Retail Markets

The 2025 NARUC Summer Policy Summit featured a conversation between Exelon CEO Calvin Butler and NARUC President and Georgia Commissioner Tricia Pridemore. There was a lot to talk about with Butler, who leads one of the nation’s largest utility companies, serving more than 10.7 million customers through six fully regulated transmission and distribution utilities – Atlantic City Electric, BGE, ComEd, Delmarva Power, PECO, and Pepco. He also is chair of the board of the Edison Electric Institute and leads some twenty thousand Exelon employees.

“We can achieve the eight benefits of market integration, and with continued cooperation of EMI members and our partners, we will achieve them soon.”

The benefits of retail competition for residential customers might not be all that much.

It was increasingly recognized that rather than deregulation – which implies transformation to no or little regulation – we were implementing but a different form of regulation.

This is the first in a series of articles that will describe the Energy Technology and Governance Program, its work in the region, and its tangible benefits to the United States.

Just as state policies are unlikely to return us to the seventies, those policies are unlikely to undermine the RTOs’ and ISOs’ abilities to perform their core operational tasks.

An energy-only market could not effectively provide ancillary services, as these are externalities. A similar situation has now arisen in the capacity market.

Interviews with Pat Wood, Former FERC and Texas PUC Chair; Kenny Mercado, SVP, CenterPoint; Jim Steffes, EVP, Direct Energy; and Ken Medlock, Senior Director, Center for Energy Studies, Rice University.

We're enamored of free markets, particularly in the nineties. But power markets cannot come close to emulating authentic competition. Why? They cannot satisfy the basic conditions of competition taught in microeconomics 101.

Texas highlights the importance of market structures and economics in the growth of solar deployment. Driven by customer interest and policy objectives, distributed and utility-scale solar has thrived in municipal and cooperative service territories. The same has not been true in the competitive wholesale market with retail choice.