Commercial electricity supply: what you buy

Two counterparties at every commercial service point

On a commercial account there are two sellers, and only one of them is a decision you make. The utility that owns the network — the transmission and distribution service provider, or TDSP, in Texas — connects the premises, owns and reads the meter, restores service after an outage, and charges delivery under a tariff it files with the state regulator. It is set by the address. The retail supplier — a retail electric provider, or REP, in Texas — sells the electricity itself and stands behind the wholesale position that supplies it. It sets the price, the term, the pass-through treatment and the credit terms. The practical consequence is that a supplier is not selling a second wire: no supply agreement can move a delivery charge, and no delivery tariff improves because you shopped. The rules keep the two apart by who files what — utility charges are filed and passed through, while the supplier's own price is the part competition is allowed to reach.

• The utility (a TDSP in Texas) owns the network and the meter, and is fixed by the service address.
• The supplier (a REP in Texas) sells the commodity and sets the agreement's commercial terms.
• Delivery charges are filed with the regulator; supply prices are the competitive element.
• Only one of the two lines is a purchasing decision; the other is a function of where the site sits.

A quote is keyed to a service point, not an address

A commercial price cannot be produced from a street address. In Texas each TDSP service delivery point carries a unique number, the Electric Service Identifier, and that identifier — not the company name — is what the market prices. ERCOT describes the format as 10xxxxxyyy..yy: a leading 10, a five-digit United States Department of Energy code identifying the TDSP that assigned it, and up to twenty-nine further alphanumeric characters assigned by that TDSP. The record behind the number carries a premise type that separates residential, small non-residential and large non-residential service, a rate class, a load profile classification, a meter identifier, and a status of active, inactive or pending. That is why a quote request naming a business is not enough: the supplier prices a point on the network and the history attached to it. A business with four meters has four identifiers, four rate classes and four load shapes, so "our rate" does not describe one thing even inside a single building.

• The ESI ID identifies the service delivery point; a customer name identifies nobody in the market.
• Its format begins with 10, then the assigning TDSP's five-digit DOE code, then up to twenty-nine further characters.
• Each record carries a premise type, rate class, load profile classification and meter identifier.
• A site with four meters is four service points, quoted separately.

What the market learns about a site before it will quote

Commercial supply is underwritten, so the price arrives after an assessment rather than off a table. Two questions are answered at once: how much energy the site will take across the term, and what it would cost to be wrong. Volume comes from monthly consumption across a full year, because a single quarter hides seasonality and a summer-peaking site is a different proposition from one that runs flat. Shape comes from demand and, where it exists, from interval history. Credit comes from the legal entity, its payment record, and whether the supplier will price without security or will ask for a deposit, a guarantee or collateral instead. Meter type matters because it governs how much of the site the supplier can see. The usual cause of a rate that looks better and a bill that is worse is an input that described the operation as it used to run — equipment added, hours extended, a tenant gone.

• Twelve months of consumption, month by month, rather than an annual total.
• Peak demand for each month, where the tariff bills demand separately.
• The meter's classification, and any interval history the account already produces.
• The contracting entity, its payment record, and whether security will be required.
• Every change in operations since the period the usage was taken from.

Interval metering decides how precisely anyone can price you

A commercial meter either records a load trace or it does not, and that difference sets the quality of every quote the site will receive. An interval data recorder logs consumption in successive intervals, and ERCOT's settlement and profiling rules work in fifteen-minute periods. With a trace, a supplier can see when the peak falls, how a weekday differs from a weekend, and whether the load is weather-driven or process-driven. A non-interval site produces periodic or cumulative readings instead, and the market fills the gap: ERCOT's Load Profiling Guide describes load profiling as the practice of estimating fifteen-minute interval load for customers where interval consumption is not available, and assigns a profile — an adjusted static model for non-interval metered service, by the Guide's own methodology table. Two non-interval sites with matching annual consumption can therefore be priced from shapes that are not their own. Nothing improper is happening; the supplier is carrying an uncertainty and pricing it.

• Interval meters produce a fifteen-minute trace; non-interval meters do not.
• ERCOT settles and profiles in fifteen-minute intervals.
• A non-interval site is priced from an assigned profile — an adjusted static model, in the Guide's methodology.
• An assigned shape describes the class rather than the site, and the price carries that risk.
• Where interval data exists, request it and quote from it rather than from a monthly total.

Capacity is priced alongside volume, and the tariff defines it

A supply price is a price for energy. The rest of the bill is priced on a mixture of volume and capacity, and the capacity part is defined by a tariff rather than by your contract. The U.S. Department of Energy's guide to utility bills for Ohio businesses, written around Duke Energy Ohio's schedules, states the measure plainly: a demand meter records the maximum fifteen-minute kilowatt demand during the billing period, averaged across the interval rather than caught instantaneously, so a spike lasting seconds reads lower than a load held for the whole quarter hour. The same schedules show how far a tariff can travel beyond a simple peak: a ratchet can hold billing at 85% of the highest summer demand for the following eleven months, and where power factor falls below 90% the demand used in the charge is adjusted up to the level needed to reach 90%. Read the schedule for the account's class before treating a demand line as a straightforward reading.

• Demand is the maximum fifteen-minute kilowatt average in the period, not an instantaneous spike.
• A ratchet can carry a summer peak forward into the following eleven months.
• Power factor below 90% can raise the demand a charge is applied to.
• Which of these applies is a property of the rate class, and it sits in the filed schedule.

