This is just my own conclusions on the energy market and may not coincide with actual facts. Corrections are welcome via e-mail if you know better than I do.

Here's how I understand deregulation: In buying power from another provider, you are simply impacting the various power sources that go into EVERYONE's lines through the machinations of the electric providers market.

By going with a company that offers you the lowest price, you are tipping the power market in favor of the power producing stations that have made a deal with that company at lower rates for the right to feed into the grid and get paid for it. Almost anyone can offer you a cheaper price by going with cheaper fuels, coal and natural gas being the most likely in this area.

I know that Pepco (for instance) offers several choices of power from renewable energy sources to make up 10%, 51% or 100% of the power generation that you pay for.

http://www.powerchoice.com/residential/res_productlist.cfm?groupid=1&zip=21202&utilid=2

By buying into a plan of 100% renewable energy, you assure that those renewable sources will be purchased by the grid operators at the price point the providers have agreed to with Pepco. You may wind up paying more (.1242/kWh compared to the .1049 the offered you means $13.80 more per month for having 10 light bulbs on all the time), but you know that somewhere a wind station or hydroelectric dam operator is closer to meeting their budget.

And there's always a catch to "cheaper" power through a deregulated distributor. The most common is they will try to lock you into some sort of peak usage contract where the amount you pay is based on some percentile of use run through a mathematical formula against the different times of day that you use your power (as opposed to the actual kilowatts you use--the one method that actually makes sense to me).

So while they can advertise a lower "cost to compare" as a discrete number, only a few customers actually benefit from the formula they sign up for.

If you're going to switch, make your market forces work for some purpose besides pushing down costs to Wal-Mart-esque levels. BGE will be delivering your "last mile" power and charging you out the asshole for it anyway, so you might as well be moral about the part you can choose.

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