When Ella Allen and Diashawn Wright got an unusually high gas bill for their home in West Pullman toward the end of 2022, the parents of five young children thought it was a fluke.
But when the monthly charges skyrocketed during winter — reaching a whopping $1,030.77 for their bill due last March — they took a closer look. That’s when they noticed an entry on the last page of the bill that said “alternative energy supplier service.”
The supplier, Direct Energy, was billing their usage at 97 cents per therm — nearly twice the price Peoples Gas would have charged.
It turned out they’d been billed by the alternative gas supplier for months.
The couple say they never signed up for Direct Energy and don’t know how the switch occurred. Allen called it “a complete nightmare.”
When Illinois deregulated natural gas and electricity markets more than two decades ago, it allowed hundreds of companies to compete as suppliers of residential utility services. Complaints started surfacing, and despite consumer protections that took effect in 2020, some customers are still reporting issues.
Some like Allen and Wright say they never knew an alternative supplier was on their bill until the charges started piling up.
Others knowingly accepted a deal for electricity or natural gas offered by a door-to-door salesperson or at a pop-up booth — deals often including a free gadget or gift card — but say it ended up costing them more after the introductory rate ended.
“Unfortunately, this is a very common story,” says Sarah Moskowitz, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, a nonprofit that advocates for utility customers in Illinois.
Citizens Utility Board Executive Director Sarah Moskowitz.
Before deregulation, gas and electric utilities in Illinois controlled both the supply of energy and the infrastructure bringing it into people’s homes.
Opening up the supplier market was meant to bring prices down — and it did.
But these days consumer advocates say it’s usually a better deal to stick with your utility company for electricity and gas.
“We’re not really seeing folks save even in the face of fluctuating gas prices,” Moskowitz says.
Illinois sues over ‘deceptive’ practices
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has taken action against several alternative suppliers for deceptive marketing, most recently New York-based Residents Energy LLC, which the agency says had customers paying double or more for their electricity.
The lawsuit, filed in Cook County circuit court in September, says salespeople for Residents Energy misled consumers into thinking they were dealing with their public utility and touted low rates without disclosing that those were temporary, introductory prices.
In some cases, customers were “slammed” or enrolled without their consent, the suit says.
It says “consumers who switched to Residents [Energy] virtually always paid considerably more for their electricity than they would have had they not switched.”
A spokesman for Residents Energy says the accusations are “uncorroborated and inaccurate” and that the company will “continue to offer Illinois customers environmentally responsible and other value offers that represent an alternative to their local utility’s take-it-or-leave-it rates.”
The attorney general’s office advises caution with any alternative energy offer, saying they “typically offer low introductory prices that appear to be lower than the utility price but increase substantially after a few months.”
92-year-old dad surprised by contract
Grace Balinski is still angry about what happened to her 92-year-old father Guadalupe Muñoz, who she says was signed up for a Direct Energy natural gas contract without his consent, resulting in years of higher prices.
After she discovered this, the company showed her a contract dated Sept. 15, 2014, a day Balinski can prove that her father, then 83, was in California visiting his sister. The signature and phone number on the contract aren’t her father’s, Balinski says.
Muñoz, who lives in McKinley Park, never noticed Direct Energy was the supplier on his bill. His payments were set to auto pay, and he thought letters from Direct Energy were junk mail and didn’t open them,…
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