How Standard Offer Service sits next to a PSC-licensed supplier
Standard Offer Service is the default generation product the Maryland Public Service Commission requires BGE, Pepco Maryland, Delmarva Power Maryland, Potomac Edison, SMECO, and Choptank Electric Cooperative to sell when a customer has not chosen a licensed retail supplier. The Commission’s SOS page at https://www.psc.state.md.us/electricity/standard-offer-service/ explains that utilities buy that wholesale supply through a regulated competitive bid, not by owning the generation themselves.
A licensed supplier replaces only the SOS generation line. Delivery, customer charges, metering, and emergency response stay with the utility. Switching does not move your store onto a different set of poles. If a feeder fails during a Mid-Atlantic storm, you still call BGE, Pepco, Delmarva, Potomac Edison, SMECO, or Choptank—the company printed as the electric distribution utility on the bill.
The same SOS page tells utilities to publish supply-price comparison information for summer months, winter months, and a weighted annual average. That disclosure is the Commission’s intended benchmark against a supplier proposal. It is not a promised savings percentage, and this guide does not invent a unit energy price. Pull the current SOS comparison from your utility’s posted materials before you score any offer.
MDElectricChoice.com is the official electric choice shopping website of the PSC. Its welcome copy talks about buying electricity for a home. A coin laundry on a commercial schedule should treat that portal as orientation, then open the Commission’s commercial and industrial supplier search at https://webapp.psc.state.md.us/ecm/ecmsupplier3.cfm and filter by the utility that actually reads the meter.
Residential and small-commercial SOS wholesale bids occur twice a year; large-commercial bids arrive quarterly. Those calendars matter for how long a default price stays in force, not as a reason to invent a seasonal laundry usage average. Align supplier term dates to the SOS window that applies to your class, then keep delivery riders out of the generation comparison.
Gas dryers, MDGasChoice copy, and the C&I supplier directory
Many Baltimore stores take BGE gas for dryer banks while Montgomery County and inner-suburban stores often sit on Washington Gas Maryland. Both commodities can be shopped in participating territories, but the shopping tools are not interchangeable with the electric portal and are not interchangeable with each other.
MDGasChoice.com is the Commission’s official gas choice website. Its homepage states that residential utility customers can buy gas for the home from a retail supplier. That sentence is the trap for a commercial owner: a dryer-heavy C&I account is not automatically the class the residential shopper was built to display. Confirm the supplier’s authority for your gas utility and customer class on the PSC supplier search.
Leaving a default gas commodity product does not transfer leak response, meter ownership, or main repair to the marketer. BGE or Washington Gas Maryland still delivers therms and still handles distribution emergencies. A dual-fuel RFP that treats gas marketers as if they were the LDC will mis-assign after-hours calls when a dryer train is down.
Senate Bill 1 reforms that reduced some residential retail offers, as MDGasChoice itself notes, do not tell you whether a given marketer will quote a commercial dryer meter. Ask for the license class in writing, match it to the PSC directory, and keep BGE gas or Washington Gas delivery charges on a separate worksheet from commodity.
Four investor-owned maps plus SMECO and Choptank
Baltimore City and much of the surrounding BGE electric footprint should not be quoted as if they were Montgomery County. Silver Spring, Bethesda, and other inner-Beltway addresses are typically Pepco Maryland, not BGE. Using a BGE SOS comparison file on a Pepco meter is the same error as using a Dallas TDU file on a Houston store—except the utilities and default-product names are local.
Delmarva Power Maryland covers Eastern Shore investor-owned territory that still sits inside PJM but does not share BGE’s urban network or Pepco’s District-adjacent feeders. Potomac Edison, the FirstEnergy affiliate, is the usual Frederick and western-Maryland path. A multi-store operator who copies one supplier matrix across those four investor-owned names will mix SOS bid calendars and delivery tariffs.
SMECO in Southern Maryland and Choptank Electric Cooperative on the Eastern Shore participate in Standard Offer Service and appear on the Commission’s SOS comparison roster. Choice exists, but the licensed-supplier pool is thinner than the BGE or Pepco Maryland lists. A mailer that assumes every cooperative meter has the same retail depth as downtown Baltimore is not a procurement plan.
Confirm the utility name on the current invoice and on the PSC supplier-search filter before you request quotes. Mailing city is not territory. An Annapolis, Frederick, or Salisbury storefront can sit one franchise line away from the utility a broker assumed from the ZIP code.
PJM is the regional transmission organization behind all of these Maryland distribution companies. That shared RTO does not make delivery tariffs or SOS products identical. Treat PJM as the wholesale backdrop, then build a separate SOS-versus-delivery file for each utility that actually serves a washer row.
