ComEd Commercial Electricity: Rates, Delivery Charges, and Demand

ComEd is the regulated wires company for northern Illinois. It delivers your power no matter who sells you the energy, and for many commercial accounts the delivery side of the ComEd bill is the part that actually determines the total.

A ComEd commercial bill is really two bills stapled together. One half is supply, the energy itself in cents per kilowatt hour, which Illinois opened to competition years ago. The other half is delivery, what it costs to move that energy over ComEd's wires, which stays a regulated monopoly. You can shop the supply half. You cannot shop the delivery half, and you cannot get off ComEd.

That split matters because the largest single line on many commercial accounts lives on the delivery side. On one reconciled ComEd Small Load account, the delivery demand charge came to $596.88 for the month, set by a single thirty minute interval, on a bill where the shoppable supply rate was never the problem. The bill shows only the result, not the interval that produced it.

Before any of that applies, the wires have to reach you. If you are building or moving into a site ComEd's distribution system does not already serve, who pays to extend the lines is decided by a threshold test rather than a price list, and the deposit you get back is conditioned on the load you projected at the start.

Underneath both halves sits a block of smaller rider and adjustment lines, with names like Coal to Solar and Energy Storage and Environmental Cost Recovery Adj, that no bill ever explains. Every line on a ComEd bill works through ten of them against two bills reconciled to the cent. The largest turns out to be a credit, the whole block nets to under two dollars fifty, and two of the ten can actually be avoided.

The essays below reconstruct how a ComEd commercial bill is built, why the delivery half behaves the way it does, and what the interval data reveals that the bill hides. We do not sell energy or take a commission on anything. The goal is a bill you can actually read.