Somebody has quoted your business a lower electricity price and you want to know whether it is actually a better deal. In Ohio the question is live in a way it is not in most of the country, because Ohio businesses genuinely can choose who generates their power. What they cannot choose is nearly everything else on the bill, and that is where the comparison usually goes wrong.
One thing said plainly before anything else. We reconcile commercial bills against filed tariffs, and the tariff we have reconciled is ComEd's, in northern Illinois. We have not reconciled an Ohio bill and we do not publish Ohio rate figures. What follows is the structure of the decision and the arithmetic you can run on your own bills. Where a number belongs, it is a number off your bill, not off ours.
What an Ohio supplier can and cannot change
Ohio separated generation from delivery. The generation half of your bill is competitive: certified retail suppliers can sell it to you, PUCO publishes the list of who is certified, and the default if you do nothing is the utility's Standard Service Offer, the price set through the utility's competitive procurement rather than by the utility choosing it.
The delivery half is not competitive. AEP Ohio, Duke Energy Ohio, AES Ohio, and the FirstEnergy utilities each own the wires in their own service territory, and whichever one serves your address delivers your power no matter whose name appears on the generation line. That half is set by filed tariff, and on a commercial account it is where the demand charge lives.
So the first move is not to compare offers. It is to open your last bill and add up the two halves. If the delivery side is the larger of the two, then every offer in front of you is bidding on the smaller half, and the largest number on the page is not in the auction.
Why the lowest advertised rate is not the cheapest supplier
Four things decide whether a lower quoted price produces a lower bill, and none of them appears on a comparison chart.
The price you are actually comparing against. The number to beat is not the headline Standard Service Offer, it is what you actually paid per kilowatt hour. Divide the generation dollars on each bill by the kilowatt hours on the same bill. That is your real rate.
What happens when the term ends. An introductory fixed price that rolls into a variable price is two prices, and only the second one is open-ended. Compare across the whole period you will be under contract, at the price that applies in each part of it.
Whether the quote is all-in. Offers differ in what they bundle. Capacity and transmission are real costs and an offer that passes them through separately is not comparable to one that includes them, even when the headline number looks lower.
Your own usage shape, if the offer is indexed. If the price tracks the wholesale market rather than sitting flat, then when you draw power matters as much as how much you draw. Ohio is inside the PJM market, so an indexed offer exposes you to the same summer afternoon pricing that a building running overnight would barely notice.
The arithmetic, on your own numbers
Pull twelve months of bills. For each month write down the kilowatt hours and the total generation dollars. Multiply each month's kilowatt hours by the offered price, add anything the offer passes through separately, and compare the total to what you actually paid. Repeat for the months that fall after any introductory period, at the price that applies then.
The output is a dollar figure for the year and it is specific to your building. It is also the only form of the answer that is worth anything, because a rate on its own cannot be cheaper or more expensive than another rate until it meets a quantity.
When the answer is "none of them"
A legitimate result of this exercise is that no offer beats the default by enough to justify signing a term contract, and another legitimate result is that the generation half is small enough that the whole exercise is a distraction from the delivery half.
Both are correct answers for a meaningful share of commercial accounts, and both cost an hour with a stack of bills to establish.
Who is the cheapest electricity supplier in Ohio for a business?
There is no single cheapest supplier, because an offer is a price and your bill is a price multiplied by your own kilowatt hours, added to a delivery half no supplier touches. The cheapest one for your business is whichever offer produces the lowest total when applied to your last twelve months of usage across the full contract term.
Can I switch electricity suppliers and stay with AEP Ohio?
Yes, and the second half is not optional. Your utility delivers the power and bills the delivery charges regardless of who generates it. Shopping changes the generation portion of the bill only.
What is the Standard Service Offer?
It is the default generation price you pay if you do not choose a supplier. It is the benchmark an offer has to beat, but the benchmark that matters for your decision is what you actually paid per kilowatt hour, which you can compute from your own bills.
Does switching suppliers reduce my demand charge?
No. A demand charge is billed on your single highest interval of the month and sits in the regulated delivery half of the bill. No generation supplier can change it.