ComEd Commercial Electricity: Rates, Delivery Charges, and Demand

ComEd is the regulated wires company for northern Illinois. It delivers your power no matter who sells you the energy, and for many commercial accounts the delivery side of the ComEd bill is the part that actually determines the total.

A ComEd commercial bill is really two bills stapled together. One half is supply, the energy itself in cents per kilowatt hour, which Illinois opened to competition years ago. The other half is delivery, what it costs to move that energy over ComEd's wires, which stays a regulated monopoly. You can shop the supply half. You cannot shop the delivery half, and you cannot get off ComEd.

That split matters because the largest single line on many commercial accounts lives on the delivery side. On one reconciled ComEd Small Load account, the delivery demand charge came to $596.88 for the month, set by a single thirty minute interval, on a bill where the shoppable supply rate was never the problem. The bill shows only the result, not the interval that produced it.

The essays below reconstruct how a ComEd commercial bill is built, why the delivery half behaves the way it does, and what the interval data reveals that the bill hides. We do not sell energy or take a commission on anything. The goal is a bill you can actually read.