RetailEnergyX reported that 77,000 customers have switched from the utility Eversource to retail suppliers since November 2014. That amounts to 5.5 percent of the company’s 1.4 million electricity customers in Massachusetts, writes the Daily Hampshire Gazette. That is a very high number for a state that restructured its electricity markets 17 years ago (see Chapter 164 of the Massachusetts Session Laws of 1997). To put that in perspective, data from the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources show that about 19 percent of all residential ratepayers in the state had switched to competitive suppliers as of December 2014, the most recent month for which data are available.
A much larger number of business customers had already switched to competitive suppliers, as is the case in most states, and it is unclear yet the extent to which this winter’s soaring power prices drove additional switching. About 87 percent of load from large commercial and industrial (C&I) customers had selected retail power, followed by 59 percent of medium C&I and 47 percent of small C&I.