After the Shakeout: Another Look at the Georgia Gas Market

After the Shakeout: Another Look at the Georgia Gas Market

 

Five suppliers are left. But that works when the utility gets out of the supply business.

Go back a year, to the summer of 2000. Georgia's retail natural gas market was spinning out of control, taking hits in the national press. Some consumers had to wait month after month just to get a bill - if they were lucky. Citing an "utter state of confusion," the state utility commission had to impose new billing rules, to force suppliers to get their act together.

Then came the winter of 2000-2001, with sky-high gas prices that strained pocketbooks for gas customers all across the country, putting even more pressure on Georgia's nascent gas market.

And yet we can say today that retail gas competition is working in Georgia.

After a fierce shakeout, only five retail gas suppliers still survive in Georgia with any meaningful slice of market share. That's out of at least 24 that jumped in at the start of the program. However, as we will show here with some hard numbers, a market with five suppliers appears to be enough to offer meaningful choice to residential consumers, based on our observations of the Georgia experience: