Retail market opening plan : key activities and milestones to market opening on May 1, 2002

The Ontario Energy Board (OEB) published its Retail Market Readiness Plan in January 2000 with particular focus on what is needed by distributors to become ready for self certification on December 14, 2001. The market opening date has now been set for May 1, 2002 so the framework has been updated to focus on what is needed to open the electricity market to retail competition. This report describes the activities required for the opening of the retail electricity market with reference to the activities that the participants, distributors and retailers need to complete to properly interact at market opening. The measures that other organizations such as EBT hubs should take were also identified for cases where the measures involve cooperation and interaction with distributors and retailers to ensure a smooth transition to competition within the industry. While schedules of individual organizations will vary, market participants should try to align with the overall framework at key milestones. The mandatory requirements associated with milestones were included in Appendix B. These included requirements for: market opening baseline; market readiness activities; participant systems and organizational preparations; loading of new rates into systems; cutover to new systems by market participants; data scrubbing; multiple contract resolution; pre-market processing; distributor-retailer service agreement; retail prudential posting; inter-participant testing; contingency arrangements; stability period; and, market opening. Appendix A includes the Market Opening Gantt Chart. 1 tab