Nearly four years after retail gas market deregulation allowed residential customers across Georgia to buy gas from alternative suppliers, complaints have slowed to a trickle and the state legislature and staff of the Georgia Public Service Commission (GPSC) have been able to turn to fine-tuning the system.

“When we were getting a thousand calls a month during the early days, it was all we could do just to respond to the calls,” said Bill Edge, GPSC’s spokesman. Now, with complaints down to about 200 a month recently and under 400 in January, commission “staff has been able to concentrate on enforcement. Now we can be proactive.” The PSC has developed cases and penalized four marketers in the past year and collected $1 million in fines.

The most recent was a $413,800 fine levied on Centrica subsidiary Energy America earlier this month for slamming (see Daily GPI, Sept. 3). In the meantime, the commission also issued a policy statement in July against automatic renewal of fixed price contracts without an affirmative response from the customer.

Georgia tops the list for participation in a report by the American Gas Association (AGA) released earlier this week detailing state and utility choice programs for residential customers. Choice succeeded in Georgia because the legislature took a hand and ordered all residential customers of the state’s main gas supplier, Atlanta Gas Light (AGL), to choose a supplier other than the utility, or be allocated to a new supplier. The program succeeded, in effect, because customers had no choice. They were forced off-system.

Edge said the transition might have been smoother if there had been a pilot program first, but the AGA report shows that most states and utilities that took a slower route have done little more than dabble in competitive choice for residentials. Next to AGL’s 100% residential choice participation rate, which covers 1.4 million households, Kinder Morgan’s retail program in Nebraska shows a 98% participation rate with 74,000 participants. Next on the list are Dominion East Ohio Gas at 49% or 551,000 customers participating and Columbia Gas of Ohio with 47% or 582,000 customers participating. Columbia of Kentucky had 33% participation or 41,500 customers. All others were below 30% right on down to “negligible” or not even on the list.

In its report, “Summary of Residential Customer Choice Pilot Programs and Initiatives,” AGA said it took no position as to the value of residential unbundling, nor how a program should be constructed.

Today, AGL’s deregulated retail market subsidiary, Georgia Natural Gas, still has the largest number of customers in Georgia, followed by Scana Energy, Shell Energy Service and Southern Company Gas.

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