How Ohio's Price to Compare actually works

Every Ohio electric bill from an investor-owned utility (Ohio Edison, CEI, Toledo Edison, AEP Ohio, Duke Energy Ohio, AES Ohio) shows a number called the Price to Compare — usually abbreviated PTC. It's the one number that matters when you're deciding whether to switch to a competitive supplier: your supplier's offer needs to be lower than the PTC for you to save money on the generation portion of your bill.

What's not obvious from the bill itself is how that number gets set. It's not a Wall Street market price; it's the result of a competitive auction the utility runs every few months, and understanding that auction is the key to knowing whether the PTC is about to go up or down.

The PTC is the price of "doing nothing"

If you never pick a supplier, you stay on what's called the Standard Service Offer (SSO) — the default generation rate your utility charges. The PTC is the per-kWh price tag of that default. PUCO requires the utility to display it prominently so you can decide whether a supplier's offer beats it.

Crucially, the utility doesn't generate the electricity. Even if you stay on the default, the actual power is sourced from competitive wholesale suppliers through the PJM market. The utility just buys it on your behalf at the auction-clearing price and passes that cost through to you with no markup on the energy itself.

How the auction works

Two or three times a year (the cadence varies by utility — typically every 60 to 90 days), each Ohio utility holds a competitive bid auction for the right to supply default-service customers for an upcoming period. PUCO oversees the auction. Wholesale electricity suppliers — many of the same companies that also sell competitive retail offers — submit bids saying how much they'll charge per megawatt-hour to deliver power to that utility's customers for, say, the next twelve months.

The lowest bids win. The auction clears at a single price (or sometimes a weighted average across multiple "tranches"). That clearing price, plus a small set of pass-through costs like transmission and capacity, becomes the new Price to Compare.

Why the PTC moves in jumps

This auction-based mechanism is why a chart of the PTC looks like a staircase, not a smooth curve:

For two or three months at a time, the price is flat — every customer is paying the rate that won the most recent auction.
Then on a known date, the price jumps to whatever the next auction cleared at — sometimes up, sometimes down, occasionally by a lot.
Then it goes flat again until the next reset.

If you've ever wondered why every Ohio electricity comparison site reports identical PTC numbers and they all change on the same day for a given utility, this is why.

What drives the auction price

The two biggest inputs are wholesale energy prices in PJM (the regional grid operator) and PJM capacity prices in the utility's specific zone.

Wholesale energy prices reflect the cost of natural gas and coal generation running on the grid in real time. When natural gas prices spike, the auction clears higher.

Capacity prices are set in PJM's annual Base Residual Auction — a separate auction that decides how much generation owners get paid to be available for the grid, even if they don't run. Capacity prices can move dramatically from one year to the next: PJM's 2025/26 capacity auction cleared at roughly 9× the prior year's price in some Ohio zones, which translated directly into double-digit PTC increases at the next utility procurement.

A few other ingredients enter the mix — transmission charges, line losses, ancillary services — but those are smaller and more stable. The energy-plus-capacity total is what mostly drives where the PTC lands.

How to use this when shopping

Three practical implications:

Watch the next auction date. Each utility publishes its procurement schedule. If you're a few weeks before a known auction, the current PTC might be about to change significantly. The history page shows the trend so you can see whether the recent direction has been up or down.
A fixed-rate supplier offer below the PTC is a bet on the auction. When you lock a fixed rate with a supplier, you're effectively betting that the future PTC will be higher than the rate you're locking. If the next auction comes in lower than expected, your fixed rate may underperform.
The PTC is the floor, not the ceiling. Suppliers can't legally charge you more than they've offered, but the utility's PTC will adjust at every auction. A "deal" today can become "above market" two PTC resets from now.

Where to verify all this yourself

PUCO publishes the underlying auction results, the procurement schedules, and the methodology. PJM publishes capacity-auction results and zonal prices. The links below are the originals: