Is ComEd's Peak Time Rebate Worth Changing Your Afternoon For?

ComEd's Peak Time Rebate is a residential program with an unusually clean promise: on a handful of afternoons a year, ComEd tells you a curtailment period is starting, and you are paid for the electricity you do not use during it.

The rate is generous on its face. Under Rider PTR, the filed tariff sets the rebate at $1.00 per kilowatt hour avoided, which is several times what a kilowatt hour costs you to buy. The question is what "avoided" means, and the answer is where the decision actually lives.

What you are paid against is a baseline, not zero

You are not paid for using little electricity. You are paid for using less than a baseline.

The tariff builds that baseline as a customer baseline load profile, a modelled estimate of what your consumption would have been during those hours had nothing happened. Your credit is $1.00 multiplied by the difference between the baseline and what you actually used. If your actual usage is not below the baseline, the tariff is explicit that no credit is provided for that period. There is no penalty either, but there is nothing.

The baseline is built from your own recent behaviour. That has a consequence worth thinking about before enrolling, because it runs against the intuition the program creates.

A household that already keeps the air conditioning modest on hot afternoons has a low baseline, so it has little room to drop below it and earns little. A household that runs everything hard on hot afternoons has a high baseline and can earn substantially by turning things off for four hours. The program pays for the change, and the more wasteful your normal afternoon, the more change is available to sell.

That is not a scandal. It is how every demand response baseline works, and understanding it is the difference between an accurate expectation and a disappointed one.

The terms most people do not read

Four provisions in the filed rider that change how the program feels in practice.

You get at least one hour of notice, and delivery is not guaranteed. The tariff requires ComEd to notify each participant at least one hour before a curtailment period starts, by email, automated call, text or another available channel. It also states plainly that ComEd does not guarantee you receive the notification. If you are unreachable on a summer afternoon, the period happens without you.

ComEd may control your smart thermostat during the period. If you have one installed, the rider allows ComEd to remotely change its temperature settings during a curtailment period. This is the part that surprises people, and it is the mechanism by which the program produces reductions from participants who are not paying attention.

The credit arrives late. It appears on one of your next two monthly bills after the curtailment period, not on the bill for the month it happened. Do not go looking for it immediately.

You can leave at any time. Termination takes effect on your next scheduled meter reading or billing cycle occurring at least five calendar days after you tell ComEd, and credits already earned are still owed to you. The exit is genuinely cheap, which matters for the decision below.

There is one more that catches a specific kind of participant: ComEd may terminate your enrolment if it determines the same reductions are also being sold through another entity's curtailment program. You can be paid for a reduction once.

Where the money actually comes from, and why the events are few

The rider says the rebate is funded by the compensation ComEd receives from PJM for participating in PJM's demand response programs, and that if the funding is insufficient or unused, ComEd may increase or limit the number and duration of curtailment periods in later years.

That is the structural reason nobody gets rich on this. The program is a pass-through of a wholesale capacity and demand response revenue stream, and it is sized by that stream rather than by what participation is worth to you. Expect a small number of events per summer, priced well, on hours you do not choose.

The decision, stated honestly

The rebate rate is real and the exit is easy, so the enrolment decision is close to free. The realistic question is not whether to enrol but whether to plan around it.

Enrol if you are usually reachable on summer weekday afternoons, you have flexible load worth turning down, and you would not have turned it down anyway. That last clause is the one that decides the size of the cheque.

Do not build a plan around it if you need a predictable number. The events are few, they are not scheduled in advance, the funding is external, and the baseline is modelled rather than agreed with you.

Check the alternative before enrolling. ComEd's Rider AC air conditioner cycling program pays a fixed credit per summer bill instead of a variable one, and the tariff makes the two mutually exclusive: Rider AC is not available to a customer taking service under Rider PTR. A fixed small credit for giving up control, or a variable larger credit for paying attention, is the actual choice, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by whichever one you found first.