On August 5, 2026, at 6:00 PM, the City of Powell hosted an information session in Council Chambers at 47 Hall Street to educate residents about the city's new electric aggregation program with NOPEC (Northeast Ohio Public Energy Council). The session was led by Genevieve Costanzo, a relationship manager at NOPEC, who presented on Ohio's deregulated energy market, NOPEC's structure as a nonprofit council of governments, program rates, and how residents can opt out or choose alternative rate options.
Note: The agenda included a presentation titled "Powell City New Aggregation and Community presentation.pdf" but the minutes were not available; all details are derived from the raw transcript.
Good evening, everyone. We're gonna try to start right on time and get you guys out here in a good fashion. My name is Genevieve Costanzo, and I'm a relationship manager with NOPAC. Tonight, what we're going to do is we're going to go over what brought us here today, which is we're gonna start with talking a little bit and quickly about deregulation, then we're gonna talk about NOPAC, and then I'm gonna talk about some of the most common questions that typically arise, hopefully answering your questions. And at the end, um I promise you that I'm gonna stay here, and if your question was not answered in this presentation, I will be here until every single person's question is answered to your satisfaction. So thank you again so much for letting me be here, and we're gonna continue on down. Um before we start and get into how NOPAC came into your community, we're gonna look back at Ohio and deregulation. Ohio is one of 14 states in the United States that deregulated energy. They did this in two the year 2000. What that means is that they separated the supply portion of your bill from the utility portion. You have a choice in your suppliers. You have no choice in your utility. The suppliers are responsible for going to the market and securing a good rate for your electricity for your kilowatts per hour. The utility is responsible for all the wires that you see for your bill for gatekeeping your account. We as NOPAC have no information about your account. Um, but the utility has to do all that. Again, the utility is decided upon where you by where you live. You have no choice in your utility, but you do have a choice in your supplier. So we're gonna go to the next one. Um, as I mentioned, the utility delivers the energy, manages the pipes and wires, and they are responsible fully for your bill. They send the bill and they um create the bill every month. You cannot choose your utility. So, what your energy supplier does is it secures the energy you uses and negotiates the rate for that energy. So typically, I mentioned that, or I just said in Ohio, we are deregulated. That gave you the option of over a hundred different suppliers. Every day there's um you could go to Apples to Apples, which is Ohio Energy Choice.com, and you could get your choice of over a hundred different suppliers to choose from the supply is notated here on the next slide. I apologize. Now, on your bill, this is kind of important. On your bill, the blue part is your supply. So you could see here that this customer used 933 kilowatts per hour, and her supply total was 127 dollars. But that wasn't her bill. Her bill total is 230 dollars. Why? Because again, you cannot choose your utility, and all of their charges per month are low are denoted in the raspberry section of this bill. In one sense, what I tell a lot of my customers is that you actually have almost two different bills in one on your monthly electric bill. Right away, just kind of set the level and say you only have control over one part. It's very simple. The one line, the kilowatt that you used times your rate. Everything else in your bill, we have no agency over at all. That that's a key term. Next one, please. So, as I mentioned, there's many different suppliers to choose from in Ohio. And what it can definitely does promote competition, but it also can be confusing. Next slide. What they found out is early on in the beginning of 2000s, so maybe 2002, 2003, there was a lot of almost predatory sales tactics going on. People would be knocking on doors and not be actual forthcoming about who they were. They may have actually slammed some, you know, slammed some accounts, which means they would take their account and enroll them in their program. We were finding that this was happening a lot. And unfortunately, the people that were really getting hit were the elderly people. So at that point, and recognizing the predatory environment.