Wholesale standard service auctions, typically held in November and April, determine the generation price of electricity. Generation covers the first stage in delivering electricity.
The auction delay will let participating bidders get additional load data from the utility, becoming better informed during the auction process, said the PUCO spokesman, Matt Schilling.
“We will know wholesale energy prices on April 29 after the completion of the auction,” Schilling said.
AES Ohio held an auction in October 2024 that secured half of the load that sets the price of electricity starting June 1, he said.
That auction secured a price of $88.05 per megawatt hour. This will be blended with whatever price the next auction secures to help set June’s SSO, or “standard service offer” price.
The standard service offer price applies to AES Ohio customers who do not participate in a local government aggregation program or choose a different retail supplier on their own.
The wholesale energy price in place today is $80.09 per megawatt hour, according to the PUCO.
Schilling noted that Ohio power companies FirstEnergy and AEP Ohio have completed their auctions. The wholesale prices for those companies are rising 9% and 35%, respectively, he added.
Some market observers are concerned that prices are trending up.
“The rising costs of electricity in Ohio are the result of a perfect storm — the globalization of our domestic energy markets, aging infrastructure, rising demand, volatile weather, all coming to a head at the same time and, unfortunately, those higher costs are passed on to us as electric consumers,” said Maha Kashani, senior sales manager at Dublin, Ohio-based retail energy supplier IGS Energy.
A spokeswoman for AES Ohio confirmed the auction delay, and noted the auction is conducted by an independent third party with oversight by the PUCO.
All Ohio utilities participate in competitive market-based auctions for generation of electricity.
In these auctions, wholesale suppliers bid to serve AES Ohio customers their generation supply, and pricing is based on market conditions that day.
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