I’ve seen things with people in different regions talking about how you can switch to a different company for electricity or natural gas. How does this work? Do places where this is the case have lots of pipes and conduit running for each company, or is it somehow shared among them?
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You purchase electricity and gas from a utility. The utility owns the pipes and wires that run to your house, and all through the system. The utility purchases electricity and gas from various suppliers. Each supplier has its own means of production or they contract with other producers, but put that last part aside for the sake of simplicity. So the suppliers own the power plants or solar farms or hydroelectric dams, gas pipelines and transport and storage facilities, gas wells, etc. Used to be the utility bought all of what it needed from all the different suppliers and then just resold it to you. Now, the utility can do that, but you can also buy directly from the supplier. Of course, you’re not actually buying the specific molecules of gas or electrons supplied from a particular supplier, but you and all the other customers are telling that supplier to put X amount of gas or electricity into the system (in a sense). The supplier bills you directly for the amount it “put into the system” based on your usage, and the utility charges you a distribution fee based on the amount it transported to you.
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