Sunday, June 11, 2000 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal READY, SET, NET Retx.com system lets utilities manage transactions at low cost By John G. Edwards Review-Journal       The Internet is key to making residential customers attractive to competitors in deregulated electric power markets, a dot-com executive said.       "What we are is the absolute intersection of the Internet and retail energy," explained Ross Malme, chief executive officer of Retx.com, a company based in Atlanta.       His company provides an Internet hub that enables utilities and other electric service providers to manage transactions with trading partners and customers for minimal cost.       Malme participated last week in the Utility Customer Information System Conference in Las Vegas. He outlined how competition will reshape the electric power industry and how his company intends to participate in the process.       By using the Internet, competitors can cut costs in signing up all types of customers, he explained.       Lower costs are essential to fostering competition for residential customers, he said, because the profit margins for residential customers are so thin.       "Our business is relatively focused on cost, because that's the only way we're able to generate benefits for the residential customer," Malme said.       "Retail competition has got to provide benefits to all stakeholders in the industry, including the residential customer," he added.       Without a low-cost way of sharing customer information, competitive choices in the power industry will be limited to a few large commercial and industrial power users, he said.       Although Nevada has not set a date for opening its electric power markets to competition, Malme said he has a product that helps a utility even before deregulation.       That product, the Retx.com Load Management Dispatcher, lets utilities and other energy service providers obtain real-time, immediate access to information about energy demand and supply availability.       By using the dispatcher, Nevada Power, for example, could pay a large user, such as a casino, to reduce power consumption or to turn on its backup generators to provide additional electricity. The cost could be negotiated so that Nevada Power would pay less than the spot market price, but the casino would also profit.       That type of information could be vital this summer, given national concerns about energy shortages.       After the start of competition, Retx.com creates a transaction clearinghouse, similar to what Visa provides member banks for credit-card services. The clearinghouse is where information is available about energy availability, demand and pricing. A utility or competitor could rely on Retx.com for sharing information with state regulators, electric power exchanges, meter service companies and others.       Retx.com, he said, can easily extract that customer information to make it available to competitors.       Policy-makers generally believe that information about an individual customer belongs to that individual customer. If the customer wants the information released to a competitor, it should be released, he continued. The data, however, would be maintained by the former monopoly utility.       "One of the problems you have is getting to this stuff and trying to get it out (of the utility's computer system)," he said.       "The business-to-business Internet hub that Retx provides is required infrastructure to make retail competition work," Malme said.       The alternative for a former regulated, monopoly utility is to rebuild the "legacy" customer information and billing system for a competitive environment, he said.       "In California, each regulated utility had to go make investments in its own internal infrastructure to deal with retail choice," he said.       Southern California Edison spent $323 million to accommodate competition, not counting its share of expenses associated with the California Independent System Operator, he said. A utility could avoid some of those costs by subscribing to his company service at www.retx.com.       Deregulation or electric utility restructuring appears inevitable.       "The federal government will likely enact legislation that will set a certain date when the states will have to have retail competition implemented," Malme said. Many anticipate that Congress will set the deadline sometime between 2006 and 2010.       "The clear preference is for the federal government not to get involved in the specifics of these local markets," he said.       "Each state will continue to refine their independent business model as to what makes the most sense for each of the stakeholders," he said.