Full Customer Choice: All customers could choose their power supplier. You could continue to buy electricity from Seattle City Light at a fixed rate or price as you do today. Seattle City Light would continue to deliver electricity to your home and bill you for that service as well as public purposes charges such as conservation and renewable resources. As for the rates and terms and conditions of service, they would be set locally by the Seattle City Council as they are now. No additional billing and metering equipment would be needed. With this option, our customers would experience little perceptible change from current service.

Other companies could also offer fixed-price electricity packages. Billing and metering services might be provided by Seattle City Light, but possibly other agents, depending on the details of restructuring legislation. Billing disputes on the electricity component of the customer bill would be resolved through your chosen energy provider. Outage complaints and questions involving delivery would be addressed to Seattle City Light.

You might also have the opportunity to buy market-priced electricity directly from the energy market, with Seattle City Light or another utility or energy service company acting as your agent. Access to the power market would require special billing and metering services, which could be provided by Seattle City Light or another agent at your expense. Seattle City Light would continue to deliver energy to your home or business and maintain the reliability of the distribution service in its service territory. Billing disputes for the energy portion of a bill would be resolved through the new energy supplier; Seattle City Light would continue to respond to outage complaints and questions involving delivery and public purpose charges.

Partial Customer Choice: Currently, in the State of Washington, a group of private and public utilities, industrial customers, commercial customers, and public interest groups are working to develop a new approach for providing customer choice, which responds to unique issues important to citizens of the Northwest.

This approach would require all public and private utilities to offer a menu of energy choices to all customer classes within its service territory. These are described as resource portfolios. The menu would include: a market-based portfolio rate, an environmentally friendly "green" portfolio rate, a traditional utility portfolio rate, and perhaps, a federal power (Bonneville) portfolio rate.

No other utilities or energy service companies would be allowed to offer menu services within a utilities service territory, with one exception:

Large customers with the necessary metering equipment would have access to portfolio rates offered by their local utility, plus the ability to negotiate directly with alternative energy providers outside their traditional service territory. The distribution utility would remain responsible for backup and ancillary services, but would be allowed to charge for those services.

If customer choice is legislated in Washington and you are considering your energy supply options, here are some of the questions you should ask potential providers:

• What service am I buying from you? What services will I continue to buy from my existing utility?

• What will I be charged? What will I save on my bills compared to my existing utility? Will I see weekly, monthly, or seasonal variability in my bills? Do you have a monthly budget plan?

• How long will you require me to buy power from you? If I want to return to my old utility, will I have to pay a connection charge?

• Can I receive a discount for using power at times when most people don’t such as late night? Do I need a special meter ? What does the meter cost?

• How will I be billed? Will I receive more than one bill? If I want to dispute my bill, what do I do? Who should I contact if I have an outage?

• Where is your nearest office? How do I know I’ll be able to reach you?

• How long have you been in the power business?

• What are your financial resources to back up the energy commitment you’re making to me? What happens if you fail to deliver the power to my distribution utility?

• Where do you get your power?

• Are you a registered Power Marketer?

• Are you going to sell my name, address, telephone number and/or electrical use information to anyone?