Look at the 2026 commercial electricity map and one number does most of the talking: the spread. Federal Energy Information Administration figures put the average U.S. business at about 12.75 cents per kilowatt-hour — but that average hides a range that runs from roughly 7.19 cents in North Dakota to 38.18 cents in Hawaii, more than a fivefold difference for the same commodity. Illinois sits below the national line at about 11.81 cents. Most of that gap is physics and geography: generation mix, fuel logistics, and how far power has to travel before it reaches a meter.
But there is a second layer stacked on top of the physics, and it is the one the industry tends to talk about in a single breath — "retail choice" — as though it were one policy. It isn't. It's closer to a dozen different games sharing a name.
In a fully restructured market like Texas, a commercial customer buys the supply portion of the bill from a competitive retailer and takes delivery from the wires company. In Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, the utility still posts a default service rate — the "price to compare" — and shopping is simply the act of beating it. Across most of the South and the mountain West, there is no game at all: the vertically integrated utility sets the whole bill and the commission signs off.
The quietly noticed pattern is that the phrase travels better than the mechanism. A procurement lead who has shopped supply in Houston walks into a facility in a monopoly state and finds there is nothing to shop — the same bill, start to finish, is a regulated number. The line item that felt movable back home is simply gone.
What this means for a multi-site operator is that the map matters as much as the megawatts. Before you model savings, you have to know which of your addresses sit in choice jurisdictions and which don't, because that determines where procurement effort actually moves the number — and where the only lever left is efficiency. The spread on the map is real. Whether you can act on it depends entirely on which version of "choice" your meter happens to fall under.