(Credit: Transparent Energy)Commercial and industrial organizations in North America are increasingly seeking out the services of live-auction energy procurement companies to help them drive energy cost savings, according to procurement and advisory services company Transparent Energy.
Transparent Energy says it achieved record results in 2019, growing 21% year over year as it attracted more than 200 new large commercial and industrial customers to its live-auction energy procurement platform. The company says that its 98% close rate proves that when it runs a procurement event, suppliers “bid to win, benefitting the customer” with energy savings, value and insights.
The average annual energy spend of customers tripled, to $1.4 million, with average energy savings of more than 7%, Transparent says. New customers include large enterprise clients in the automotive, education, financial services, healthcare, real estate, retail and technology space.
Energy consumers seeking procurement in deregulated states - including California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas - can choose their own energy supply companies. For most deregulated states, this resulted in “consumer savings of millions of dollars in retail utility costs every year, while providing utility companies new markets for their excess capacity,” Transparent Energy says.
However, evidence that such competition has actually reduced energy prices is “somewhat slight,” according to Ike Brannon, a senior fellow at the Jack Kemp Foundation, writing for Forbes. Today’s prices, in inflation-adjusted terms, are not much different from what they were before deregulation, though Brannon points out that energy markets have been “buffeted by a wide array of forces over the last quarter century” that have had a greater impact on energy prices than deregulation. Prices in deregulated states are significantly higher than in regulated states, but that is largely because those states had higher utility prices to begin with, he adds.
The last 20 years have shown that the best way to keep consumer electricity prices from running rampant is to pursue “a wide array of reforms across the board,” Brannon writes.
