A member’s perspective on the Time of Use rate

Read more about our Time of Use rate

Learn more or sign up for our Time of Use rate trial

Transcript

What are the benefits of Time of Use from a cooperative perspective?

The benefits of Time of Use are that you can see a significant amount of savings if you can move a vast majority of your electric consumption or your kilowatt hour consumption to off-peak times. Again, our Time of Use rate is very different from traditional time of use rates. There is only a two hour window seven days a week, that are considered on-peak. So if you can move the vast majority of your kilowatt hour consumption to the other 22 hours of the day, then you can see savings.

Who is the ideal candidate for Time of Use?

We feel like the ideal candidate is anyone that feels like they are compelled to be able to move consumption and can have flexibility in their daily consumption habits.

What tools are available to determine if Time of Use is right for you?

Many of you probably already use, if you don’t you should sign up for our SmartHub application. In our SmartHub application not only can you pay your bill electronically, you can check outages you can see a lot of things that are going on about the cooperative. But you can look at your individual interval data down to an hourly level for the day prior. You can look at monthly usage, you can look at daily usage and you can look at hourly interval data. I would encourage you If you’re on the fence about Time of Use look at your hourly interval data. As I said, in the summer time our peak-hours are at 4PM-6PM. Just look and see how your usage patterns are already developing it may be that you’re already taking advantage and not even realizing that some of your usage is off-peak. Again, with the vast majority of the 22 hours being off-peak if you can move just some smaller items to those 22 hours, there is a potential savings for you. Look at your interval disaggregation, look at your actual hourly interval data and I think you can make some really good assumptions about whether you’d be a good candidate for Time of Use or not.

Are there options for people curious about trying the Time of Use rate?

Today, I’m excited to share with you that we have a Time of Use trial for up to 250 participants. It’s a risk-free opportunity for you to see if you can save money on Time of Use. We will bill you on Time of Use, you will pay the Time of Use rate for 12 months and at the end of the 12 months we will reevaluate your cost or savings. And if the program cost you more during those 12 months, we will simply credit your account for the difference and put you back on our standard residential rate.

How can you learn more or sign up?

Members can review our website, we have information on our website www.wemc.com it talks about our risk-free trial. But you can also contact our customer service reps, all of our representatives are fully engaged in understanding our time of use rate and are happy to share with you the advantages about the time of use rate but also give you an opportunity to sign up – easily get you signed up on the TOU Trial.

Why does Wake Electric offer a TOU rate?

So many of you may ask why does Wake Electric offer a Time of Use trial or why do we even offer a Time of Use rate? In today’s market, I want our members to know that we’re really almost looking at real time pricing. And we pay, the cooperative pays a significant dollar amount for peak times. So when we have savings, because we’re a cooperative we can pass those savings along to our members. So, if we can reduce our peak, then we’re buying at our wholesale price a lot cheaper than we are during on-peak times. So if we can get members to curtail usage during our defined on-peak times, we’re buying our kilowatt hours at a reduced cost and at that reduced cost, we can pass that savings along to our members. So in essence it’s a win for the cooperative and it’s a win for the membership.