“We’ve all gotten the pitch — a letter, call, even a sales rep at the door — from an energy company promising big savings on electric bills by switching from our local utility.
Critics have long contended that too many of those offers are part of a pernicious bait-and-switch scheme and end up costing consumers much, much more than if they had stayed with their utility. The Massachusetts attorney general’s office has been tallying that cost for years, and its latest dollar figure is a whopping $578 million in additional payments by consumers over an eight-year period from July 2015 through June 2023.”