As the retail market community does damage control in the wake of the polar vortex, one of the refrains repeated more than once is that only a few bad apple suppliers are to blame for the current problems -- typically niche, unsophisticated suppliers operating out of a "basement."

While certain niche suppliers have their share of blame, pricing nearly double the default rate is not the sole domain of small, unsophisticated retail suppliers, as a column by Kevin Hunt in the Hartford Courant shows

In The Bottom Line, Hunt quotes reader letters complaining about high rates (for one supplier, as high as 17¢/kWh, or essentially double the SOS rate) from three big-name retail suppliers: Constellation Energy, Direct Energy, and Energy Plus (a unit of NRG Energy).

True, none of the quoted rates in Hunt's column are the sticker-shock rates of 30-40 cents per kWh seen from some other suppliers, but let's not pretend rates double the standard offer were going to go unnoticed.

Not that this is surprising, of course, but it merely provides another hard datapoint to push back against the narrative that the current problems in the retail market are caused by unsophisticated niche players, and that if the states would only tighten regulations so only large Fortune 500 or international conglomerates could be licensed, these problems would go away.