Founded in 2000 by a team of experienced energy professionals, Competitive Energy Services (CES) has spent more than 26 years helping organizations navigate an increasingly complex energy landscape. What began as a focus on competitive energy procurement has evolved into a comprehensive suite of energy, sustainability, and strategic advisory services designed to help clients make informed decisions and achieve their long-term goals.
Today, CES advises a diverse portfolio of clients across North America on the full spectrum of energy market issues. Our clients include colleges and universities, healthcare systems, municipalities, commercial businesses, manufacturers, and other organizations with complex energy needs and ambitious goals.
As a full-service, independent energy advisory firm, CES serves more than 800 organizations across the United States and Canada. We combine energy procurement, market intelligence, regulatory expertise, sustainability consulting, analytics, and project implementation support to help clients achieve their operational, financial, and environmental objectives.
CES processes more than 1,300 competitive bid solicitations and facilitates more than 600 supply agreements each year. But our work extends far beyond energy purchasing. We help clients develop long-term energy strategies, manage utility budgets, evaluate renewable energy opportunities, navigate utility tariffs and regulatory changes, pursue carbon reduction initiatives, and make informed decisions in an increasingly dynamic energy marketplace. Our value is not measured solely by transactions. It’s measured by the trusted relationships we have built and the results we help our clients achieve. Whether supporting a single facility or a multi-site organization, we provide customized solutions backed by deep market expertise, transparent advice, and an unwavering commitment to client success.
CES does not believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. Each of our clients has different needs, goals, and logistical requirements, and understanding these unique factors is at the foundation of our approach to energy management. Through partnership, we assess each aspect of the total picture, and it is from this base of understanding that we build each individual strategy.
CES also brings a level of independence that many of our competitors are not able to offer. As a privately held firm with no affiliate relationships, we are always 100% commodity, supplier, and technology neutral, and put the interest of our clients first and foremost in the process. Our story is our independence, our market expertise, and our focus on being long-term trusted partners to our clients.
Because we work across industries, markets, and regions, we bring a broad perspective to every client engagement. We see trends emerge, identify opportunities, and share insights gained from working with organizations facing many of the same challenges. This depth and diversity of experience allow us to deliver informed, practical guidance tailored to each client’s unique circumstances.
We are essential to the success of our clients, and have built our reputation on our unmatched experience, communication, and innovative thinking.
CES was born out of one of the most significant changes in Maine’s energy history: electric market restructuring.
When Maine opened its electricity market to competition in 1998, there was expectation that national energy suppliers would enter the state and provide new choices for businesses and institutions. Yet by late 1999, as retail choice was preparing to launch, Maine had attracted little attention from competitive suppliers. Despite being home to some of New England’s largest energy users, the state’s relatively small size made it easy to overlook in favor of larger emerging markets such as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California.
Recognizing both the challenge and the opportunity, CES founders Richard Silkman and Mark Isaacson established the Maine Electricity Consumer Cooperative (MECC). By bringing together approximately 100 businesses and institutions into a single purchasing group, MECC created the scale necessary to attract national suppliers and introduce meaningful competition into Maine’s electricity market.
Over the past 26+ years, CES has grown alongside a rapidly changing energy industry that has undergone remarkable transformation. In that time, CES evolved by expanding its services, expertise, and geographic reach to support more than 800 clients across 30 states and provinces. Today, CES manages the strategic procurement of approximately $2 billion in annual energy expenditures while providing guidance on a broad range of energy, sustainability, and infrastructure initiatives.
As client needs have evolved, so too have our services. From renewable energy development and on-site generation to energy efficiency, carbon management, electrification, and long-range energy planning, CES has expanded its capabilities to help organizations address increasingly complex challenges and opportunities.
Along the way, we have supported the development and evaluation of hundreds of megawatts of renewable and distributed energy projects, helped clients pursue meaningful sustainability goals, and provided strategic guidance on initiatives that improve reliability, resilience, and long-term value.
While much has changed over the years, our mission remains the same: helping clients make informed decisions in a dynamic energy environment through independent advice, market expertise, and trusted partnership.
That philosophy continues to shape how we serve clients more than 26 years later.
CES’s expertise has never come solely from studying energy markets. It comes from actively helping shape them.
Over the years, CES principals have played leading roles in a number of pioneering energy initiatives throughout Maine and New England. These efforts include developing one of Maine’s earliest green power offerings, helping advance utility-scale wind development, supporting the expansion of natural gas infrastructure in central Maine, advocating for innovative alternatives to traditional transmission investments, and contributing to discussions around long-term energy and decarbonization policy.
This hands-on experience gives CES a perspective that extends beyond market analysis alone. We understand how energy projects are developed, financed, regulated, and implemented in the real world. That practical knowledge continues to inform the advice we provide clients as they navigate evolving markets, emerging technologies, reliability challenges, and sustainability goals.
Over the past 26+ years, CES has grown alongside a rapidly changing energy industry that has undergone remarkable transformation. In that time, CES evolved by expanding its services, expertise, and geographic reach to support more than 800 clients across 30 states and provinces. Today, CES manages the strategic procurement of approximately $2 billion in annual energy expenditures while providing guidance on a broad range of energy, sustainability, and infrastructure initiatives.
