Disclaimer

Last updated 2026-08-08

General information, not advice

Everything on The Demand Charge is published as general information about how commercial and industrial electricity is priced. It is not professional advice of any kind and no relationship of adviser and client arises from reading it.

Specifically, nothing here is:

• Engineering advice. Sizing a capacitor bank, changing a control sequence or connecting storage behind your meter has consequences for equipment and for safety. Those decisions belong to a licensed engineer who has seen the installation.
• Legal advice. Articles describe published rules; they do not tell you what your position is under them.
• Tax advice. Pieces touching the investment tax credit, depreciation or incentive taxability describe the rules as published by the relevant authority. Your eligibility, your basis, your recapture exposure and your timing are questions for a qualified tax adviser.
• Investment advice. A payback calculation on this site is an illustration of a method, not a recommendation to spend money.

Why worked examples are illustrations

The examples on this site work with explicit inputs so that you can substitute your own. They are not benchmarks and they are not predictions.

The reason is structural rather than cautious. Electricity tariffs in the United States are set utility by utility and approved commission by commission. Two facilities on opposite sides of a service territory boundary, with identical load, can face:

• different demand charge rates and different units;
• a ratchet in one tariff and none in the other;
• demand measured over 15 minutes in one and 30 in the other;
• an on-peak window defined differently, or a season defined differently;
• a power factor clause priced as a penalty in one and as kVA billing in the other;
• entirely different riders stacked on top.

Any figure that did not come from your own tariff sheet and your own interval data is a placeholder for the shape of the calculation, not an answer.

Accuracy and currency

Articles are researched from primary sources and the sources are linked so you can read past the summary. Even so:

• Tariffs change. A rate approved this year can be superseded next year, and this site does not track every filing in every jurisdiction.
• Programs change. Incentive schemes and demand response products open, close and change their terms.
• Tax rules change, and their application depends on facts this site does not have.
• Errors happen. When one is found it is corrected and the correction is dated.

No warranty is given that any page is complete, current or fit for a particular purpose. If accuracy matters to a decision you are about to make, verify it against the primary document, which is linked precisely so that you can.

Third-party sites and products

Links point to agencies, national laboratories, standards bodies, regulators and utility documents. Those sites are not under this publisher's control, and a link is not an endorsement of anything other than the specific document linked.

Where software or equipment categories are discussed, the discussion is descriptive. No vendor has approval over what is written about it. See the advertising disclosure for how commercial relationships are handled.

Safety

Nothing on this site should be used as a work instruction on live electrical equipment. Work on energized systems is governed by standards and by law, and by the qualifications of the person doing it.

Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the publisher accepts no liability for loss arising from use of, or reliance on, anything published here. The full position, and the law that governs it, is in the terms of use.

Telling us it is wrong

Corrections are welcome and they get made. The fastest route is contact@thedemandcharge.com with the page, the sentence and the primary source that contradicts it. How corrections are handled and logged is set out in the editorial policy.