A few weeks ago I wrote about how grid-modernization capital reaches the delivery charge. The natural mirror of that question is the supply side — and it deserves its own post, because it's where the most misread numbers in our industry live.
Here's the puzzle. Ohio's all-in residential electricity price is roughly 18.78¢/kWh. Yet the "Price to Compare" an Ohio household actually shops against sits closer to 10.7–11.1¢. Both are correct. They're measuring different things — and conflating them distorts nearly every affordability debate I read.
The 18.78¢ figure is the EIA all-in average: total residential revenue divided by total kWh sold. It contains everything on the bill — generation supply, transmission, distribution (the delivery charge and its rate-base return), capacity, riders, and taxes. The ~11¢ figure is only the default generation-supply slice: the piece a customer can actually shop by switching to a competitive retail supplier.
So the gap between them isn't an error — it's the rest of the bill. Roughly seven cents of that Ohio number is delivery, transmission, capacity, and riders: the non-competitive portion. Switching suppliers moves the supply slice and nothing else. A household that shops its generation rate perfectly still pays the full delivery stack — which is exactly why the grid-plan fights from my last post matter more to the total bill than most supply-price headlines do.
Pennsylvania shows the same structure. The all-in average runs about 20.92¢/kWh, while the Price to Compare across the major utilities lands in an 11.76–14.14¢ band depending on territory. Same lesson: the shoppable number is a minority of the bill, and it varies by utility, not just by state.
For energy professionals, the discipline is simply to say which number you mean. There are at least three, and they answer different questions:
• The EIA all-in average — best for cross-state affordability comparisons.
• The default-service Price to Compare — best for a "should I switch" decision.
• The competitive market offer — best for measuring what shopping actually saves.
When a policymaker cites an all-in average to argue supply competition has failed, or a marketer cites a shoppable rate to call a state "cheap," they're usually comparing across those categories without saying so. The debate gets sharper the moment everyone names the denominator.
Which raises a question for this community: should default-service disclosures show customers the split explicitly — here's your shoppable slice, here's the delivery stack you can't shop — instead of a single blended rate? Would that clarify the switching decision, or just add noise?