302
Opinion of the Court
tive End-Users Under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Order No. 636, 62 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 718, 749 (1994) ("Gas service disruptions lasting just a few days can cause severe health risks to captive end-users"). They are also buyers without the high volume requirements needed to make investment in the transaction costs of individual purchases on the open market economically feasible. Pierce, Intrastate Natural Gas Regulation: An Alternative Perspective, 9 Yale J. Reg. 407, 409-410 (1992) ("Purchasing gas service [from marketers] requires considerable time and expertise. Its benefits are likely to exceed its costs only for consumers who purchase very large quantities of gas"). The demands of this market historically arose free of any influence of differential taxation (since there was none during the pre-1978 period when only LDC's generally served end users), and because the market's economic characteristics appear to be independent of any effect attributable to the State's sales taxation as imposed today, there is good reason to assume that any pricing changes that could result from eliminating the sales tax differential challenged here would be inadequate to create competition between LDC's and marketers for the business of the utilities' core home market.
On the other hand, one circumstance of this case is unlike what Arctic Maid assumed, for there is a possibility of competition between LDC's and marketers for the noncaptive market. Although the record before this Court reveals virtually nothing about the details of that competitive market, in the period under examination it presumably included bulk buyers like GMC, which have no need for bundled protection, see, e. g., State Issue: Atlanta Gas Light Takes Step to Abandon Gas Sales by Unbundling Services for Non-Core Customers, Foster Natural Gas Report, June 20, 1996, p. 22 (indicating that prior to "unbundling" marketers accounted for 80% of sales to large commercial and industrial users in Georgia), and consumers of middling volumes of natural gas who found
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