But if you have a competitive supplier, a private company buys power for you. Usually, you pay your utility for both parts. Your electric bill has two parts: supply and delivery. It can be especially confusing for residents with limited English proficiency, he added. “Many residents are surprised when I tell them that they are receiving their electricity from another company, because the bill comes from Eversource and the name of the supplier is written on their bill in very small letters,” he said. This system of “consolidated billing” was intended to make things simple for ratepayers, but it also makes it easy to miss that you have a competitive supplier, MacGoy said. Your utility still delivers your power, and you still write it one check every month for the total amount on your bill - your utility then pays your supplier what it’s owed. If you enroll with a competitive supplier, the only thing that changes is that a third-party company buys power for you. Each of these things represents about half of your monthly bill. Your utility typically charges you for two services: The power it buys on your behalf in the wholesale market and the cost of maintaining the wires that bring electricity to your home. “I see this problem all the time because energy bills are, frankly, really hard to decipher,” said Devin MacGoy, a community organizer with the nonprofit GreenRoots. Rodriguez had no idea she was buying power from a so-called competitive supplier because her monthly electric bills were still coming from Eversource. Some months, her bill totaled more than $200, and she struggled to pay what she owed. It's not entirely clear what happened, but Rodriguez ended up on a plan with really high and variable rates. Noemy Rodriguez near her home in East Boston. “That’s when I started noticing that the bills were too much,” she said. According to Rodriguez, the man on the phone said he’d cancel her plan and she’d go back to having Eversource as her supplier. She decided not to sign a new contract because she’d recently seen something in the news about people being overcharged for electricity. The problems didn't start until after someone from the company called her about renewing her plan. In Rodriguez's case, her bills were lower at first. But for the most part, the opposite has happened. When lawmakers set up this system in the late 1990s, the assumption was that a competitive marketplace would result in lower power prices for customers. Massachusetts is one of about a dozen states where residents can choose to buy electricity from a supplier other than their default utility. “I thought this was going to benefit me,” she said through an interpreter. Traducido en español por El Planeta, Boston's Latino daily. The two men - one of whom spoke Spanish - also said they were working with the city, so she felt like she could trust them. So when some salespeople knocked on the door of her East Boston apartment a few years ago and said they could sign her up for “a state plan” that would lower her bill, she was intrigued. All she knew was that the $80 a month she was paying Eversource felt like too much. Like most people, Noemy Rodriguez never gave much thought to various charges on her electric bill.
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