Today’s Energy Business

Conventional energy businesses are characterized by traits foreign to those familiar with most retail businesses.  These companies tend to be risk averse and not customer focused.  Their businesses are structured to deal with counterparties, rather than customers.  They have largely created a zero-sum game.

Energy Cost Experts is different!  Our program, MasterPlan is on your side always accountable to you and your company.

  • Master Plan provides you a running one-year list of monthly payments that include all your electric and natural gas expenses.             
  • MasterPlan pays all bills and assumes all cost risk.
  • MasterPlan contracts for supply on your behalf to your best advantage.
  • Master Plan does not accept commissions or other compensation from any provider.
  • For energy saving infrastructure improvements, Master Plan will provide transparent valuation and guaranteed full value credits at no cost.

An Important Rule of Thumb

Do not trust rules of thumb.  Beware of standard, simplified savings calculations.  You owe it to yourself to obtain detailed calculations, including operating hours, before you spend dearly earned capital.

Beware of HVAC modeling.  Even when done honestly and with the best of intentions (which it normally is), can yield results at odds with reality.  These models must be verified against your actual consumptions of electricity and gas.

Lower Your Energy Bills…In Two Ways:

  1. Reduce Consumption You can and should do the easy things first, like turning off lights when not in use and using programable thermostats.  These provide marginal savings at little to no cost.  We highly recommend not engaging companies who will try to sell you large expense equipment to improve your infrastructure.  The problem is that they will over-value the performance to profit maximize at your cost.  For energy saving infrastructure improvements, Master Plan will provide transparent valuation and guaranteed full value credits at no cost.

2. Reduce Your Rate   Fact of the matter is, 30% to 50% of your bill is determined by regulated distribution rates that you can’t control.  Of the remaining portion of your bill, supply savings of 5% to 15% are within your reach

Properly managing your energy is a big problem.  We can make it disappear.

Deregulation

How We Got to Where We Are Now

During the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the process of deregulating electric and natural gas retail markets began and we were off like a herd of turtles.

Your energy bill is made up of two components; supply and distribution.  The distribution portion of the bill is for the pipes and wires that deliver electricity and gas to your meters and is owned by a regulated utility that is a monopoly in its service area.  The supply portion covers generation of the energy commodity and its transmission (or transportation for gas) to the utility that distributes it to you.  This is the portion of your service that was deregulated.  It did not go well.

Deregulation of natural gas was a relatively simple process because all of the necessary components and management entities already existed and there were essentially no major changes in infrastructure required.

Today’s Energy Business

Deregulation of electricity was not a matter of flipping a switch; it was a long and arduous process.  This was made necessary because in a regulated world, each utility was required to maintain sufficient generation assets to serve the power needs of its entire service area.  Due to varying ages and efficiencies of these generators, utilities were left with excess generating capacity that would not be competitive in an open marketplace.  This left regulated utilities with stranded assets that were essentially unusable.

Over a period of time, that in most areas lasted for years, utilities were compensated for these stranded assets by including a recovery charge billed to customers, thus making competitive supply less economical.  The cynics among us believed that some utilities, with the compliance of regulators, transferred generation cost to recovery fees in order to maintain their supply monopoly.  I, of course, personally never believed such a thing.  These charges slowly disappeared and markets that deregulated are open now.  Most utilities maintain generating capacity, often using deregulated merchant spin off companies.

Have questions or would like to learn more?

Contact Donald Parker with the best dates and times to schedule a call or zoom.

This usually only takes 15-30 minutes to see if I can help you.

MPlan, LLC
540 Pennsylvania Avenue, Suite 310
Fort Washington, PA 19034

215-825-5630