By Jason Charles Guck, Business Development, Delta Edge CI
If your buildings sit in a state where you can choose your electricity supplier, something happened this summer that most operators have not looked at closely. Default supply prices reset across several large deregulated markets, and the increases landed unevenly by state, by utility, and by customer class.
That last part is what gets missed. Coverage of these resets reports the residential impact, because that is what regulators and reporters ask for. Commercial and industrial classes moved differently, and in some cases moved further.
What actually changed
Pennsylvania
On June 1, PECO’s commercial general service supply price rose from 9.35 cents per kilowatt-hour to 10.728 cents, an increase of roughly 15%. For comparison, the residential default service price at the same utility rose just under 5%, from 11.024 cents to 11.572 cents.
Read those two numbers together. The commercial class absorbed an increase three times the size of the residential one at the same utility on the same day. An operator following this story through consumer coverage would have seen the 5% and concluded it was manageable.
Ohio
FirstEnergy’s Ohio utilities reset their standard service offer on June 1 following a competitive auction. General service secondary customers saw increases of about 6%, landing at 9.4503 cents at the Illuminating Company, 9.3786 cents at Ohio Edison and 9.4310 cents at Toledo Edison.
General service primary customers moved more: up 9% to 9.0466 cents at Cleveland Electric Illuminating, up 10% to 8.8451 cents at Ohio Edison, and up nearly 8% to 8.7772 cents at Toledo Edison.
Illinois
Regulators approved delivery increases effective January 2026: $243 million for ComEd and $48 million for Ameren. Delivery is the component a supply contract does not touch, which makes it the part of the bill most operators have no plan for.
ComEd’s supply price also rose sharply, to 9.66 cents per kilowatt-hour in January, roughly 47% above the year before. That figure is the residential rate, and it is worth stating plainly because it circulates without that qualifier. Commercial classes are priced separately. The direction is the same; the number is not transferable.
The Ohio auction says more than the Ohio rate
Here is the finding that matters most, and it is not in the rate tables.
The auction that set those Ohio prices cleared at a weighted average of $101.08 per megawatt-hour. The price it replaced was $53.62. The wholesale cost of supply nearly doubled, while the retail commercial rates built on it rose between 6% and 10%.
That gap is not a discrepancy. It is how these procurements work. A default service price blends multiple auction tranches bought at different times, so a single expensive auction only moves the blended price by a fraction of its own increase. The rest arrives later, as cheaper tranches expire and are replaced at the new level.
Which means the June increase is not the adjustment. It is the first instalment of one. An operator who looked at 6% and decided to ride it out has made a decision based on the smallest number in the sequence.
Virginia is a different situation entirely
Virginia has not been a choice market for most commercial customers. That changed on July 1, when a new law took effect allowing any nonresidential customer of Dominion Energy or Appalachian Power with annual peak demand above 5 megawatts to buy electricity from a licensed competitive supplier.
Two details in that law matter more than the headline. The notice period for returning to utility service dropped from five years to eighteen months, and a returning customer faces a twelve-month minimum stay. Those terms are what make the option practical rather than theoretical, because a five-year exit was long enough to deter most finance committees.
Separately, regulators approved Dominion base rate increases of $565.7 million for 2026 and $209.9 million for 2027, against requests of $822 million and $345 million. Getting less than you asked for is still an increase.
If you operate above 5 megawatts in Virginia, you have an option this year that did not exist last year, and no internal process for evaluating it.
What to do with this
Choice is only worth something if you know what you are comparing against. Four steps, none of which requires a decision yet.
- Find your service classification and write it down. It is a code on the bill. Every number in this article is reported by class, and general service secondary and general service primary moved differently in the same territory on the same day. Without your class, none of this applies to you specifically.
- Establish your default price, not the average price. The figure that matters is what your utility charges you today if you do nothing. That is the benchmark any competitive offer has to beat, and it is the only fair comparison.
- Put your contract end date on the budget calendar. If you are under a fixed supply agreement, you are insulated until a specific date and then fully exposed. That date belongs in the budget as a planning milestone, not discovered in a renewal letter.
- Separate supply from delivery before you negotiate. A competitive supplier can price the supply line. Delivery is set by tariff and moves through rate cases regardless of who supplies you. Illinois is the clearest example this year: the delivery increases took effect in January and no supply contract affected them. The four components of a commercial bill, and why they move independently, are covered in our post on building an energy budget from measures.
The honest limits
A fixed contract is not a saving. It is the purchase of certainty, and certainty has a price. If default prices fall, a fixed contract will cost more than doing nothing, and that outcome does not mean the decision was wrong. It means the risk was priced.
Every figure here is specific to a utility, a class and a date, and rates change through a public process that continues after publication. Confirm anything you plan to act on against your own current tariff before building a number on it.
What does not change is the shape of the problem. In a choice market, the operator who knows their classification, their default price and their contract end date is negotiating. Everyone else is being quoted at. If you want your classifications identified and your default prices tracked against your renewal calendar, that is work we do at Delta Edge CI.