How Often Should You RFP Your Energy Supply: Annual vs. Biannual

"How often should we put our energy supply out to bid?" is one of the most common procurement questions, and the honest answer is that it depends on your load, your risk tolerance, and how much administrative effort you can sustain. This guide lays out the trade-offs between frequent and less-frequent RFPs, explains how staggering renewals across multiple sites changes the picture, and helps you match a bidding cadence to your actual situation rather than to a rule of thumb.

Whether your accounts sit with ComEd in northern Illinois or Ameren in central and southern Illinois, the underlying logic is the same: an RFP is a decision point, and the question is how many decision points you want and can handle.

What an RFP frequency actually controls

Running a competitive supply RFP does not, by itself, change who delivers your power or how reliable it is — the delivery utility always handles delivery and outages regardless of your supplier. What an RFP controls is how often you re-price your supply and re-examine your options. Each RFP is a chance to test the market, benchmark against the price-to-compare, and decide whether to renew, switch, or stay on utility default.

The frequency question is really a question about how often you want to make that decision — and every choice trades one kind of risk for another.

The case for more frequent bidding

Bidding more often — say, tying an RFP to shorter contract terms so you are back in the market annually — has real advantages:

• More decision points. You are never locked into a single market moment for long, so a period of unfavorable pricing affects a smaller slice of your buying history.
• Sharper market awareness. Regular engagement keeps you and your team fluent in current conditions, supplier behavior, and contract terms.
• Flexibility as the business changes. If your load is growing, shrinking, or shifting, frequent bidding lets contract volume track reality more closely.

The costs are equally real. Each RFP consumes staff time to gather data, solicit and compare offers apples-to-apples, and review contract terms. Shorter terms that enable frequent bidding also carry their own risk profile, and constant re-shopping can become a treadmill that produces activity without a corresponding payoff.

The case for less-frequent bidding

Committing to longer terms and bidding less often — every two years or more — has a different set of merits:

• Price stability over a longer horizon. A longer fixed term locks a known rate across more of your budget cycle, which many businesses value for planning.
• Lower administrative load. Fewer RFPs mean less recurring work for whoever owns energy procurement.
• Fewer chances to mistime the market. If you cannot reliably predict prices — and no one can — reducing the number of commitment moments is a legitimate way to limit exposure to a single bad guess.

The trade-off is reduced flexibility. A long term signed just before a favorable market shift locks you out of that improvement, and a business whose load changes significantly may find a long fixed-volume contract poorly matched to reality. Longer terms also make the contract's terms — bandwidth, pass-throughs, and termination language — more consequential, because you live with them longer.

Matching cadence to your load and risk exposure

The right cadence flows from a few characteristics of your specific situation:

• Load size and predictability. A large, volatile, or seasonal load has more at stake in each decision and more to gain from thoughtful timing and fixed vs. index structuring. A small, steady load may be well served by simply renewing on a reasonable term without frequent re-shopping.
• Risk tolerance. If price certainty matters most for budgeting, lean toward longer terms and less-frequent bidding. If you want to stay responsive to the market and can absorb some variability, more frequent bidding gives you more levers.
• Administrative capacity. Be honest about who will actually run each RFP. A cadence your team cannot sustain leads to missed notice windows and lapses into holdover rates — the worst outcome of all.
• Market exposure. The more of your total spend that comes up for renewal at once, the more a single market moment matters. This is where staggering becomes powerful.

Staggering renewals across a multi-site portfolio

For businesses with multiple meters or sites, when contracts come up for renewal can matter as much as how often you bid. If every site shares a single end date, the entire portfolio is exposed to whatever the market looks like in that one window. Staggering — deliberately setting contract end dates across different months or seasons — spreads that exposure.

Staggering delivers two benefits at once. First, it diversifies market timing, so no single unfavorable moment captures your whole load. Second, it smooths the administrative workload into a steadier rhythm instead of a once-every-few-years scramble. The trade-off is that you are in the market more or less continuously, which favors businesses with the capacity to manage an ongoing process — often with help from an energy broker.

Deciding whether to align or stagger is a portfolio-level choice. For the broader mechanics of coordinating many meters, see multi-location energy procurement.

Building cadence into a repeatable process

Whatever frequency you choose, the decision only works if it is scheduled rather than remembered. The reliable way to do this is a procurement calendar that lists every meter's end date and notice window and places the RFP work — data gathering, benchmarking, offers, comparison, decision — on specific months. A calendar turns your chosen cadence into a routine and makes staggering visible and manageable.

If you want to run RFPs ahead of your current contract's expiration, understand the mechanics and trade-offs of a forward-start contract before doing so, because bidding early is a distinct decision with its own risks.

The bottom line

There is no universal answer to how often you should bid. Frequent RFPs buy optionality and market awareness at the cost of time and shorter-term risk; less-frequent RFPs buy stability and lower effort at the cost of flexibility. Match the cadence to your load's size and predictability, your appetite for volatility, and your capacity to run the process. For portfolios, stagger renewals so no single market moment captures everything. Then commit the cadence to a calendar so it happens on schedule, not by accident.

Sources

• Illinois Commerce Commission — Plug In Illinois: Electric Choice Basics
• Illinois Power Agency — Electricity Supply Rates

Choosing a bidding cadence organizes how you buy; it does not promise any particular rate or savings.