Ohio has had a deregulated electricity market since 2001, when Senate Bill 3 gave businesses the right to choose their own generation supplier. The state's Energy Choice program is mature, with dozens of Competitive Retail Electric Service (CRES) providers actively fighting for commercial accounts.

So what's the most common mistake we see? It's almost too predictable.

Businesses that "chose" a supplier once, five years ago, and then never thought about it again. Set it and forget it — except in energy procurement, that's not a strategy. It's how you end up overpaying for years without realizing it.

Ohio's Utility Landscape

Ohio's electricity distribution runs through several major utilities, all operating within PJM Interconnection:

• Ohio Edison, The Illuminating Company, and Toledo Edison (FirstEnergy) — Covering northern and central Ohio including Cleveland, Akron, and Toledo
• AEP Ohio (Ohio Power) — Serving Columbus and much of central and southern Ohio
• Duke Energy Ohio — Serving the greater Cincinnati area
• Dayton Power & Light (AES Ohio) — Serving the Dayton region

Each utility has a Standard Service Offer (SSO) rate — the default price you pay if you haven't picked a competitive supplier. Like Pennsylvania's Price to Compare, it's a blended auction-based rate. It has nothing to do with your specific business, your specific load, or what you could get if you actually went out and negotiated.

The Three Biggest Mistakes Ohio Businesses Make

1. Accepting Door-to-Door or Telemarketer Offers

Ohio's competitive market has attracted some, shall we say, enthusiastic retail marketers. They show up at your door or call you during lunch with offers that look great on paper. And the first month? Sure, the rate might actually be 5% below SSO.

But read the fine print. Escalation clauses. Variable rate provisions. Early termination penalties that make your cell phone contract look generous. By month six, that "savings" has flipped to 15% above SSO. Classic bait and switch — legal, but not exactly in your best interest.

2. Not Aligning Contract Terms with Market Conditions

Ohio sits in PJM, which means forward energy prices dance to the tune of natural gas prices, capacity auction results, and regional supply/demand dynamics. Signing a 36-month fixed contract when the 12-month forwards look great — or locking into a short-term deal right before prices climb — is the kind of timing mistake that costs real money.

We've watched businesses sign long-term contracts during price spikes, only to see market rates drop 20% the next quarter. Painful. On the flip side, businesses that went with short-term variable rates during a low-price stretch got hammered when PJM capacity costs surged. You can't time the market perfectly, but you can avoid the obvious traps.

3. Ignoring Capacity and Transmission Costs

This one drives me a little crazy. In Ohio — as across all of PJM — capacity and transmission costs are separate from your energy supply charge and can represent 25-35% of your total electric costs. A quarter to a third of your bill. And most businesses never even look at it.

Here's what you should be looking at: your Peak Load Contribution (PLC) and Network Service Peak Load (NSPL) values. Actively managing these through peak shaving or demand response can deliver savings that exceed what you'd gain from switching suppliers alone. Let that sink in — managing your peak demand can save you more than shopping for a better rate.

Natural Gas Choice in Ohio

Ohio also has competitive natural gas choice through the PUCO-regulated Choice Program. Columbia Gas of Ohio, Dominion Energy Ohio, Duke Energy Ohio, and CenterPoint Energy are the local distribution companies, while competitive suppliers offer alternative commodity rates.

The good news? Ohio's proximity to Appalachian production and multiple interstate pipeline interconnections keeps basis differentials — the spread between Henry Hub and Ohio delivery points — favorable. Competitive gas suppliers can often beat the utility's Gas Cost Recovery (GCR) rate by meaningful margins. Not always, but often enough that you should be checking every time your contract comes up.

What a Strategic Procurement Process Looks Like

When we bring on an Ohio commercial client, we follow a specific sequence. And yes, every step matters:

• Usage analysis: We pull 12-24 months of interval data. We want to understand your load shape, your peak demand patterns, your seasonal swings. No shortcuts here.
• Market timing assessment: Where are current forward prices relative to historical ranges? What's coming — capacity auctions, seasonal weather forecasts, policy changes? Context matters.
• Competitive solicitation: We issue RFPs to 15-20 CRES providers with the exact product structure and term length that fits your profile. Not generic requests — tailored ones.
• Apples-to-apples comparison: We normalize every bid to account for differences in capacity passthrough, renewable charges, bandwidth provisions, and termination clauses. Because comparing headline rates without this is meaningless.
• Ongoing monitoring: After you sign, we track your costs against market movements and flag renewal windows 6-9 months before expiration. Because if you're hearing about your renewal for the first time the month it expires, we've failed.

The Ohio Opportunity

Let me put it bluntly: no Ohio business should be paying SSO rates. The competitive market is deep enough, transparent enough, and active enough that better options exist for virtually every commercial account.

The businesses that save the most in Ohio aren't the ones with the lowest usage. They're the ones with the most intentional approach. Strategy beats scale, every time.