Smart Energy Plan – General: Frequently Asked Questions

The Smart Energy Plan offers more opportunities to save on your energy costs. This billing plan bases your delivery charges on the days your home uses the most electricity during an hourly period. Your delivery charges are what you pay Con Edison to bring energy to your home/business.

Your Smart Energy Plan is a new billing plan comprised of two delivery charges for energy use during peak and off-peak hours. During peak hours, delivery charges are higher. During off-peak hours, delivery charges are lower.

You can benefit and save money from using energy wisely by making changes like staggering energy use (especially during peak hours) so large electric devices (like a dishwasher or clothes washer) will run at separate times instead of all at once, or by shifting your energy use of those appliances to off-peak hours (for example, you could set your dishwasher to run before or after peak hours).

It means how much energy your large electric devices use within a 60-minute period. For example, if you use your air conditioner, dishwasher, and clothes washer during the same 60-minute period, your home will use more electricity at once. This results in higher delivery costs under the Smart Energy Plan, especially during peak hours.

The 60-minute periods used to measure your energy use begin on the hour, or every 15 minutes thereafter. For example, a 60-minute period is 3:15 to 4:15 pm during weekdays. Your three highest 60-minute periods during peak hours and off-peak hours are averaged to determine your billable demand for each month.

Peak refers to the times of day when delivery charges are higher. Off-peak refers to the times when delivery charges are lower, including weekends and holidays.

On the Smart Energy Plan, your savings can add up over time in two ways:

• Stagger when you use large electric devices (like a dishwasher or clothes washer) so they don’t run all at once, especially during peak hours.
• Shift your energy use to off-peak hours to save more.

Large appliances like clothes washers, electric clothes dryers, space heaters, air conditioners, dishwashers, and electric stoves or ovens use the most energy. Running multiple large appliances at once during an hourly period requires more power than running just one appliance. Therefore, the more large appliances running at once, the more it costs to deliver energy to power them.

See how much energy common devices typically use.

Any time your energy use goes up, your bill will typically be higher as well (when compared with months when you used less energy).

But if you stagger when you use your devices, distributing energy steadily over the course of the day, you could actually pay less on the Smart Energy Plan than you would have on your prior rate.