Maryland Electric Choice: How to Read and Compare Supplier Offer Sheets
Why Maryland bills look like two businesses in one
If you live or run a small business in much of Maryland, your relationship with electricity is usually split the same way the grid is split on paper: one company still owns the wires, reads the meter, and restores outages, while a different company may sell you the generation product tied to your usage. The U.S. Energy Information Administration explains that in restructured states, customers may pick an alternate electricity supplier—often called retail choice or customer choice—while the distribution utility still delivers the contracted electricity to the customer’s meter and charges for that delivery service (¹). Maryland is explicitly listed among the jurisdictions where retail choice has been available to investor-owned utility customers, alongside other mid-Atlantic and Northeast states (¹).
That split is the key to reading offer sheets. A marketer’s one-page price is almost never the entire per-kilowatthour world you live in; it is usually the supply slice. Delivery, public policy charges, and other riders can still show up on the utility portion of a consolidated bill. When EIA publishes average retail prices by state, it notes those averages include all costs for delivered electricity—generation, transmission, distribution, taxes, and fees—because they are derived from utility revenues from retail sales divided by kilowatthours sold. EIA is careful to add that what it publishes are not necessarily the same thing as the itemized rates on your tariff: rates can apply separately to the electricity itself (which might come from a supplier other than the distribution utility), to delivery, and to other services or charges (²). Translation for shoppers: treat the offer sheet as a focused quote on one line item, then keep your recent utility bill nearby so you can see what else still moves with usage or seasons.
If you are unsure whether retail choice applies to your account class or neighborhood, EIA suggests contacting your distribution utility or your state utility regulatory commission to learn whether retail choice is available and whether a list of alternate suppliers exists (¹). That phone call or web portal check is boring, but it prevents you from comparing offers that never attached to your meter in the first place.
What suppliers mean by a kilowatthour on the offer
Offers almost always anchor to cents per kilowatthour. EIA’s glossary defines a kilowatthour as the energy used when one kilowatt of power runs for one hour—one kWh equals one kilowatt sustained for sixty minutes (³)). Why that matters on a Maryland offer sheet: your supply price is multiplied by the kWh you draw in a billing period (not by your peak demand in kilowatts unless the plan explicitly says demand charges apply). For mental math, EIA’s residential statistics note that in 2022 the average annual electricity sold to a U.S. residential customer was 10,791 kilowatthours, which works out to an average of about 899 kWh per month (⁴). Your own meter history matters more, but that order of magnitude helps you sanity-check a quoted monthly dollar figure someone puts in bold at the bottom of a flyer.
Small-business meters often read higher totals in kWh than a typical house, but the arithmetic is identical: multiply the contract’s supply rate by the kWh in the billing period, then add contract fees, then compare that supply-only stack to what you paid historically for the supply line item—not to the entire bill that still funds wires and programs (²).
Anatomy of a competitive offer sheet (the fields that drive dollars)
Think of an offer sheet as a contract summary dressed up as marketing. The high-value fields are almost always the same, even when layout changes.
All-in advertised price vs. pass-through adders. Some plans quote an “energy charge” that assumes certain riders or regulatory components are passed through exactly as the utility would have charged them; others bake more into a single number. Without diving into Maryland tariff minutiae here, the safe cross-check is EIA’s reminder that published average retail prices aggregate many cost categories, while the rates you pay can be split across services (²). If an offer sheet is vague about what is included, mark it as a question for the supplier in writing before you sign.
Term and renewal. Look past the headline rate to the contract term in months, whether the price is fixed or indexed, and what happens on renewal. Many headaches come not from the first six months, but from the automatic renewal band when market conditions have changed.
Early termination and enrollment fees. Retail supply agreements sometimes carry early-exit fees or account fees. These belong in the same red-font neighborhood as the rate itself because they change the effective price if your lease ends early or you sell the house.
Usage tiers and promotional windows. Time-of-use plans, “free nights,” or introductory rates can be legitimate, but the apples-to-apples comparison is total dollars for your actual load shape across a full year, not a cherry-picked month.
