Independent analysis of commercial and industrial electricity bills: demand charges, rate schedules, power factor penalties and the arithmetic of reducing peak demand.
One pillar for each subject area. Each links out to the supporting pieces underneath it.
An industrial statement is four different charges stacked together, each priced on a different determinant. Here is what every line means and which ones respond to timing rather than volume.
What a demand charge measures, why utilities levy it, how the fifteen-minute interval works, and why two plants with identical consumption can receive very different bills.
A ladder of measures from free to capital-intensive, with the diagnostic that tells you which rung your site is actually on and the arithmetic for deciding between them.
Being on the wrong tariff is among the most common avoidable overcharges in commercial billing. Modeling your own interval data against the alternatives settles it in a day.
Reactive power does no useful work and still has to be carried by the wires. Three different tariff mechanisms bill you for it, and they are not equivalent.
The engineering on these projects is usually right. What fails is the financial framing — the wrong avoided cost, a payback number where an appraisal was needed, and no plan to prove the saving.
The bill, the charge, the fix, the tariff, the power factor and the money.
Taking an industrial statement apart line by line, from billing determinants to riders.
Read the section 02What the charge measures, how the interval is defined, and where the money actually sits.
Read the section 03Changing the shape of a load curve rather than its area — and knowing which levers move it.
Read the section 04Choosing between general service, time-of-use and real-time pricing with your own interval data.
Read the section 05Reactive power, penalty clauses, capacitor sizing and the discounts hiding at higher voltage.
Read the section 06Avoided-cost modeling, tax credits, incentive programs and measurement rigorous enough for finance.
Read the sectionSupporting analysis across all six areas.
A repeatable review that takes about an hour with one bill and one tariff sheet, and finds the errors and mismatches that persist for years because nobody checks.
Every dollar on a commercial electricity statement is a measured quantity multiplied by a price. Learn the four determinants and the bill stops being a mystery.
An estimated bill is a placeholder that gets corrected later. On a demand tariff the correction is not always straightforward, and it is worth knowing how yours is calculated.
A monthly bill tells you a peak happened. Fifteen-minute interval data tells you when, how often and what caused it — and it is usually available for free.
On instrument-metered services the register reading is multiplied before it reaches the bill. When that multiplier is wrong, every determinant is wrong by the same factor.
Fuel adjustments, transmission recovery, efficiency program funding and public benefit charges sit on top of the base rate. What they attach to decides what your savings project is worth.
Kilowatts are a rate, kilowatt-hours are a quantity, and your utility bills for both separately. Getting the distinction wrong is how savings projections end up wrong.
One charge bills your own highest interval. The other bills whatever you were drawing when the grid peaked. They are different problems and they need different solutions.
Writes and edits The Demand Charge. Background in administration and finance: cost analysis, TCO and ROI modeling, and reading tariff documents and primary regulation directly.
