I attended a meeting on competitive bidding and the following information emerged:

1. Cinergy does not plan to wait until 12/05 to end the Market Development Period (MDP) and in fact indicated that it may petition to end it for some customer classes prior to 12/03.  Public Authority switching rate is in the teens.  Must of that load is off-peak street lighting so there may be some opportunites when that opens up.  In the settlement, we negotiated that the shopping credit would continue even if the MDP ended early so our positions should be protected.

2.  AEP endorsed a model very similar to ours and that would indicate that they want to get out of the default service function.  They are stuck, however, until they reach at least 20%.  There may be some opportunities for us in light of the slow motion in dereg in their service territory and their desire to shed these customers.

3. FE will file next month a revision for next year for the market price of MSG and the shopping credit.  From what they told me privately, the market price will go up in accordance with the schedule, but because they have exceeded the 20% switch requirement in some customer classes, the percentage differential between market price and shopping credit will remain the same and not escalate.  Of critical importance will be to evaluate how they have come up with the percentages.  

4.  DPL kept pushing that in order for a marketer to competitively bid it had to have generation to back up the bid.  I think I killed that argument, with, ironically, AEP's assistance.  But what this tells me is that DPL is looking for buyers of its generation.  So maybe there is an opportunity to acquire load following generation from them.

Janine