What Is the Environmental Cost Recovery Adj on a ComEd Bill?

There is a line on a ComEd bill that reads Environmental Cost Recovery Adj, and on most residential bills it is somewhere between five and twenty cents. It is small enough that almost nobody asks what it is.

It pays to clean up gas plants that stopped operating before most of the people paying it were born.

What it cost on two real bills

Both of these are actual bills, reconciled to the cent against the filed rate.

Bill	Usage	Rate	Arithmetic	Printed
July 2026 billing period	953 kWh	0.009 cents per kWh	953 x $0.00009 = $0.08577	$0.09
June 2026 billing period	1,518 kWh	0.009 cents per kWh	1,518 x $0.00009 = $0.13662	$0.14

The rate is not derived from the bills. It is the filed number on ComEd's 54th Revised Informational Sheet No. 8, the supplement to Rider ECR, applicable from the April 2026 monthly billing period through the July 2026 monthly billing period. The bills confirm it.

The rate drops in August 2026

The same sheet carries the next window. Beginning with the August 2026 monthly billing period and extending through December 2026, the ECR is 0.007 cents per kWh.

That is a fall of about 22 percent. On 953 kWh it takes the line from 9 cents to 7 cents. This is a small amount of money and a useful test: if your August bill shows an Environmental Cost Recovery Adj computed at the old rate, the arithmetic on your bill disagrees with the filed sheet, and that is worth a phone call for reasons that have nothing to do with two cents.

What the filed tariff says it is for

Rider ECR recovers what the tariff calls Incremental Costs incurred in association with Environmental Activities associated with former manufactured gas plant sites.

Manufactured gas plants made fuel gas from coal and oil. Chicago and the towns around it ran on the stuff for lighting and heating from the middle of the nineteenth century until natural gas pipelines displaced it. The plants left coal tar and its associated contamination in the ground, and the sites are still being worked.

The rider defines Environmental Activities as the remediation or other treatment of environmental contamination at or associated with those sites, and lists what that covers: investigation, sampling, monitoring, testing, removal and response measures, disposal, storage, and the operation and maintenance of remediation and treatment measures. That last item explains the timescale. Some of these sites are not cleaned and closed. They are monitored, indefinitely.

Four things ComEd is not allowed to charge you for

This is the part of the rider worth reading, because it is unusually specific about the boundary.

Incremental Costs, per the filed text, do not include:

1. Costs arising out of personal injury claims from exposure to asbestos.
2. Land acquisition purchase costs incurred before August 22, 2009.
3. Wages and salaries of ComEd employees.
4. Work performed by parties affiliated with ComEd and billed to ComEd.

Number three is the interesting one. ComEd staff time on manufactured gas plant remediation is not recoverable through this line. What is recoverable is money paid to outside parties, plus the cost of pursuing insurance recovery, plus judgments and settlements, plus legal and litigation costs.

There is also an anti double recovery clause. If ComEd buys land solely for Environmental Activities, recovers the acquisition cost through this rider, and then decides to keep the land for some other purpose, that cost must be excluded from its rate base in any later rate case. You do not pay for the same parcel twice.

Who sets the rate and how it moves

ComEd computes it. The ICC reviews it after the fact.

The filed formula is projected costs, less net reimbursements, plus two reconciliation terms, divided by projected energy:

• PC, projected incremental costs for the coming calendar year.
• NRIC, net reimbursements. Insurance recoveries, lease proceeds and land sale proceeds associated with the sites, less what it cost to obtain them. Money recovered from insurers comes off what you pay.
• ARF, the Automatic Reconciliation Factor. Last period's over collection or under collection, carried forward.
• ORF, the Ordered Reconciliation Factor. Any amount the ICC orders refunded to or collected from customers.
• PE, projected kilowatt hours delivered.

Each year on or before November 30 ComEd files the coming year's ECR with the ICC for informational purposes, with supporting work papers.

Then, on or before February 28, it files an annual report comparing what it actually recovered against what it actually spent. That report has to carry testimony on the prudence of the costs, addressing reasonable and appropriate business practices, the requirements of state and federal authorities, minimisation of cost to customers consistent with safety and reliability, and what ComEd knew or should have known at the time it spent the money. The reconciliation from that report folds into a revised ECR effective with the April billing period, which is why the rate windows in the table above start in April.

The ICC may order a hearing on any annual report within 180 days. Everything previously collected under the rider stays subject to adjustment through the ORF after such a review. The money is not final when it is billed.

It moves often

Informational Sheet No. 8 is on its 54th revision. It changed twice in 2026 alone, effective March 12 and July 15, both recorded in ComEd's index of filings with the ICC.

That cadence is the reason this page states a window for every number on it. An ECR figure quoted without the billing periods it belongs to is wrong within months.

Can it be avoided?

No.

Rider ECR is applicable to all rates except Rate RESS and Rate MSPS, neither of which is a rate a retail customer takes service under. It is applied to each kilowatt hour delivered, which means it does not depend on who supplies your electricity. Switching to a retail electric supplier does not touch it.

There is no exemption, no rate class that escapes it, and nothing to negotiate. It is also, at nine cents, not worth the attempt. The reason to understand it is to recognise it as settled when someone reviewing your bill implies it is not.

What this page was checked against

Both. The mechanism is quoted from the filed Rider ECR, Sheets No. 240 through 244 of ComEd's Schedule of Rates. The rate is the filed value on the 54th Revised Informational Sheet No. 8, effective July 15, 2026, and it is confirmed by two unrelated bills that reconcile to the cent.

That distinction matters and we state it on every page in this set. Some ComEd bill lines can be checked against a filed sheet. Others can only be checked against what the bill printed, because no sheet publishes the value. This one is the first kind, which is the stronger kind.

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