ABSTRACT
Customers have many ways to reduce supply pricing by squeezing more value out of the competitive bidding process. Brokers can be made to compete just like suppliers. Many suppliers offer floating pricing indexed it to the day-ahead market price, which offers hourly pricing for the next 24 hours. Some markets also offer a real time/hour-ahead market that gives pricing only an hour ahead. When done routinely from year-to-year, the author have found that positioning fixed price contract start and end dates based on the usual times of such dips is a good bet. It is almost certainly better than signing up in the dead of winter or the height of the summer, when near-term power pricing is almost always high. If considering use of Renewable Energy Credits to reduce the firm's carbon footprint, ask for pricing both "green" and "brown" power to assess the differential.
