Municipal Gas Aggregation

Local Utility:

Dominion East Ohio

Population:

22,000.

Challenge:

Identifying eligible customers within the physical municipal boundaries of a community possessing 5 different mailing city descriptions. The community in question was formed in 1991 by combining small-unincorporated areas into a Village and ultimately became a City the following year. However, throughout this complex transition they retained 5 unique postal city addresses. When purchasing the community customer list from the local utility they are not able to isolate on municipal boundaries. They provide customer data based on eligible zip codes. In this case, the customer list contained thousands of accounts that were not within the physical municipal boundaries. These accounts had to be identified and removed to prevent inadvertent customer switching.

Buying Group Description:

A single community seeking offers for Residential and Commercial customers.

Resolutions:

• The founder of Independent Energy Consultants, Inc. (IEC) had previous experience developing an opt-out electric program with this community. That experience made it easier to identify boundaries and eligible customers. This is a benefit of using a consultant like IEC who can administer both electric and natural gas aggregation programs.
• Opt-Out Notices were designed with a prominent warning disclaimer for customers to contact the supplier if the notice was received by someone outside the municipal boundaries.
• By using a combination of sophisticated software tools, list matching techniques, and a great deal of manual labor, we were able to produce a very accurate list of eligible customers. There were no instances of inadvertent customer switching.

• Numerous resources were used to develop an accurate list of customers. Those included, but were not limited to: Engineering databases of street addresses; County Geographical Information Services (GIS) parcel mapping; 911 street address listings; detailed community maps; Global Positioning Systems (GPS) software tools; and USPS Zip code reports.
• A visual verification was performed on questionable addresses.
• The City also received an auxiliary benefit from the consultant's work in that it was able to update some of its tax records.