ComEd Illinois "Hourly Pricing" Electricity Mailer

IsambardPrince — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 20:42:51 GMT

ComEd, the electric company in Illinois, appears to be up to some new kind of deception, in my opinion.

With the price of everything soaring, they are sending out mailers purporting to want to "save you money" to, afaict, every ratepayer in the State, claiming what they might have saved last year on an "hourly electricity program".

Basically, the way it works is this. Instead of paying a fixed rate for electricity, which is set by them having to go ask the Illinois Commerce Commission for permission, and the ICC gets to decide what's reasonable, your energy cost varies per hour.

Each hour, you pay the PJM Interconnect's wholesale rate for electricity, with no markup, but there's some catches.

The first is, it adds this thing called a "Capacity Charge" to your electric bill, and this is a multiplier, so they multiply every kilowatt hour you use by this factor, and they set the factor according to your five worst days every billing year (usually when it's hotter than Hell outside and your air conditioner is cranked up, but possibly also the coldest days of the year when your heat is running hard), so the Capacity Charge is based on a Worst Case Scenerio. Some people out there have figured out how to "hack it", but this usually involves sweating like a farm animal or freezing for several days out of the year to get their electricity rate down for the rest of the year.

Gaming the system to lower this charge requires extreme and impractical lifestyle adjustments, like enduring unsafe temperatures.

Then there's the fact that PJM prices can go up or down based on a lot of things, including natural disasters. Theoretically, your wholesale price of power in Illinois could be affected by hurricanes in Florida, or a tornado outbreak downstate, or even just a tree branch falling on a power line in Ohio blacking out five states and parts of Canada, like what happened in 2004.

The wholesale cost of power is likely to go up, not down, and on the Hourly Plan, you have no insulation from that from the ICC. You're entirely at the mercy of whatever they feel like doing to you, hour by hour.

Many people on Reddit who have used "Hourly Pricing" have said it's not worth it, because they started focusing excessively on their electric bills and when they run appliances, and then saved fifty dollars....over an entire year.

In the Worst Case, there is a per kilowatt hour cap on the supply side portion of your bill, but it's like $3.70 per kilowatt hour compared to under 7 cents on the fixed rate plan. ComEd says that they've "only" had prices go above $1 per kilowatt hour for 15 total hours between 2019 and 2023, however, this is not a guarantee.

If the price cap was hit and didn't go down for a month, your electric bill for a small apartment could go from $100, to nearly $3,000.'

This happened under Texas's wholesale power market. People who went most of the month freezing in a blackout while the power company routed electricity to lighting up empty office skyscrapers were treated to $33,000 electric bills, and some had to file bankruptcy to get away from "Griddy".

Logic dictates that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and it's highly unlikely that ComEd would be paying first class postage to millions of people so that they could get them on a program that is really going to bring in $200-300 LESS per year.

Have you ever had a creditor, landlord, or utility company offer you something that would mean less money for them?

Probably not.

The claim that customers "could have saved money" in a particular year is inherently speculative, relying on conditions that may not persist in future years.

Re: ComEd Illinois "Hourly Pricing" Electricity Mailer

TrapLine — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 21:18:52 GMT

In my state electric utility providers are able to offer such an award winning plan.

The one interesting item is the utility had a program that the residential user could use to determine what electric program was the best for them based on their actual usage pattern. The program used your actual billing usages averaged over three years (I think). In my case the program told me the fixed rate program worked best.

To get the best rates they actually had it figured that the lower usage from 11 pm to 5 am got the best rates. So, run you cooling/heating, dryer and other electric appliances during the night. OK!

Re: ComEd Illinois "Hourly Pricing" Electricity Mailer

IsambardPrince — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 03:22:24 GMT

@TrapLine wrote:
In my state electric utility providers are able to offer such an award winning plan.

The one interesting item is the utility had a program that the residential user could use to determine what electric program was the best for them based on their actual usage pattern. The program used your actual billing usages averaged over three years (I think). In my case the program told me the fixed rate program worked best.

To get the best rates they actually had it figured that the lower usage from 11 pm to 5 am got the best rates. So, run you cooling/heating, dryer and other electric appliances during the night. OK!

Yeah, I noticed that ComEd doesn't go and tell you the life of your account. On this one it would have been 2020-2024 so they had a solid four years of data and only gave me 2023. If I had 4 years I could have added them and divided by 4. The more trailing data you get, the easier it is to make a conclusion.

You don't have the data to do it yourself because you don't know what the capacity charge factor is.

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ComEd Illinois "Hourly Pricing" Electricity Mailer

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Re: ComEd Illinois "Hourly Pricing" Electricity Mailer