How CleanChoice Energy Allegedly Charged Customers Up to 3x the Market Rate

The Human Cost: What Getting Fleeced on Your Electric Bill Actually Feels Like

Carter Davies signed up for CleanChoice in June 2017. He was trying to do something good. He wanted clean energy. He got a mailer in his mailbox — professionally printed, environmentally righteous, promising him 100% renewable electricity. He filled out his ComEd account number, signed the form, mailed it back. He believed he was making a responsible choice.

What he was actually signing was a contract that gave CleanChoice the latitude to charge him whatever rate it wanted… as long as the company dressed that rate in language vague enough that no ordinary person would notice that is! And charge him they did. For over eight years. Month after month, Davies paid a rate that the lawsuit alleges was routinely double or triple what ComEd was actually paying to buy the same electricity on the open market.

The lawsuit is explicit about who these practices hit hardest. Energy bills are not a luxury. They are the rent you pay to exist in a climate-controlled structure. They keep your insulin refrigerated. They power the CPAP machine. They keep the lights on so children can do homework. When a bill is inflated by 67% or 150% above what it should be, that money has to come from somewhere. It comes from the grocery budget. It comes from the medicine budget. It comes from the emergency savings that were never large to begin with.

The complaint does not mince words: CleanChoice’s scheme “often affects society’s most vulnerable citizens.” Once a customer was enrolled and being overcharged, their only real option was to pay what was billed or risk having their electricity shut off. The lawsuit describes this explicitly as a trap — one that could be “life-threatening in the depths of the summer and winter.”

Davies did not cancel until December 2025. He had been enrolled for over eight years. The lawsuit notes that customers do not realize they are victims — CleanChoice’s bills showed only the per-kWh rate charged, with no disclosure of what the actual market cost of that electricity was, no comparison to the utility rate, and no honest accounting of how the number on the bill was generated. The company allegedly knew this. It knew that customer inertia, confusion, and trust in the billing process would keep people paying. The complaint calls this exploitation of the “status quo bias” — a documented psychological tendency for people to stick with the default, even when the default is harming them.

Tens of thousands of Illinois customers are alleged to be in the same position as Davies. Most of them, the lawsuit suggests, still do not know.

Legal Receipts: What the Documents Actually Say

The following are verbatim quotes from the filed complaint and cited regulatory documents.

“[Y]ou will be charged a variable supply rate that is subject to change based on different factors which may include the cost for us to purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs), applicable state and local taxes, generation and transmission charges, and other marketing conditions.”

• This is the pricing clause in CleanChoice’s Terms and Conditions, as included in the mailer sent to plaintiff Davies. The word “based on” is central to the entire lawsuit. The complaint argues this language limits CleanChoice’s rate-setting to those specific cost factors and nothing else. CleanChoice allegedly ignored this limit entirely.
• The use of “marketing conditions” instead of “market conditions” is characterized in the complaint as a scrivener’s error. CleanChoice’s own current website, its Massachusetts contracts, and a subsequent document it sent to Davies all use “market conditions.” This matters because it means CleanChoice cannot claim the ambiguous word gave it unlimited pricing discretion.

“CleanChoice’s contract summary form, and contract, conflicted with CleanChoice’s actual business practice of raising prices regardless of market conditions and its energy costs” and accordingly “CleanChoice’s contract summary forms and contract were inaccurate and deceptive.”

• This finding comes from the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities’ Notice of Probable Violation, issued September 15, 2025, in a separate regulatory action. It is not a plaintiff’s allegation; it is a regulator’s documented finding about CleanChoice’s practices.
• The Massachusetts DPU used the phrase “egregious misconduct and a pattern of misconduct” to describe CleanChoice’s behavior. This language directly supports the Illinois lawsuit’s characterization of CleanChoice as a repeat offender with a documented, multi-state pattern of deception.

“CleanChoice asks customers to pay a premium for grid power matched with Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), but fails to provide critical information, such as what type of RECs are being offered, where the RECs were generated, and the ‘price to compare’ (the default utility’s current supply price). Without this information, customers cannot evaluate the costs and benefits of these offers.”

