Currently in New Jersey, residential customers are not switching at a high rate. From this comparison, it becomes clear that New Jersey can do better to encourage competition in the State. Although the Board's monthly updates on customer switches do not provide the number of switches by rate class, I assume small commercial customers have a correspondingly small percentage of customers switching as well. As professionals in the new energy marketplace, it is important to encourage clear, concise information that is easily accessible. For example, the Ratepayer Advocate has a website that lists the licensed suppliers offering electricity in each utility territory and a short summary of the packages offered by those suppliers.
Customers can go to one website and save countless research hours.
Providing this type of information saves customers time, hopefully enough time to make exploring their energy options more worthwhile. I encourage your clients to compile similar data and distribute it, either through the web or other medium to save customers time and energy. We also believe that to be able to make an informed choice, customers must know what their present status is before they can begin to search for better offerings. Therefore, it is imperative that we move forward with working group topics such as billing format. Billing format issues on the electric side still continues to be an open topic of discussion after competition has been in place for 5 months.