ATOU Residential Service Time-of-Use

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 34.4¢ a kWh; at the best hour, 7.3¢ — 4.7× 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 $99 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 $408 a year in fixed fees. On the apartment above that is 47% of the whole bill; on the house with a car charging in it, 25%. 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 $190 in July and $78 in February — a $112 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 4th cheapest of 4. The cheapest option, AEA Residential Energy Advantage Service, would run about $175 a year less.

Against A - Residential Service, which looks like the plan you land on by default, this one comes out $125 more per year (10%). 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.