Retail choice in EIA data

In most of the country one utility generates or buys the power, delivers it and sends the bill. EIA calls this bundled service. In states that opened retail supply to competition, a customer may instead buy energy from a separate company while the local utility still owns the wires and delivers it. This page explains how that arrangement shows up in EIA's files and on this site. It is a description of the data and takes no view on whether any customer should choose a supplier.

Three kinds of row

• Bundled: one respondent reports all the revenue and all the kilowatthours. Revenue divided by sales is a whole price.
• Energy-only: a retail power marketer or community choice aggregator reports the revenue for the energy it sold. Delivery is billed by someone else.
• Delivery-only: the local utility reports the revenue for delivering energy that another company sold.

The same kilowatthours appear in an energy-only row and a delivery-only row, and the same customer is counted by both respondents. EIA's state totals allow for this. A state's average price is therefore sound, while a single energy-only or delivery-only row is half of a picture.

How the site treats them

Average price, bill and use on utility pages come from bundled rows only. A delivery utility with many customers on retail supply still has a bundled price, which describes its default-service customers and is labelled that way. Respondents with no bundled service to speak of have pages that show customers, sales and part-bill revenue per kWh, marked as not comparable, and they are left out of medians, ranks and the price dial.

Texas is the exception in the files. In the competitive part of the state the retail provider bills the whole service, so EIA records those rows as bundled and the provider has a whole price, while the distribution companies report delivery revenue in a separate file.

For 2024, 163 retail power marketers reported at least 1,000 residential customers, as did 26 community choice aggregators.

What the data cannot tell you

An annual average across all of a supplier's customers and contracts says nothing about the offer available to a new customer today, its term, its fees or how it changes after an introductory period. State utility commissions in retail-choice states publish current offers and the default-service price for comparison; they are the source for anyone weighing a decision.