Under Washington law, utilities have an obligation to serve their retail customers. The utility, faced with a supply shortage, can offer customers compensation, subject to the approval of the WUTC, for a customer s voluntary choice to forego service which the utility may otherwise be obligated to provide under state law and regulation. Allowing retail customers to sell power provided by a utility on the wholesale market, as the Commission proposes, implies that the right to be served confers a customer ownership right to the utility s power. No such right is established in state or federal law. Further, the Commission s proposal implies that a retail customer has the authority to compel the utility to make wholesale power deliveries to a third party with whom the utility has not otherwise entered a sales agreement.
Retail customers have no such authority under state or federal law.
The Commission s proposal envisions a commercial transaction between a retail customer and a purchaser of power at wholesale. Presumably, the payment for the power would be tendered by the wholesale purchaser to the retail customer, but the power would necessarily be delivered to the wholesale purchaser by the utility. The benefit to the retail customer making this sale is the difference between the market value of power and the embedded-cost, regulated, retail rate he and all other customers pay to the utility. But, as we have noted above, the power belongs to the utility, not the customer. Nothing in state or federal law entitles the retail customer to capture this benefit to the exclusion of the utility or the utility s other retail customers.