Ohio’s widely cited 18.78¢ per kilowatt-hour residential electricity price and the 11¢ “Price to Compare” that customers use to shop for competitive suppliers are both accurate — they simply measure different slices of the bill. The 18.78¢ figure from the Energy Information Administration captures the full all-in cost: generation, transmission, distribution, capacity charges, riders, and taxes. The roughly 11¢ figure reflects only the default generation supply portion, the single component a household can change by switching retail providers. The seven-cent gap between them represents the non-shoppable delivery stack, meaning even perfect supply shopping leaves the majority of the bill untouched.
Pennsylvania tells the same story with different numbers: an all-in average of 20.92¢ versus Price to Compare rates ranging from 11.76¢ to 14.14¢ depending on the utility territory. In both states, the shoppable generation slice constitutes a minority of the total bill, and the non-competitive portion — driven by grid modernization investments, transmission upgrades, and capacity market costs — is growing. This structural reality reframes the affordability debate: fights over distribution rate cases and transmission planning now have far more impact on the average customer’s total outlay than wholesale power price fluctuations or retail marketing campaigns.
The confusion persists because policymakers, advocates, and marketers routinely cite whichever number serves their narrative without naming the denominator. An all-in average gets deployed to argue that retail competition has failed to lower bills, while a low Price to Compare gets advertised as proof of a “cheap” electricity state. Both claims are technically true but analytically empty without context. The industry has at least three distinct price signals — the EIA all-in average for cross-state affordability benchmarking, the default-service Price to Compare for switching decisions, and actual competitive offers for measuring realized savings — and conflating them obscures more than it reveals.
Regulators could reduce the noise by requiring default-service disclosures to show the bill split explicitly: here is the shoppable generation rate, and here is the fixed delivery charge you will pay regardless of supplier. That transparency would not lower costs directly, but it would anchor the public debate in the correct denominator — and in a sector where every cent is contested, clarity about what a price actually represents is its own form of progress.
Read the full report at Energy Central.