Last Monday, the Chicago Tribune ran an article by Diane Rado about District 211 and the Illinois Energy Consortium.

Late last week, the Illinois Energy Consortium responded to that article on their website.

(Somewhat off the subject, the Illinois Energy Consortium has an expensive-looking website, doesn’t it?)

The thrust of the Chicago Tribune article is that the organizations that sponsor the IEC have received millions of dollars from the IEC in fees. It is not clear what the fees are for–perhaps for referring school districts to the IEC.

I don’t know that people will really care that much that the three groups sponsoring the IEC received these millions of dollars in fees, if the school districts overall saved money on their electricity and natural gas.

The IEC claims in its statement that, indeed, the school districts that are its clients have realized very significant savings. The figure they use is $30,000,000:

Over the course of the past seven years the IEC has saved school districts in Illinois more than $30 million through the cooperative purchase of electric supply and more recently natural gas supply.

The IEC document provides email addresses for two contact people, for those who have additional questions. I did have an additional question, so I wrote to Mr. Steigerwald on Friday. The question I asked was: Given that you are saying that the IEC saved school districts $30,000,000, how did you perform this analysis? What was your basis of comparison?

Mr. David Grace responded on Friday afternoon, writing that:

During the past years the IEC was the only non utility able to offer schools competitively priced supply.

I wrote him back this morning asking him to confirm that he is stating that the IEC, during the period of time they calculated the savings schools have realized (“the past years”), had no competitors that could have offered competitive electricity supplies to Illinois school districts.

I’ll continue to follow this story as information becomes available.