There is a line in ComEd's tariff book that most people will never read, and it is one of the more clarifying documents about the electricity market you can find.
Rider IMUD, Interval Meter Usage Data, sets out what ComEd charges a retail electricity supplier for access to residential interval usage data. Not what it charges you. What it charges the companies who want to sell to you.
What suppliers pay
The rider imposes a quarterly System Fee on retail electric suppliers, banded by how many customers they served as of December 2023.
| Customers served by the supplier | Annual fee | Quarterly fee |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | $1,000 | $250 |
| 1 to 1,000 | $4,000 | $1,000 |
| 1,001 to 5,000 | $6,000 | $1,500 |
| 5,001 to 10,000 | $8,000 | $2,000 |
| 10,001 to 25,000 | $11,000 | $2,750 |
| 25,001 to 50,000 | $12,000 | $3,000 |
| 50,001 to 100,000 | $14,000 | $3,500 |
| Over 100,000 | $16,000 | $4,000 |
Those recover ComEd's implementation costs and run quarterly from June 2025 through the end of 2029, with a final application in the first quarter of 2030 that trues up any over or under recovery.
On top of that there is an annual fee covering ongoing storage costs, divided across the eligible suppliers, and an interchange fee recovering the volumetric cost of delivering the data. The arrangement was established by the Illinois Commerce Commission in Docket 23-0773.
What you pay
Your own usage data is yours. You do not pay ComEd a system fee, an annual fee or an interchange fee to see the record of your own meter.
That asymmetry is the point of this page. An entire industry pays real money, on a published schedule, for a version of the thing you can obtain for nothing. Nobody builds a fee structure with eight bands and a five year recovery schedule around data that has no commercial value.
What that tells you about the sales call
When a supplier or a broker offers to analyse your usage and show you what they can save, the analysis is not a favour and it is not free to them. It is a paid input into a sales process, and the output is shaped by what the seller is selling.
Three practical consequences.
The data was good enough to make an offer, so it is good enough to check the offer. Anyone who says the data is too complex for you to use has told you something about themselves rather than about the data.
Ask what they modelled it against. A quote built on your own interval record and one built on a class average profile look identical on paper and mean very different things. The class average assumes you look like your neighbours, and if you did, your bill would not warrant a sales call.
A supply quote does not touch your delivery charges. A supplier sells the supply portion of your bill. The delivery portion, including any demand charge, remains ComEd's and is unaffected by who supplies you. If a saving is quoted against your total bill rather than the supply portion, ask which lines it applies to.
The case for pulling it yourself
Not because the supplier's copy is wrong, but because your questions are different from theirs.
A supplier looks at your record to find a price at which selling to you is profitable. That is legitimate, and it answers exactly one question: what supply will cost.
Your record answers others no supplier has reason to ask. How far your top interval sits above your second, which caps everything peak management can recover. What actually set the peak: the day, the hour, the equipment. Whether a battery, a schedule change or solar would have paid, measured against what your site did rather than projected from a model.
Those questions carry the larger numbers, and they live on the delivery side of the bill that a supply quote does not reach.
How to get it
The mechanism exists and it is regulated rather than discretionary, but it is not the same mechanism for every customer, and the difference is written into the tariff.
ComEd's third-party data access is governed by Rate DART, Data Access and Retrieval Tenets. It offers an authorised third party exactly two routes, and on the Green Button Connect route the tariff states that historical interval data are available only for residential retail customers. The other route, the supplier portal, is open only to retail electric suppliers.
So if you are a residential customer, you can authorise a provider to pull your record directly. Phantom Grid is one of three providers listed in ComEd's production Connect My Data directory, so that is not a theoretical route.
If you are a business, there is no equivalent automated third-party rail under that tariff, and the route is to download your own record from your ComEd account and pass it on yourself. That is more friction, and it is worth knowing it is a tariff boundary rather than a limitation of whoever you are talking to.
Whether you should is a separate question, and the honest answer is that many decisions are settled by twelve bills alone. If your delivery charges contain no line priced in dollars per kilowatt, the expensive questions above do not apply to you. Establish that first, before requesting anything.
But if there is a demand charge on your bill and it moves around, no supply quote you receive can answer the question you actually have, no matter how much the person who made it paid for the data.
Does ComEd charge suppliers for customer usage data?
Yes. Rider IMUD imposes a quarterly system fee on retail electric suppliers ranging from $250 to $4,000 per quarter depending on how many customers they serve, plus an annual storage fee and a volumetric interchange fee. The arrangement was established in ICC Docket 23-0773.
Do I have to pay to get my own ComEd interval data?
No. Rider IMUD applies to retail electric suppliers taking service under Rate RESS. Your own usage record is yours, and you can download it from your ComEd account at no charge. Authorising a third party to pull it for you through Green Button Connect is available to residential customers under Rate DART; a business account passes the file on itself.
Can a supplier's savings quote reduce my demand charge?
No. A supplier sells the supply portion of your bill. Delivery charges, including any demand charge, remain with ComEd regardless of who supplies your electricity. Ask which lines any quoted saving applies to.
Why does it matter that suppliers pay for this data?
Because it establishes that the record has commercial value, that an analysis offered to you for free is a paid input into a sale, and that the same record is available to you at no cost to answer questions the supplier has no reason to ask.