Alliance Offers FERC the Retail View in Support of Wholesale Market Design

September 2003

Last week the Alliance for Retail Choice filed comments at FERC on its Wholesale Power Market Platform offering our perspective about how wholesale market design affects customer choices in competitive and emerging retail electric markets.

The Alliance specifically supports a wholesale market design that promotes price transparency, open access and competition. Wholesale markets with these elements will improve retail competition and demand response. In return, a stronger retail market will increase liquidity and depth in the wholesale forward market for electricity, creating the price signals needed to promote investment in the Nation's energy infrastructure. Better markets will provide better customer choices and services.


MA DTE Encourages Large Customers to Use the Competitive Retail Market

In a follow-up to an earlier order moving Massachusetts default service to a more competitive model, the DTE recently ordered that wholesale default service contracts for medium and large C&I customers will bid quarterly to better reflect wholesale market prices. The Alliance supports DTE's stated objective: "[D] efault service for these customers 'should function as a basic service that provides customers with the appropriate incentives to turn to the competitive market for more sophisticated or advantageous offerings. Larger customers should view default service as a short-term, last resort service, rather than a longer-term alternative to competitive supply.'"