Residential Time-of-Use Pilot Program

Estimates, not quotes. We run three made-up but realistic households through this tariff hour by hour for a full year — including the way air conditioning loads the afternoon and an EV loads the small hours. Your own bill depends on when you actually use electricity, which is exactly the thing a per-kWh number hides.

This is a time-of-use plan, which means the clock decides your bill as much as the meter does. At the worst hour you pay 17.4¢ a kWh; at the best hour, 9.9¢ — 1.8× apart for identical electricity.

That gap is worth real money only if you can move load into it. Every kilowatt-hour a day you shift from 3pm to midnight is about $27 a year. A dishwasher run is roughly 1.5 kWh; an EV commute charge is 8 to 12. If your day is fixed — you are home in the evening and the air conditioner runs when it runs — a plan like this costs you more, not less.

Before a single kilowatt-hour moves, this plan charges $180 a year in fixed fees. On the apartment above that is 24% of the whole bill; on the house with a car charging in it, 11%. Fixed charges are invisible in a cents-per-kWh comparison and they punish small users hardest — if you use very little electricity, the headline rate is the least important number on this page.

Expect the bill to move with the calendar. The same family home costs about $151 in July and $84 in February — a $67 spread driven by heating and cooling far more than by anything you chose. Budget against the July figure, not the average, and a summer bill stops being a surprise.

Measured against the other residential plans this utility files, a family home lands 3rd cheapest of 3. The cheapest option, Residential - Outside Austin, would run about $104 a year less.

Against Residential, which looks like the plan you land on by default, this one comes out $53 more per year (4%). We infer the default from the tariff structure rather than a flag in the data, so confirm it against your own bill before you switch.