Yesterday's column was an expanded version of this blog post about falling electricity prices and alternative deals from Dominion Retail and other power sellers.
Bottom line: If you haven't switched to an alternative supplier yet, take Dominion Retail's deal of 10.37 cents per kilowatt hour for generation and transmission. It'll save you $10 or $20 a month off BGE's standard price of 11.78 cents for the summer months. Then, if prices continue to fall as experts believe they will, shop around again in the fall or at the end of the year. Either timing will work because Dominion's offer expires in December, but you can get out of the deal early penalty-free.
But what if you're like reader Ron and me, who switched to a 10.8-cent fixed-price deal from Washington Gas Energy Services a year ago? We've saved a decent amount of money. (BGE's standard price last summer was more than 12 cents.) But now some WGES customers are locked in until 2011 or even 2012 if they took a 3-year deal.
Unlike Dominion, WGES and other alternative suppliers charge an early termination fee of $75, $150 or sometimes even more. I told Ron I'm going to keep my WGES deal at least through the summer. My 10.8-cent price is still lower than the 11.78 cents BGE will be charging this summer. Then I'll see where the market is in the fall. (Let's hope no Gulf Coast hurricane disrupts natural gas supply lines, which would cause prices to spike.) If prices really do fall to 9 cents, as some are predicting, I'll do the math and see how many months of savings it would take to repay my WGES termination fee.
UPDATE: A reader asks: What are the risks of switching to Dominion? Here's my answer.