On Hourly Pricing, the price of the energy you use changes every hour. Understanding which price you are actually billed on, and which ones are just there to help you plan, is most of what makes the program usable.
How does ComEd Hourly Pricing work? The real-time price is the one you pay
You are billed on the real-time hourly price. It comes from the regional grid market, and each hour's price is the average of the twelve five-minute prices during that hour. Because it is an average of the hour as it happens, the final number for an hour is not known until the hour has passed. That is the price that lands on your bill.
Real-time price vs the day-ahead price
The day before, the market also sets a day-ahead price for each hour. ComEd broadcasts it so you can see, roughly, which hours tomorrow are expected to be cheap or expensive and plan flexible usage around them. It is a forecast the market makes, not your bill. You plan with the day-ahead price and you pay the real-time price, and on most days they are close, but on volatile days they can diverge.
To make this workable, ComEd publishes three numbers as the day goes: the real-time hourly price, the running average for the current hour, and the day-ahead price. The habit the program rewards is simple: watch the day-ahead price to decide when to run big flexible loads.
What is the ComEd capacity charge?
Starting in June 2026, Hourly Pricing bills also carry a Capacity Charge. This is not the hourly energy price. It is a separate charge tied to how much power your home draws during the grid's highest demand hours in summer. In other words it is set by your peak draw at the worst moments, not by your total energy over the month. That makes it behave like a residential version of a commercial demand charge, and it means summer afternoons carry weight on your bill in two separate ways at once.
Why this shapes the whole decision
Put together, being on Hourly Pricing means the cost of a kilowatt hour depends entirely on the hour you use it, and your summer peak draw carries its own separate cost. Whether that adds up to a saving or a loss for your home is not something the price rules alone can tell you. It depends on when your house actually uses power, which is a question only your own usage data can answer. We are building an independent, no-commission tool to reconstruct exactly that from your ComEd data.
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