The flat rate and Hourly Pricing are two ways of pricing the same energy. The flat rate averages the year into one predictable number. Hourly Pricing charges the real price each hour. Which one is cheaper for you is not decided by the rates. It is decided by the shape of when your home uses power.
Hourly Pricing vs the fixed rate: what is the difference?
On the flat rate, you pay the same cents per kilowatt hour whether you run your dryer at 3 a.m. or 3 p.m. on the hottest day of the year. That predictability is the product. The cost of it is that a home using power mostly in cheap hours subsidizes homes using it in expensive ones, because everyone pays the blended average.
Hourly Pricing removes the blending. You pay what your hours actually cost. That helps you only if your hours are cheaper than the average, and hurts you if they are more expensive.
Which homes save on ComEd Hourly Pricing?
The homes that tend to come out ahead share a trait: their load lands in cheaper hours, or it is flexible enough to move there. Common patterns include running large appliances overnight or in the early morning, charging an electric vehicle in the low priced overnight window, being away or light on use during summer weekday afternoons, and generally having flexibility about when big loads run.
Which homes pay more on Hourly Pricing?
The homes that tend to lose share the opposite trait: heavy, inflexible load concentrated in the expensive hours. The clearest case is heavy air conditioning running hard through summer weekday afternoons, which is exactly when both the hourly price and the capacity charge are highest. If that load cannot move, Hourly Pricing exposes it to the real cost the flat rate was smoothing over.
The average is the one number that cannot tell you
This is why a blanket claim in either direction is useless. "Hourly pricing saves people money" and "hourly pricing is risky" are both true for different homes, and the average across all homes tells you nothing about yours. The variable that decides it, the shape of your own usage, is specific to your house.
There is a real answer, and it is not a forecast. Your meter recorded your usage hour by hour, and the market recorded what each hour cost, so you can reconstruct exactly what you would have paid on each plan over the past year. That is the honest way to settle it, and it is the tool we are building, independent and with no commission. Until then: do not switch on a promise, and do not stay on a fear.
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