Retail Markets

This panel at the 2025 NARUC Summer Policy Summit explored competing policy demands. On the panel were moderator and NARUC Senior Director Kim Duffley, ISO New England CEO Gordon van Welie, District of Columbia Commission Chair Emile Thompson, Northeast Power Coordinating Council CEO Charles Dickerson, Avangrid Networks CEO Joe Purington, GT Power Group President Glen Thomas, and Copper Monarch Principal Vincent Duane.

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.

Now is not the time to reverse course, to undermine states’ ability to define and regulate retail electric service.

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.

Centralized markets are a supporting actor in the industry. They are important, but not author, producer, director, and leading actor in the play.

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.