By Jesse Berst

 

Consumers are increasingly setting up joint purchase agreements to get better prices from energy providers, the Washington Post reports. The latest alliance was a coalition called Groundswell made up of 103 religious and consumer groups including the NAACP and Georgetown Presbyterian Church. Groundswell will negotiate in their behalf for lower rates.

 

"We are seeing a detectable trend of small businesses moving to third-party suppliers," confirmed Pepco spokeswoman Mary-Beth Hutchinson to the Post.

Groundswell co-founder Will Byrne said the goal was to get members electric power

that was both clean and low cost. "We've found... that the psychology between a resident and a small-business owner is very comparable. It's not intuitive for these people that they even have an option," he told the Post. "Our idea to push for aggregation was actually an innovation to try to figure out how can we make clean energy work while delivering an economic benefit."

 

Prediction: In those areas with retail competition, watch for other suppliers to use this technique. It can be much easier to sign up multiple consumer groups than to sign up consumers one at a time individually.

 

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Jesse Berst is the founder and chief analyst of Smart Grid News.com. He consults to smart grid companies seeking market entry advice and M&A advisory. A frequent keynoter at industry events in the US and abroad, he also serves on the Advisory Council of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Energy & Environment directorate.

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Great Idea

Not only might such groups of people get together and consider how to best purchase electricity they might even consider joint purchase of solar panels and energy efficiency, and then, on top of it all, implement an energy management system so that they can optimize those purchases and those resources. That sounds very cool. If it were organized around the local city it might even qualify for favorable tax treatment as well as an solid time tested organizational structure. I think this concept could catch on.

Fredric Fletcher - 03/27/2012 - 09:51

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Yeah, I managed the Groundswell contract for my church. Seems they're also looking to ease into the residential market via their organizational participants. So I guess in the future (or maybe to some extent now), an organization is part of the joint purchase, and then members of its congregation can hitch on too. That may take some of the spookiness out of electricity bid contracts for individuals. Also note that a major part of the program is to source from renewable generation. (and I seem totally unable to get these CAPTCHA security codes correct...)

Tom Simchak - 03/27/2012 - 12:24

Actually, yes on residential...

To correct my earlier post, they are indeed enrolling residential customers who are members of participating institutions.

Tom Simchak - 03/27/2012 - 15:05

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