Originally published by Steve Daniels, Crain's Chicago Business
The city of Chicago has a new electricity supplier, and it's a familiar name: Exelon Corp.
The parent of Commonwealth Edison Co. has a deal, announced today, to buy Integrys Energy Services, the retail power and natural gas supply arm of Chicago-based Integrys Energy Group Inc., which provides electricity to more than 700,000 households in Chicago. Exelon is paying $60 million plus adjusted working capital of about $183 million.
The Chicago contract, the largest such municipal electricity pact in the U.S., was won by Integrys in December 2012. The runner-up? Exelon. At the time, the loss of the Chicago deal was a significant disappointment to Exelon, by far the largest energy company in Illinois and one of the biggest publicly traded companies in the Chicago area.
Integrys Energy Group, though, has decided to sell its utility operations, which include Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas, the natural gas distributors for the city and many northern suburbs, to Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Energy Corp. And its retail supply arm, which Integrys says it already had planned to unload before striking the $5.7 billion deal with Wisconsin Energy, isn't part of that transaction.
The purchase of Integrys Energy Services will give Exelon a firm that had $2.17 billion in sales and provided 21 million megawatt-hours of electricity and 184 billion cubic feet of natural gas last year. The retail unit employs 300. Integrys' commercial and residential customers now will be served by Constellation, Exelon's retail unit.