How Maryland fits the national map (including the Texas contrast)
Maryland’s voluntary retail-choice design sits in the same broad family as several other states EIA catalogs, but it is not the only model in the country. EIA notes that in Texas, customers of utilities connected to the grid managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas are required to choose a retail electricity provider—a different enrollment logic than “opt-in” marketing to an already-wired home (¹). If you are reading national guides written for Texans, mentally swap the defaults: Maryland shoppers still start from a split bill concept where the distribution utility remains your delivery platform even when supply is competitive (¹).
Community choice aggregation: when the “supplier” is your county or city
Maryland also participates in community choice aggregation (CCA), sometimes called municipal aggregation. EPA describes CCA as programs where local governments procure power on behalf of residents, businesses, and municipal accounts from an alternative supplier while customers still receive transmission and distribution service from their existing utility provider (⁵). EPA lists Maryland among states that authorize CCAs. The agency also stresses that participation is voluntary, that many CCAs use opt-out enrollment when a community begins a program, and that customers continue to receive the same delivery and maintenance services from the local utility, with a single utility bill that reflects the supplier change (⁵). If your mailbox contains a municipal notice in addition to a private marketer’s flyer, read both: your default supply path may already be an aggregation product unless you opted out.
EIA’s retail-choice FAQ adds a complementary national lens: among states with retail choice for investor-owned utility customers, Maryland is one of several that have implemented community choice aggregator programs customers can opt into or out of (¹). That matters when you compare “utility default” to a competitive offer—your default might be shaped by local government procurement rules, not only the utility’s standard service offer.
“Green,” renewable content, and marketing language
Offer sheets love renewable adjectives. EPA’s Green Power Markets site explains that it provides tools and resources to understand and engage with green power in the United States, including material on voluntary markets and energy attribute tracking systems (⁶). Practical shopper translation: ask how a plan’s renewable percentage is documented, what happens to energy attributes, and whether marketing language maps to a specific product structure. If the answer is hand-wavy, treat the green line item as unsettled until it is not.
Participation context—why offers keep landing in your mailbox
Retail choice is real, but participation is uneven. EIA’s Today in Energy reports that in 2021 about 26% of eligible U.S. customers participated in their state’s retail choice program, representing about 13.2 million residential electric customers, based on Form EIA-861 data (⁷). The same article notes that thirteen states and the District of Columbia had active statewide or districtwide retail choice programs for residential customers in that framing, explicitly separate from Texas, where the retail choice program is mandatory under state law (⁷). Maryland sits inside the retail-choice geography EIA lists for investor-owned utility customers (¹). Marketers respond to renewals, aggregation launches, and neighbor comparisons—your job is to separate urgency from value.
A practical comparison checklist before you sign
- Pull 12 months of usage in kWh from your utility portal if you can. Multiply by the offer’s supply rate and compare to what you actually paid for supply (not the whole bill) over the same months.
- Normalize fees. Spread any monthly charge across your typical kWh to get an adjusted cents-per-kWh.
- Map the default. If you do nothing, know whether you revert to utility default service, an aggregation product, or something else; EIA notes Maryland is among states with community choice aggregator programs in addition to classic retail choice (¹).
- Read the fine print on exit. Early termination numbers can swamp a few tenths of a cent in headline rate.
- Confirm billing mechanics with the supplier. For CCA-style setups, EPA emphasizes that customers continue to receive delivery from the local utility and see a single bill reflecting the supplier change (⁵). For other competitive contracts, ask explicitly whether you will receive one consolidated bill or separate supplier and utility bills, because that affects how you reconcile line items.
Geography lesson: Baltimore and BGE as a worked example
Maryland has multiple investor-owned delivery utilities; your offer’s eligibility and pass-through line items depend on territory. As one concrete illustration, a Baltimore-focused electricity marketplace page states that Baltimore is in BGE (Baltimore Gas & Electric) territory on the PJM grid and frames supply as competitively shoppable while delivery runs through the utility (⁸). You would substitute another host utility depending on address—the comparison method stays the same even when the logo changes.
Closing the loop with your own goals
If you care about budget stability, optimize for fixed supply math plus low fees. If you care about renewables, optimize for documentation rather than slogans, using EPA’s green-power resources as a starting point for what “voluntary” supply claims can mean (⁶). If you care about simplicity, understand whether aggregation or utility default service already sets a baseline before you chase a teaser rate. In every case, anchor decisions to your measured kWh (³)), your real bill splits (²), and the structural fact that delivery remains with the distribution utility under retail choice (¹).