Reading SOS generation apart from utility delivery lines
Pull twelve months of invoices and split each month into SOS or supplier generation, utility delivery, and non-bypassable riders before anyone scores an offer. The generation line is the only piece a licensed supplier is bidding to replace. Customer charges, distribution demand, and EmPOWER Maryland surcharge lines stay with the utility whether you remain on SOS or not.
BGE, Pepco Maryland, Delmarva, and Potomac Edison present comparison information differently on customer-facing sites, but the Commission’s instruction is the same: the utility must show the SOS price you would pay so you can compare it to a retail offer. Do not let a supplier quote bury that benchmark inside a blended “all-in” number that also swallows delivery.
After enrollment, the logo at the top of a consolidated bill may change while the distribution company of record does not. The first two bills after a switch are for spotting whether generation moved and whether delivery riders remained labeled as utility charges. Mis-posted demand or surcharge lines are billing disputes, not proof that SOS “lost.”
Keep the utility outage number on the wall separately from the supplier’s billing desk. Crews that restore a feeder after a summer thunderstorm work for BGE, Pepco, Delmarva, Potomac Edison, SMECO, or Choptank. A supplier call center cannot dispatch those trucks.
Washer rows, dryer banks, and SOS seasonal windows
A coin laundry stacks extract motors, water heating or booster loads, lighting, and space conditioning on an electric meter while many Baltimore and suburban stores put dryer heat on a gas meter. That split is why a single “energy rate” conversation fails. Model the electric SOS or supplier generation against washer and HVAC hours, and model gas commodity against dryer therms, without inventing a statewide kWh or therm average.
SOS summer and winter comparison prices exist because wholesale bids and seasonal load shapes differ. Align a fixed supplier term to the class-specific SOS window—twice-yearly for residential and small commercial, quarterly for large commercial—rather than to a calendar you borrowed from another state. The window is a procurement date, not a usage forecast.
Humidity along the Chesapeake and heat-island blocks in Baltimore keep makeup-air and air-conditioning equipment running while washers stay busy. That coincidence raises interval exposure on the electric meter. It does not create a published store-count or savings claim, and it does not move outage responsibility off the utility.
If you add electric dryers or a larger booster heater, revisit whether the account still sits in the SOS class you used for the last bid. A class change can move you from the twice-yearly small-commercial SOS process toward the quarterly large-commercial process. Re-pull the utility’s current SOS comparison after the tariff conversation, not before.
Shopper-class gaps, cooperative pools, and county mis-maps
The first trap is treating MDElectricChoice.com as a complete commercial catalog. The site is the official shopper, and it is also written around household supply. A GS or demand-metered laundry that never opens https://webapp.psc.state.md.us/ecm/ecmsupplier3.cfm is shopping with the wrong filter even when the supplier brand looks familiar.
The second trap is assuming MDGasChoice.com covers every dryer account. Residential emphasis on that site is explicit. Washington Gas Maryland and BGE gas C&I eligibility have to be confirmed on the PSC directory for the class printed on the gas bill, not inferred from a household rate card.
The third trap is quoting Montgomery County as BGE because the owner used to operate in Baltimore. Pepco Maryland is the usual inner-suburban electric utility. A BGE SOS file used on a Pepco meter compares the wrong default product and the wrong delivery tariff.
The fourth trap is expecting SMECO or Choptank to produce the same supplier shortlist as BGE. Choice is real; depth is not identical. If only one or two licensed suppliers will quote the cooperative meter, document that constraint instead of forcing a Baltimore-style RFP template onto a thinner pool.
File to assemble before leaving Standard Offer Service
Identify the electric utility of record—BGE, Pepco Maryland, Delmarva Power Maryland, Potomac Edison, SMECO, or Choptank—and the gas LDC if dryers are gas-fired. Save the SOS comparison the utility currently publishes for your class, including the summer, winter, and weighted-annual figures when they are posted, without converting them into a promised discount.
Run the PSC commercial supplier search filtered by that utility. Cross-check every bidder’s license against the directory. Treat MDElectricChoice and MDGasChoice as official orientation pages, not as proof that a residential product may be dropped onto a commercial meter.
Split twelve months of bills into generation, delivery, and riders. Note EmPOWER and customer-charge lines as utility items that survive a switch. File the utility outage number apart from supplier billing contacts so night staff do not call the wrong desk when the store goes dark.
Match contract end dates to the SOS bid calendar that applies to your class. Dual-fuel BGE stores should calendar electric and gas renewals separately because the commodities do not share one Commission shopper or one default-product clock.
After enrollment, audit the first two invoices for correct utility labeling on delivery and correct supplier labeling on generation. If the store later adds demand-heavy equipment, repeat the class check before the next SOS window rather than assuming last year’s small-commercial file still applies.
