ComEd Hourly Pricing

ComEd Hourly Pricing lets a residential customer pay the real hourly market price for the energy half of their bill, instead of the flat rate everyone else pays. ComEd passes the wholesale price through without a markup, so the rate you pay changes every hour of every day. The program's formal name is ComEd Real-Time Pricing, or RRTP; Hourly Pricing is how ComEd markets the same rate. You can watch ComEd's live prices move over the course of a day.

That is the whole idea, and also the whole catch. If your usage lands in cheap hours, you can pay less than the flat rate. If it lands in expensive ones, you can pay more. So the honest question is never "is hourly pricing good," it is "would it have saved me," and the only place that answer lives is in your own usage. The shape that matters most is your summer afternoon share: wholesale prices peak on hot weekday afternoons, so a home that runs heavy from two to seven in July sits on the expensive side of the curve, and a home that can run overnight sits on the cheap side. Our free interval data analysis tool reads that shape directly from your own ComEd usage export, including how much of your summer use lands in the peak window.

Two more things belong in the full picture. Since June 2026, Hourly Pricing bills carry a separate summer Capacity Charge tied to your draw during the grid's highest demand hours, a residential cousin of the commercial demand charge, so the program now has two moving parts: the hourly energy price and a peak charge set by your worst summer afternoons. And the stakes are seasonal. Interest in the program peaks in early summer for a reason: the hours that decide whether it pays are the ones happening right now.

Everything above is ComEd's residential program. Two neighbouring questions get asked often enough to answer separately: whether hourly supply makes sense for a nonresidential account, and whether any of it transfers to the other Illinois utility. On the second, does Ameren Illinois offer business hourly pricing the way ComEd's Rate BESH does sets out what carries across the state line and what we will not assert without a reconciled bill.

Four narrower decisions get asked often enough to have their own pages: whether rates are really lower at night, what happens when the hourly price goes negative, what the capacity charge is and why it rose in June 2026, and whether the rate is worth it in winter. Each one is measured on the same fourteen months of settled ComEd zone prices.

The essays below explain how the program actually works, what decides whether it pays off for a given home, and how you would reconstruct the answer from your own data rather than a generic promise. We do not sell energy and we take no commission.