Demand charges have existed since nearly the beginning of the electric industry. Although utilities often favor them, economists have continually questioned whether these rates — applied to an individual customer’s maximum short-term usage in a billing period — are an efficient form of pricing. This paper does a deep dive on demand charges and cost causatio...

Improvements to electric efficiency in homes and businesses provide a variety of benefits to both the customers making the improvements and to the electric system as a whole. The most widely recognized are energy savings and system peak demand savings. A much less widely recognized benefit is the potential to enhance the reliability of the transmission and distri...