Maine households paying more than the standard rate for power jumped sharply last year, after hitting a nine-year low in 2023.

According to federal data updated annually, Maine households spent $67.6 million with these retail electricity providers. That’s roughly $20 million more than this group of customers would have spent by purchasing power instead from the standard offer.

In total, since 2012, Mainers would have saved a little more than $200 million by going with the default standard offer rate. This trend prompted the Office of the Public Advocate to commission a study of the market, which resulted in a 2023 report recommending the state close the residential market entirely, a move supported by AARP Maine.

The 2023 study additionally concluded that the higher retail supply costs more often fall on low-income households, with customers in southern and central Maine being “almost 50 percent more likely to purchase from CEPs” than other consumers.

There’s plenty more backstory here, especially about the origins of the industry, covered in this dedicated project page:

The project page: Maine’s retail electricity ripoff

And you can find more of the technical details about the analysis and the data pipeline from this post back in May.

I can vouch for the benefits of the refactored data pipeline, as this year’s update — from source data to visuals — took minutes. I’ll continue to sing the praises of DuckDB for this kind of work, from analysis to presentation and data wrangling within the Observable Framework site.