Orlando Utilities Commission Begins Billing a Three-Tier Demand Charge on Its Non-Demand Commercial Class

Orlando Utilities Commission started billing a kilowatt-based charge in November. The charge, which OUC calls DemandLevel, is a component of a broader rate redesign the utility calls PeakSHIFT, and the filing at the Florida Public Service Commission under docket 04010-2026 shows it applying to the General Service Non-Demand class, abbreviated GSND, alongside residential customers.

For GSND accounts the charge takes three values. A monthly peak above zero and under 8 kW draws roughly $7.50. A peak from 8 kW to under 12 kW draws roughly $15.00. A peak of 12 kW and above draws roughly $22.50. All three are computed from a rate of $1.84 per kW.

The rate class is named for the determinant it did not previously carry. A schedule called General Service Non-Demand now bills on demand.

The trigger. The tier is set by the single highest 15-minute reading in the prior billing cycle. One interval, anywhere in a month, fixes the charge. Because the determinant comes from the preceding cycle, the first tier assignments under DemandLevel rest on demand that occurred before the charge existed, at a point when no account on the schedule had any reason to manage it.

The offset. OUC is reducing the non-fuel base energy charge by about 12.5 percent per kWh so that the redesign is revenue neutral in aggregate. The net effect on a GSND bill is therefore a reallocation rather than an increase: the same total revenue, collected less from kilowatt-hours consumed and more from kilowatts drawn at a single moment. Customers whose consumption is flat relative to their peak gain. Customers with a spiky load shape and modest total usage pay more.

The shape of the top tier. The third tier is defined as 12 kW and above, with no further step published. The charge therefore stops rising once an account crosses 12 kW, which makes the effective per-kilowatt price a declining function of peak size within that tier. At exactly 12 kW, $22.50 works out to about $1.88 per kW, close to the $1.84 rate the tiers are built from. At 20 kW the same $22.50 is about $1.13 per kW. At 30 kW it is 75 cents. Inside the top tier, the accounts drawing the most distribution capacity pay the least for each kilowatt of it.

What peak reduction earns. Total DemandLevel exposure for a GSND account runs from $7.50 to $22.50 a month. The largest sum any amount of load shaping can recover is $15 a month, or $180 a year, and only an account that moves from above 12 kW to below 8 kW collects all of it. Everything else is partial or nothing.

The savings also sit at two breakpoints with flat ground between them. An account peaking at 11.9 kW and an account peaking at 8.1 kW pay the same $15.00. An account peaking at 40 kW and an account peaking at 12.1 kW pay the same $22.50. Shaving 25 kW off the first of those pays nothing until the peak drops under 12 kW, at which point it pays $7.50. The structure rewards crossing a line, not reducing load.

That property cuts two ways for anyone selling peak reduction into the class. The dollars are small and bounded, which limits what any mitigation can be worth. The dollars are also unusually legible, because the saving from moving a site below a stated threshold is a fixed, verifiable number that appears on the next bill rather than an estimate derived from a rate model.

The equipment on offer. The commercial storage products reaching market this autumn are sized for a different customer. Exide Technologies launched its Solition Powerflex in October at 125 kW of integrated power conversion, 261 kWh of capacity and 86 percent nominal round-trip efficiency, and specified it for outdoor siting, according to ESS News, which counted it as the fourth cabinet to arrive near that specification in roughly three weeks, after eVault, Hoymiles and Sigenergy. Exide extended it on November 2 with a read-only fleet monitoring application covering state of charge, power flow and fault alerts across single or multiple sites.

A GSND account at the bottom of the top tier peaks at 12 kW. That is about a tenth of the power rating those cabinets carry. The load being billed and the hardware being built for commercial buildings are roughly an order of magnitude apart.

The gap in the segment. Speaking at pv magazine USA Week on November 2, former Department of Energy Loan Programs Office head Jigar Shah sized last year’s United States commercial and industrial storage market at about 150 MW against roughly 2.7 GW of residential storage. He attributed the difference to two causes: the absence of standardized commercial equipment, and thin availability of third-party financing structures such as 48E tax-credit leases. In the same interview he cited Rocky Mountain Power’s Wattsmart program as covering about a third of battery cost in exchange for 30 to 130 dispatches a year, and valued transmission-scale storage below $300 per kWh, in some cases near $200.

Shah’s diagnosis and Orlando’s tariff describe the same mismatch from opposite ends. A GSND account now has a priced exposure to a single 15-minute interval, and the commercial product catalogue addressing that exposure begins at ten times the relevant size. The residential market, which Shah sized at eighteen times the commercial one, has standardized hardware in roughly the right power band but is not the class OUC has just started billing.

What has been established. The near-term dollars attached to DemandLevel are modest. A GSND customer who ignores the charge entirely faces a worst case of $22.50 a month, partly offset by a 12.5 percent reduction in the energy rate. The structural change is that a measurement now exists where one did not. OUC’s filing establishes a 15-minute interval reading as a billing determinant for a class that previously had none, and sets a rate, $1.84 per kW, against which any future adjustment would be measured. OUC has proposed no such adjustment. Whether the determinant acquires a larger price later is a question the filing does not answer, and the tiering means the current structure gives most accounts a single threshold to manage rather than a continuous incentive to reduce peak.

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