Unbundling the retail gas market: Current activities and guidance for serving residential and small customers

Abstract

The restructuring of retail gas services has followed a typical pattern for previously heavily regulated industries: large customers are initially given rights to purchase unbundled services from different entities, with the same rights dispersed over time to smaller customers. For about ten years now industrial customers in most states have been able to {open_quotes}play the market{close_quotes}. Since the passage of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 636 in 1992, interest has centered on expanding service unbundling to small retail customers, including residential customers. Importantly, the Order prohibited pipelines from providing bundled sales service. This is not surprising - in the telecommunications industry, for example, the unbundling of wholesale services was a strong stimulant for developing competition in the local exchange market. The push for small-customer service unbundling has derived from the basic but politically attractive idea that all retail customers should directly benefit from competitive forces in the natural gas industry. When one looks at the movement of prices since 1985, it is easy to see that large retail customers have enjoyed more favorable prices than other retail customers. For example, over the period 1985 to 1994 gas prices to industrial customers and electric utilities fell around 23 percent and 36 percent, respectively. In comparison, gas prices to residential customers increased by around 5 percent while gas prices to commercial customers decreased slightly by about 1 percent. This report examines various aspects of unbundling to small retail gas customers, with special emphasis on residential customers.