The biggest risk to the competitive retail energy industry isn't regulatory, but the risk that non-energy companies like Google and Apple respond faster to changes in the industry and supplant traditional retail energy suppliers in providing new services to customers, Bill Harmon, Vice President of Mass Markets and Innovation for Reliant Energy, said at the Gulf Coast Power Association's fall conference.

Touching on an earlier discussion of a potential transition in the retail energy industry similar to what happened in the mobile phone industry, which moved from a focus on minutes to value-added services and apps, Harmon said:

"I think the real risk that we wrestle with every day as a business is not that competitive markets won't thrive, it's that they'll thrive too fast, and that we'll transition from the discussion of 'minutes' to the discussion of other value-added products and services and a completely different business model that ... may not even involve a component of how many kilowatt-hours you use. That's a reality that I think is possible."

"So I think the real risk to our business is that big companies like ours that are built on a foundation of managing risk just will not be able to innovate fast enough, and that we'll be leapfrogged by, whether it's the Googles of the world, or the Amazons of the world, or a couple of kids in a garage," Harmon said.

The most material risk is not that competitive markets won't thrive, but that, "the players in the market today won't be the players 10 years from now."