If you live in Illinois and have electricity delivered to your home by Commonwealth Edison Co. (ComEd), you have the option of choosing to buy your electricity from ComEd or from a retail electricity supplier.

Regardless of whether you buy your power from ComEd or a retail electricity supplier, ComEd will continue to deliver it to your home, take calls about outages and maintain equipment like wires, poles and transformers. That means all you have to do is shop around for the retail electricity supplier that will provide you with the electricity plan, customer service, stability and other features that you’re looking for.

Once you’ve chosen your retail electricity supplier and asked them to switch your service, your switch will be completed in three easy steps:

1. The retail electricity supplier that you’ve chosen will notify ComEd of the change
2. ComEd will contact you by mail to confirm that you want to start buying your electricity from your new retail electricity supplier
3. Once you’ve confirmed your decision with ComEd, the utility and your new retail electricity supplier will work together to seamlessly complete the process; nobody will come to your home to flip a switch and your service won’t be interrupted

You can switch any time; there’s never a deadline. The effective date of your switch will occur on your next meter read date. Your new retail electricity supplier should show up on your bill roughly 18-45 days from the date you signed up with them. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that if you switch from ComEd to a retail electricity supplier and then switch back to ComEd, you might have to buy your electricity from the utility for a 12 month period before you can switch to a retail electricity supplier again.

Good luck shopping for your new retail electricity provider. If you have any more questions, you can get answers to common ComEd switching questions or ask us on Facebook or Twitter.

Sources

Plug In Illinois, “The Switching Process.”