Pathways to meeting growing electricity demand through expanding customer choice: a review of emerging hybrid power choice policies and practices

State policies determine the degree to which commercial and industrial electricity customers can choose specified power supplies in the United States. Policies that enable customer choice have helped customers to manage electricity costs and achieve sustainability objectives. Customer choice could also mitigate the risk of increasing electricity demand leading to higher retail electricity prices. Here, our objective is to document how state-level policies have resulted in varying degrees of power choice in the United States. Unlike previous work that has focused on nationwide trends or in markets with ample customer choice, we focus on 18 states in the western and southeastern U.S. without wholesale power markets or retail electricity competition. We conducted a narrative review to explore how these states have implemented hybrid policies such as utility green tariffs and direct access provisions that grant customer choice to subsets of commercial and industrial customers. We leverage various public data sources to estimate that commercial and industrial customers procured about 34 million megawatt hours of electricity through hybrid choice pathways in the 18-state sample, representing about 4% of commercial and industrial demand in those states. Hybrid choice enables these customers to achieve sustainability goals, with commercial and industrial customers procuring around 17 million megawatt-hours of renewable energy through hybrid choice in the 18-state sample. We posit that expanded customer choice could complement other measures to mitigate potential impacts from rapidly increasing electricity demand on retail electricity prices.