Electricity on eBay?

I love working with people who won’t take “no” for an answer.

When one of our team came up with the hairbrained scheme of putting a megawatt of power up for sale on Ebay, I suggested he may want to take a walk around the block for some fresh air.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe there is any such thing as a bad idea. But how are we supposed to deliver a megawatt of power to a customer on Ebay? What if the successful bidder lives in Alabama and the power we sold delivered in CT. (Some wise guy actually wrote to us asking if he could “wheel” the power to Oregon. “Wheeling” is a term of art in the electricity business so we knew he was pulling our chain. To get the electricity from Connecticut to Oregon would require doing bilateral deals with a couple dozen utilities and Independent System Operators from coast to coast, including crossing the continental divide with a phase shift somewhere around western Nebraska.) And how were we going to bill for this little megawatt, especially when the average customer uses about 10 megawatts a year, and not all of it is consumed at the same time? What if the customer agreed to pay us more than a megawatt was worth -- $119 in United Illuminating’s Territory?

Long ago I learned that before I let myself say “no,” I needed to come up with a few creative answers. So I stopped myself in mid-track and started to think to myself, “This is a cool idea. We can figure this out. We can explain in the offer that the electricity is only available in UI’s territory in Connecticut. If a customer wants to pay more than it’s worth, we can give the balance to charity. And if our customer pays us for one megawatt today, we can simply credit our customer with a megawatt in their first bill."

So we launched the auction on Thursday, December 6th. Within hours we started receiving calls from the press. On Friday morning I was asked for an interview by the Associated Press. The phone rang when I was on my way to Penn Station in New York to catch the train to Maryland for the annual Christmas Party of our Customer Call Center. I stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue with my suitcase in one hand and the cell phone in the other, being jostled by holiday shoppers. The reporter wanted to know how we were going to deliver the megawatt to Alabama, what we would do if the bidder wanted to pay more than it was worth, when we would credit the megawatt if they used power all year long. I was prepared with the answers.

That night, as I enjoyed a slice from a long chocolate cake in the form of a yule log, I felt the phone buzz in my pocket. It was the text of the Associated Press story. By now it had run in dozens of papers around the country. A few minutes later I received a call from my son in Connecticut. He had just arrived home from college. “Dad, I was driving home from the airport and I heard on CBS radio that you were selling a megawatt on ebay. Cool!” It was the ultimate accolade.