The product names a Texas rule defines

Texas regulates the vocabulary of retail offers to residential and small commercial customers, and the definitions are worth knowing because a supplier may not use a word loosely. Under 16 TAC §25.475 a fixed rate product is one with a term of at least three months whose price — including recurring and ancillary charges — is the same for every billing period of the term, with narrow exceptions for actual utility charge changes, market administrative fees, and costs imposed by new law. An indexed product is priced from a pre-defined formula built on publicly available indices and disclosed to the customer; a variable price product follows a method the supplier sets; a month-to-month contract runs no longer than thirty-one days and may not carry a termination fee or penalty; and a wholesale indexed product passes through real-time settlement point prices. Two of those are closed to smaller customers. The rule prohibits offering an indexed product to a residential or small commercial customer from 1 February 2022, and a wholesale indexed product from 1 September 2021, and it forbids marketing a product as fixed when it does not meet the definition.

• "Fixed" has a definition: a term of at least three months, with the price constant across the billing periods of that term.
• Indexed pricing follows a published, pre-defined formula; variable pricing follows the supplier's own method.
• A month-to-month contract is thirty-one days or less and cannot carry a termination fee.
• Indexed offers have been closed to residential and small commercial customers since 1 February 2022; wholesale indexed offers since 1 September 2021.
• The rule is scoped to residential and small commercial service; a larger account is governed by its own signed agreement.

What has to be right before a comparison means anything

Four inputs decide whether a quote is a real offer. The first is the identifier: the point being priced has to be the account you mean, which matters most where a site has several meters. The second is the history, which has to reflect how the site runs now rather than how it ran before the last change. The third is the frame: term length and start month have to be matched across every supplier, because the price of a forward commitment depends on the season that commitment begins in. The fourth is the end of the term, which has to be stated rather than assumed — in Texas a contract for service must set out the default renewal product the customer is enrolled in if no other choice is made, and a fixed rate contract that expires without the required notices continues on its own terms until notice is given. Get all four right and the offers become comparable. Leave one out and you are comparing assumptions.

• The right service point identifier, matched to the account you intend to price.
• Usage history that describes the site as it operates now.
• Matched term length and start month across every supplier.
• The end-of-term default stated in the offer rather than discovered afterwards.

A second fuel is a separate market, not a second line on the same quote

A site that heats, cooks or runs a process on gas is buying a second commodity from a second set of sellers, and the two procurements fail in different ways. Electricity arrives over a network whose delivery tariff is filed by the utility. Gas arrives over a distribution system owned by a local distribution company, and the molecule itself is bought from a marketer that has arranged pipeline capacity to move it. FERC's Energy Markets Primer describes the arrangement directly: where states allow competition in gas service at the local level, marketers purchase the gas and arrange for it to be shipped over both the interstate pipeline network and the LDC system. So the two-counterparty structure from the electricity side returns in a different shape — the LDC keeps the distribution system, the meter and the delivery charges under its filed tariff, while the marketer sells the commodity and carries the pipeline position, on firm or interruptible service, with the secondary market for firm rights run through FERC's capacity release programme.

• The LDC owns the distribution system and bills delivery under a filed tariff; a marketer sells the molecule and arranges its transportation.
• Interstate pipeline service is firm or interruptible, and firm rights can be released to a third party through FERC's capacity release programme.
• Gas competition is a state-level decision, so whether a site can shop at all depends on the LDC territory that serves the address.
• The units differ from electricity entirely: gas is priced per therm, per Ccf or per Mcf, and the conversion between them is a heat-content calculation rather than a fixed ratio.
• A gas load is usually heating-led, so the winter months carry most of the annual volume and most of the price risk.

Mcf, Ccf and therms are not the same quantity

Dual-fuel comparisons go wrong on units before they go wrong on price. EIA's conversion FAQ puts the 2025 U.S. average heat content of natural gas delivered to end-use sectors at about 1,037 Btu per cubic foot, which makes one Ccf — one hundred cubic feet — about 1.037 therms, and one Mcf about 10.37 therms. A quote written in Mcf and a bill rendered in therms therefore describe volumes that differ by roughly three and a half percent before any price question is asked, and a bill can meter in Ccf while the commodity is sold in therms. The same arithmetic runs through the whole comparison: convert every volume to one basis, then compare. What carries across from the electricity side is the data discipline — twelve months of consumption, the account number and served address, the rate class, and the winter share of annual use. What does not carry across is the shape, because a gas agreement adds quantities electricity contracts do not carry: an annual contract quantity, a maximum daily quantity and a minimum daily quantity, with take-or-pay and make-up rights attached to them. The practical question is not whether one company can sell both fuels. It is whether one process collects both sets of accounts, both sets of expiry dates and both load shapes, so the two procurements run on the same calendar instead of two that never meet.

• At EIA's 2025 average of about 1,037 Btu per cubic foot, 1 Ccf is about 1.037 therms and 1 Mcf about 10.37 therms.
• Convert every volume to one basis before comparing a quote with a bill.
• Gas agreements carry ACQ, MDQ and minimum daily quantities, with take-or-pay and make-up rights.
• Collect both fuels' accounts, expiries and load shapes in one process, not two.

Where HighGround fits

HighGround is an advisory channel rather than a published rate table. Supply options are sourced through the Broker Online Exchange supplier network, and where a facility decision pulls in connectivity, communications, security or software, those categories are sourced through AppDirect. The claim we make is narrow: your usage, timing and service-point details are organised into a request suppliers can price, and the offers come back on matched terms so the comparison measures suppliers rather than assumptions. Availability depends on the service address, the meter and the utility territory that serves it — municipal utilities, cooperatives and some jurisdictions have no retail choice at all. HighGround may receive compensation from providers on completed purchases. An inquiry places no order and switches no supplier.

• Supply options sourced through the Broker Online Exchange network; adjacent categories through AppDirect.
• Offers requested on matched terms, so the difference you read is the suppliers.
• Eligibility is checked per service address and meter; an inquiry commits you to nothing.

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