• This is the verified formal complaint filed against CleanChoice before the Illinois Commerce Commission in 2020, ultimately resulting in a $600,000 settlement in 2023. It confirms that CleanChoice’s information suppression practices were independently documented by consumer advocacy organizations, not just aggrieved customers.
• The failure to disclose the “price to compare” is particularly significant. Illinois regulations require ARES to provide customers with the information they need to compare offers. CleanChoice allegedly withheld the one number — the utility’s current supply price — that would have immediately revealed the overcharge.

“ARES marketing practices like that deployed by CleanChoice ‘deprive consumers of sufficient information to evaluate the ARES offers and consumers end up paying charges that grossly exceed market prices and the utility default price.'”

• This is a finding from the Illinois Attorney General, cited in the complaint from a 2018 Illinois Commerce Commission order. It is an on-record statement from the state’s chief consumer protection officer that CleanChoice’s marketing model systematically prevents customers from making informed decisions.

Public Deception: What CleanChoice Told You vs. What Was Actually Happening

The complaint documents a systematic gap between what CleanChoice communicated to customers and what its actual pricing practices were.

• CleanChoice claimed: Variable rates are “based on” specific cost factors including RECs, taxes, generation and transmission charges, and market conditions. Reality: According to the lawsuit, CleanChoice’s rate was set to maximize profits and did not fluctuate in accordance with any of those stated factors. For twelve consecutive months, Davies’s rate was a flat 19.0 cents per kWh regardless of whether market supply costs were at 8.5 cents or 16.3 cents per kWh.
• CleanChoice claimed: Its electricity procurement “does not contribute to carbon dioxide or air pollution,” marketing the product as genuinely “100% renewable energy.” Reality: CleanChoice supplied standard grid electricity and paired it with purchased Renewable Energy Certificates — paper credits representing clean energy generated by someone else elsewhere. The Illinois Attorney General has stated on record that this practice means ARES cannot truthfully claim to be providing electricity generated from renewable resources.
• CleanChoice told customers: “The biggest factor determining the size of your bill is the amount of electricity you use” and “usage is almost always the biggest factor influencing electricity bills.” Reality: The complaint alleges that for CleanChoice customers, the company’s exorbitant rate was, in practice, the biggest factor influencing their bill — and CleanChoice never disclosed this.
• CleanChoice implied: That switching to an ARES like CleanChoice in a deregulated market offered customers the possibility of savings. Reality: CleanChoice’s rates were consistently and substantially higher than the local utility’s supply costs — sometimes more than triple — and the company allegedly knew this while failing to disclose it to prospective customers.
• CleanChoice implied: That the cost of RECs justified its premium pricing. Reality: In 2024, RECs in the PJM Interconnection were priced at less than 4 cents per kWh. Even adding 4 cents per kWh to ComEd’s supply costs — which itself overestimates what CleanChoice needed to spend on RECs, because ComEd’s grid already includes some renewables — CleanChoice still overcharged Davies by between 30% and 96% every month.

Profit-Maximization at All Costs

The lawsuit documents that CleanChoice’s rate-setting had one primary driver: extraction of the maximum amount customers could be made to pay without triggering enough complaints to force a change.

• CleanChoice charged Davies a flat 19.0 cents per kWh for every single billing period from December 2024 through November 2025 — twelve consecutive months. Market supply costs during that same period ranged from 8.5 to 16.3 cents per kWh. The rate never moved. The market did.
• Over 2017–2024, CleanChoice’s weighted average rate among all Illinois ARES was 13.409 cents per kWh, against a market average of 10.247 cents per kWh — placing CleanChoice 31% above the statewide ARES average. Among the 33 major ARES with over 500,000 MWh sold, CleanChoice had the second highest rate in the state, at 38% above the average for that group (9.714 cents/kWh average vs. CleanChoice’s 13.409 cents/kWh).
• The complaint calculates that this overcharge above the ARES average allowed CleanChoice to extract an additional $31.5 million from Illinois customers over 2017–2024. Total Illinois revenue in that period: $133,389,700.
• CleanChoice’s own fixed-rate products — which also include RECs — are substantially lower than its variable rates. The complaint notes that CleanChoice uses the lower fixed rates to attract new customers, then moves them to the inflated variable rate. This proves that CleanChoice’s costs and margins do not require the variable rate it charges; the variable rate is a separate, deliberate choice to extract more money from existing customers.
• The complaint directly accuses CleanChoice of identifying “the ceiling price it could charge without customers noticing and held it steady” — charging a flat rate despite calling it variable and despite market costs moving significantly below that ceiling.
• CleanChoice’s CEO, in a January 2018 podcast interview, described the company’s energy procurement as “the least exciting and interesting part of our business. It doesn’t move very fast and that’s good. We’re not speculators.” The complaint uses this to argue that CleanChoice had stable, predictable wholesale costs that should have been passed to consumers — not used as a cover for inflated variable rates.

