The Energy Efficiency Programs Line on a ComEd Bill, and Who Can Opt Out

Energy Efficiency Programs is one of the larger rider lines on a ComEd bill. On the two residential bills reconciled below it is $3.52 and $5.60, which puts it well ahead of every other rider charge on the bill.

It is also the only line in this set with a way out, and the threshold is published.

What it cost on two real bills

Bill	Usage	Rate	Arithmetic	Printed
July 2026 billing period	953 kWh	0.369 cents per kWh	953 x $0.00369 = $3.51657	$3.52
June 2026 billing period	1,518 kWh	0.369 cents per kWh	1,518 x $0.00369 = $5.60142	$5.60

Both are residential accounts. The rate is the filed Residential value on ComEd's 10th Revised Informational Sheet No. 38, applicable for the January 2026 monthly billing period through December 2026.

The mapping from rider to bill line is stated on the sheet itself, not inferred. Note 2 reads that the EE Adjustment is designated on retail customer bills as the Energy Efficiency Programs.

Small business pays 2.4 times the residential rate

The same sheet publishes three rates, not one. The filed values:

Customer group	2025	2026	Change
Residential	0.376	0.369	down 1.9%
Small N&L	0.835	0.876	up 4.9%
Large N	0.444	0.482	up 8.6%

All in cents per kilowatt hour.

Two things fall out of that table that no single bill can show you.

The rate is not uniform. A small commercial or lighting account pays 0.876 cents per kilowatt hour where a house pays 0.369. That is 2.4 times the rate, on the same programme, for the same line name.

In January 2026 the line moved in opposite directions. Residential went down. Small business and large business both went up, large business by more than eight percent. If you run a small business and a home on the same street, one of your two Energy Efficiency Programs lines got cheaper that month and the other got dearer.

Small N&L covers the Watt-Hour, Small Load, Medium Load, Large Load, Fixture-Included Lighting, Dusk to Dawn Lighting and General Lighting delivery classes. Large N covers Very Large Load, Extra Large Load and High Voltage. Which one applies to you is set by your delivery class, which is printed on your bill.

What the filed tariff says it is for

Rider EEPP recovers ComEd's reasonable and prudently incurred costs of three things, under subsections 8-103B(d) and (k) of the Public Utilities Act:

1. Energy efficiency and demand response programmes run under Sections 8-103, 8-103B and 16-111.5B of the Act, including programmes run in the stead of the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
2. The Public Schools Carbon-Free Assessment programme, under Section 8-402.2.
3. On-bill financing programmes under Section 16-111.7.

It is recovered through a formula rate with annual updates, using cost information ComEd already publishes under federal and state reporting requirements, including its FERC Form 1.

ComEd's profit on this line moves with an independent evaluation

There is a second rider behind this one that never appears on a bill. Rider EEPA, the Energy Efficiency Performance Adjustment, states its applicability as: applicable to Rider EEPP. It is a rider that applies to another rider.

What it does is set a performance adjustment, in basis points, to the return on equity used to work out ComEd's net energy efficiency revenue requirement. That requirement is what the rate above recovers.

The adjustment is measured against what the Act calls the applicable annual incremental goal, and the rider requires an Evaluator, defined as an independent entity that performs reviews and performance assessments of the energy efficiency measures. It gives effect to subsections 8-103B(g)(7) and (g)(9) of the Act.

So the shareholder return embedded in this line is not fixed. It goes up or down depending on whether an independent evaluator finds the programmes hit their savings targets, and the result flows through to the number on your bill.

Can it be avoided? For most people no, for some yes

Every other rider covered in this set says it applies to all retail customers, full stop. Rider EEPP does not. Its applicability reads: applicable to all retail customers except those to which the Exempt Group or Opt-out Group is applicable.

The Opt-out Group is defined in ComEd's General Terms and Conditions, giving effect to subsection 8-103B(l)(1) of the Act. To qualify, a customer must:

• be a private customer. Federal, State, municipal and other public customers are excluded by name.
• have electricity use at a single premises that established a thirty minute demand exceeding 10,000 kilowatts during at least one month in the twelve consecutive monthly billing periods immediately before the applicable energy efficiency plan starts.
• have successfully opted out of that plan for the applicable period, following the requirements in subsection 8-103B(l).

Ten thousand kilowatts is a large industrial load. Most businesses are nowhere near it, and for them the answer is the same no as every other rider.

But there is a clause worth knowing if you operate more than one site.

One qualifying site can carry the others. The filed definition states that where a business entity has multiple sites in Illinois and at least one of them qualifies as an eligible large private energy customer, then any of that entity's sites, properly identified on the notice form prescribed by the ICC under 220 ILCS 5/8-103B(l)(2), are treated as eligible large private energy customers for the purposes of Section 8-103B(l).

If you run one plant above 10 MW and a dozen smaller facilities, the smaller facilities are not automatically stuck on the charge. That is a filed provision, it turns on a form, and it is not something a bill would ever tell you.

This is not advice to opt out. Opting out of the efficiency plan also means giving up access to the programmes and incentives it funds, and for a business that uses them the arithmetic can go either way. It is a decision to make with numbers, and the point of this page is that the decision exists at all.

What this page was checked against

Both. The applicability, the opt-out carve out, the statutory basis and the performance adjustment mechanism are quoted from Riders EEPP and EEPA and from the General Terms and Conditions in ComEd's filed Schedule of Rates. The rates for all three customer groups are the filed values on the 10th Revised Informational Sheet No. 38, and the Residential value is confirmed to the cent by two unrelated bills.

The other lines on the same bill are covered in every line on a ComEd bill, explained.