Avion Energy Group

How would you find “best pricing” for electricity and natural gas?

What if you were tasked with getting some quotes. Who would you request quotes from? Would you do an internet search for Energy Suppliers? What would you ask of them? How many quotes would you get? I could go on and on with the questions. Would you like me to tell you from our experience what we’ve found companies are doing?

Jim Charron, the CEO of Avion Energy Group answers this directly, but firstly let’s learn a bit about him, the company he has co-founded and the great team he has assembled.

Charron and his business partner, Joe Mittiga founded Avion Energy in July of 2010. They have been serving clients for 14 years.

“In that 14 year span we feel like we’ve seen it all,” he says. Somewhere back in time it became the established best practice for business shopping, that you would seek three quotes, compare them and in most cases choose the lower price, especially if the product was the same quality, features, and function. When shopping for Electricity and Natural Gas we don’t have to compare any features. Electricity and natural gas are commodities. Everybody gets the same thing. No one is selling special electricity.

Over the past 14 years, when Avion Energy first engaged with clients, it was in three categories:
• No one at the business is shopping for electricity or natural gas
• Keep renewing their contract with the same energy supplier
• Shopping but only getting three quotes

First category – no one at the business is shopping for electricity or natural gas.

The bill comes in the mail and makes its way to the accounting department and gets paid without anyone questioning anything about it. Everyone knows the business needs electricity. Everybody knows if you don’t pay the bill, they will turn it off. It’s one of those must have and must pay expenses. In our initial conversations with one of the “no shoppers,” we always ask why they don’t do any shopping for better rates; these are the common responses we hear, “I didn’t know I could shop for competitive rates; I thought I had to buy from the utility company.” Or I thought if I bought from someone other than the utility company, they might be upset with me and when there is a power outage, I would be the last to receive service. The utility company doesn’t think that way. They make their money on the delivery of electricity or natural gas not on the supply of the commodities. In a deregulated market where the state legislature has made consumer choice available you can purchase from a third party. That energy supplier delivers the natural gas or the electricity to the utility company and it is passed along through their infrastructure to the meter on the outside of your building. The energy supplier gets paid on how much you use; the utility company gets paid on how much passes through the pipelines and the powerlines.

We have many hundreds of stories of companies who don’t shop and are paying much more than they should. Some are paying 30, 40, 50 percent more, we’ve found many paying 100 percent more. The most outrageous example was a small municipality who were paying .32 cents per kilowatt hour when we brought competition to the bidding process we found the best price for this municipality at .07 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s over a 400 percent savings. They had shopped on an annual basis in the past but when the person tasked with that job of gathering bids was no longer working at that municipality, shopping for electricity fell through the cracks and was not being done. The energy supplier was slowly increasing rates over time after their contract had expired. We found a very significant dollar savings for this client.

Second category - Just renew the energy contract with the same supplier.

Let’s face it, you’re busy, doing the things it takes to grow your business. On the surface it feels like there can’t be much difference in energy pricing from one supplier to another. We’ve had a good experience, or should I say we haven’t had any problems with our energy supplier so if it ain’ t broke don’t fix it. We simply renew our contract with the same supplier, and we’ve done that for many years. When Avion Energy reintroduces competition to the process of getting pricing, these clients are surprised that there is such a difference in pricing from one supplier to another and in many cases surprised the supplier they been doing business with all those years wasn’t the company with the best price. We have many stories we could share about going back to the same supplier over and over again. It is the easy thing to do but you generally are paying more than you could. After all, when no competition is involved, the long-standing supplier can add a bit more to their margin and before you know it you could be paying much more for electricity and natural gas.

Third category - Shopping but only getting 3 quotes.

Many times, our initial conversations with the companies in this third category are a bit guarded. Sometimes they think they have it under control and don’t need our assistance. After all they have procurement procedures in place and routinely get pricing from 3 suppliers when their contracts are expiring. But upon a little closer scrutiny we ask if they get prices from the same 3 suppliers all the time? How do they know those 3 are the lowest cost suppliers of all the suppliers licensed in their market. Most often they have no idea if the three they are using are the lowest. It would be by chance they stumbled upon the lowest cost provider. Is leaving this to luck the best way to secure energy pricing? Do their contracts end at the time of year when energy prices are historically lower? Are they getting a fixed rate contract, a variable rate contract, an energy only contract, or a block and index contract. (I told you I could ask a lot more questions) No business out there is buying energy in a way we don’t know or understand. There are advantages to using the services of a company that does the most extensive job of energy procurement and all the while doing it by representing you, not the energy supplier.

Forth category – Use the Avion Energy process.

Charron says, “once a client goes through the Avion Energy process, no matter what category they started in, they now gladly enter a Fourth category. They don’t settle for a competitive price. They enjoy the best price. Avion Energy takes the task of energy procurement off their to do list and manages the entire process for them. We do the most extensive job of quoting and discover who has the best price on any given day. We help them avoid the common mistakes and missteps that cost them dearly. Keeping them in best pricing on and on, year after year contract after contract. That’s what we do.”