Regulatory Gray Zones: How Deregulation Became a License to Gouge

Illinois’s deregulated electricity market was designed to benefit consumers through competition, but the structure of the market created specific gaps that CleanChoice allegedly exploited without technically violating the law until now.

• Under Illinois law (220 ILCS § 5), ARES like CleanChoice are subject to minimal regulation from the Illinois Commerce Commission. ARES do not have to file their rates or their rate-setting methodology with the ICC. There is no pre-approval process for the rates they charge. This means CleanChoice could set any rate it chose, and no regulator would see it until a customer filed a formal complaint.
• The ICC complaint scorecard system — which tracks complaint rates — is a reactive mechanism, not a preventative one. CleanChoice received a “Higher Than Average Rate of Complaints” rating in five of the six available scorecards covering July 2024 through May 2025. The system documented the problem; it did not stop it from continuing.
• The contract language itself — “based on different factors which may include” — contains deliberate ambiguity. The phrase “may include” could be read as non-exhaustive, giving CleanChoice room to argue that the listed factors were illustrative, not limiting. The lawsuit challenges this reading directly, but the ambiguity existed by design.
• Because ARES’s monthly bills only disclosed the per-kWh rate charged, and not CleanChoice’s actual wholesale supply costs, customers had no practical mechanism to detect the overcharge. The information needed to identify the problem — CleanChoice’s internal procurement costs — was not public and not on the bill. Illinois law required ARES to provide an “explanation of how the variable charges are determined” (Ill. Admin. Code 83 § 412.110(c)(1)), but CleanChoice allegedly substituted jargon for an actual explanation.
• The REC-pairing model occupies a documented regulatory gray zone. RECs are certificates representing renewable energy generated somewhere else on the grid. Selling standard grid power plus RECs as “100% renewable energy” was challenged by the Illinois Attorney General as early as 2016, but without clear statutory prohibition, the practice continued. This allowed CleanChoice to market a premium “green” product that was effectively indistinguishable from standard grid power.

Manufactured Consent: Selling the Dream of Clean Energy

CleanChoice’s business model was built on marketing that leveraged customers’ environmental values as the mechanism of enrollment, then used information opacity to retain them at inflated rates.

• The enrollment mailer sent to plaintiff Davies prominently featured a “CLEAN ENERGY SIGN & SWITCH FORM” with a pre-checked checkbox authorizing CleanChoice to enroll the customer. Pre-checked consent boxes are a documented dark pattern: they exploit the status quo bias by requiring active effort to opt out, meaning customers who simply review and return the form are enrolled by default.
• CleanChoice framed its electricity as contributing nothing to “carbon dioxide or air pollution” — a claim the complaint characterizes as a misrepresentation given that the company’s product is standard grid electricity paired with purchased RECs, not electricity generated from renewable sources.
• A 2022 investigative report cited in the complaint described CleanChoice as operating “a fundamentally misleading for-profit business model that capitalizes on a lack of popular understanding about how electrical grids operate” and documented “a disturbing pattern of behavior.”
• In 2017, the Town of Acton, Massachusetts alerted the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities that CleanChoice was running “a misleading marketing campaign” by sending advertisements to residents and “creating the impression that it is a government communication.” This tactic — appearing official — is designed to suppress skepticism in recipients, particularly in older or less media-savvy populations.
• The Illinois Attorney General’s documented finding that ARES marketing practices “deprive consumers of sufficient information to evaluate the ARES offers” identifies the withholding of the “price to compare” — the utility’s current supply price — as the mechanism of manipulation. Without knowing what ComEd charged, customers could not evaluate whether CleanChoice’s rates were reasonable. CleanChoice allegedly never disclosed this comparison.