As client needs have evolved, so too have our services. From renewable energy development and on-site generation to energy efficiency, carbon management, electrification, and long-range energy planning, CES has expanded its capabilities to help organizations address increasingly complex challenges and opportunities.
Along the way, we have supported the development and evaluation of hundreds of megawatts of renewable and distributed energy projects, helped clients pursue meaningful sustainability goals, and provided strategic guidance on initiatives that improve reliability, resilience, and long-term value.
While much has changed over the years, our mission remains the same: helping clients make informed decisions in a dynamic energy environment through independent advice, market expertise, and trusted partnership.
That philosophy continues to shape how we serve clients more than 26 years later.
CES’s expertise has never come solely from studying energy markets. It comes from actively helping shape them.
Over the years, CES principals have played leading roles in a number of pioneering energy initiatives throughout Maine and New England. These efforts include developing one of Maine’s earliest green power offerings, helping advance utility-scale wind development, supporting the expansion of natural gas infrastructure in central Maine, advocating for innovative alternatives to traditional transmission investments, and contributing to discussions around long-term energy and decarbonization policy.
This hands-on experience gives CES a perspective that extends beyond market analysis alone. We understand how energy projects are developed, financed, regulated, and implemented in the real world. That practical knowledge continues to inform the advice we provide clients as they navigate evolving markets, emerging technologies, reliability challenges, and sustainability goals.
At CES, our greatest strength has always been our people.
Our team of energy professionals brings together expertise in procurement, analytics, pricing, sustainability, renewables, regulatory affairs, utility rates, data services, communications, and operations. Working collaboratively across disciplines, we help clients navigate complex challenges and identify opportunities that support their long-term goals.
CES is intentionally structured as an integrated team. Energy services advisors, analysts, pricing specialists, sustainability experts, data professionals, and strategic consultants work together to deliver solutions that are practical, data-driven, and tailored to each client’s needs. This collaborative approach allows us to draw on a wide range of expertise while providing clients with a single trusted partner.
CES helps clients achieve their energy and sustainability goals through three enduring principles: independence, market expertise, and trust. These pillars shape every recommendation we make and every long-term partnership we build.
Simply put, CES enables clients to achieve their energy and sustainability goals. This has been our purpose, our reason for being in business, for the past 26+ years. We are the independent energy experts, and our identity is inextricably tied to three pillars: our independence, our market expertise, and our unwavering focus on being a long-term trusted partner to our clients.
CES has always worked exclusively on behalf of energy end-users. This has puzzled and confounded many commodity suppliers, equipment vendors and competitors over the decades. We lost count long ago of the number of “opportunities” to align ourselves more closely with one supplier or another that hoped to curry favor with CES to increase sales to our clients. Of course, the trust of our clients depends entirely on our independence of all such influences. We have passed up every such “opportunity” in the past and will continue to do so in the future. If there is ever even the possibility of a conflict of interest – we will always disclose it fully and let our clients decide how best to proceed. Our independence is sacrosanct and critical to the long-term client relationships we have worked so hard on over the years.
Just as central to our identity is our collective energy market intelligence. Energy markets are dynamic, and it is extremely difficult to maintain the knowledge required to call ourselves experts. The difficulty grows as we enter new markets, offer new services, and increase the number of clients we work with. Luckily, this is an area that really distinguishes CES from our competition. The never-ending task of staying current on changing market conditions and policy is also what makes our day-to-day work so fascinating. A culture of academic rigor and exceptional quality in all work product we produce has always been core to our identity. The time and dedication required to maintain our market expertise could be seen as a brake on our ability to acquire new clients. We believe that any such relationship is transitory and that our long-term growth – as well as our individual job satisfaction – is dependent on maintaining our expertise for the benefit and retention of our many existing clients.
The third and final pillar is the uncommon trust that our clients have in CES. As every new CES team member hears during the leadership portion of their onboarding training – we will always act in the best interest of our clients. CES sells advice, opinion, information, and analysis – the value of each of these items is entirely dependent on the trust clients have in us. Initially, for new clients, this trust often starts with a referral from an existing client. Over time we must continually earn this trust with each of our actions for every client. Trust that is built over years can be lost in an instant. Luckily this is an exceedingly rare occurrence and many of the clients that signed on to work with CES in the early 2000s are still with us today. Maintaining this trust is also personal. No one, least of all either of us, has any interest in working at a company that is not trustworthy.
The purpose of CES has not changed over time and the pillars of Independence, Expertise and Trust – around which we have always operated – have not changed as we have grown. The CES story, however, has gotten considerably longer as we have evolved our capabilities in response to changing market dynamics, greater internal capabilities, and new client needs. To continue fulfilling our purpose we must continually add new chapters by thinking creatively about future market dynamics and how CES can adapt to provide the most value to our clients.
Every one of our team members is critical to how clients experience CES. It takes collective action from all of us to keep CES at the forefront of our field.
