How Choice and Competition Empower Customers
By Jack Doueck
Energy markets are often judged by prices: Do competitive markets produce lower rates than traditional regulated monopolies? But there is another, equally important question that deserves more attention:
Which market structure gives customers the greatest voice, transparency, and protection?
A recent conversation with Ms. Deana Dennis, Director of Regulatory and Legislative Affairs at the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire (CPCNH), highlighted a powerful example of how customer choice and competitive markets can transform the relationship between consumers, communities, and the energy industry.
On a recent episode of The Energy Insider Podcast, Deana shared the remarkable story of how Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) has grown in New Hampshire from an idea into a movement serving approximately 177,000 customers. Through customer aggregation and energy choice, CPCNH has helped communities achieve more control over their energy decisions while saving more than $25 million compared with default utility service in its first two years of operation.
But perhaps the most important lesson from New Hampshire is not just about savings. It is about accountability.
CPCNH offers customers multiple energy options based on their priorities, including different levels of renewable energy and sustainability. The organization has also integrated community solar into its offerings, including a 5-megawatt project currently under development that will provide savings opportunities to 11 member communities through New Hampshire’s version of virtual net metering. Through programs such as New Hampshire’s Aspire initiative, CCA can become a long-term partner for locally developed clean energy projects.
Yet the most revealing part of our conversation involved a regulatory proceeding that demonstrates why customer choice and an independent voice in the regulatory process matters.
A local utility proposed recovering approximately $6.5 million in default energy supply costs from customers through its distribution rates. CPCNH challenged the proposal, and further review revealed that the costs were associated with utility billing system errors—not a legitimate increase in the cost of serving customers.
Because New Hampshire has a competitive market structure and because organizations like CPCNH can represent customers and communities in that structure, the proposal received scrutiny before it could become a charge on all distribution customers’ bills. The result: customers were protected from paying millions of dollars for a problem they did not create.
This example raises an important question: How can policymakers ensure that customers have strong, independent voices at the table, including in markets where the incumbent utility remains the default energy supply provider?
Regulators remain essential, but they often face complex filings, limited resources, and significant information advantages held by the utilities. Competition does not replace regulation; it complements and strengthens it by enabling customers, communities, and market participants to challenge decisions, test assumptions, and advocate for alternatives.
The success of CPCNH demonstrates what can happen when communities can choose. Customers gain more control, local leaders gain more options over their energy supply portfolio, and utilities and other market participants face greater accountability. CCA is one expression of a broader competitive marketplace that can also support suppliers, distributed energy resources, demand flexibility, community solar, and future technologies.
The question that remains is: Only about 30% of New Hampshire residential customers receive their electricity supply through competitive alternatives, including CCA. What benefits would it take for more customers to understand and exercise that choice?
The answer may be that many customers simply do not know they have a choice.
New Hampshire’s experience offers an important lesson for policymakers across the country. Energy choice is not only about competition among suppliers. It is about empowering customers, encouraging innovation, and creating a marketplace where all participants—including utilities—must continually earn the trust of the people they serve.
That lesson is increasingly relevant as policymakers confront affordability, reliability, grid modernization, distributed energy integration, data center demand growth, and emerging technologies and business models. The goal should not be to pick winning technologies or market participants, but to establish transparent and technology-neutral market rules that allow resources to compete based on the value they deliver to customers and the electric system.
Competitive markets do not eliminate the need for regulation. They strengthen it by giving customers a greater voice in the process.
That may be the most important benefit of all.
Jack Doueck is the Founder and Principal of Grid Power Direct, Advanced Energy Capital, AEC Energy Management, Energy Marketing Conferences and the host of The Energy Insider Podcast.
