DR-LI - Mountain Baseline Region

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.

The hour of day does not change what you pay here — the month does. Running the same house through the full year, July costs about $510 and February about $261. That $249 swing is part rate and part weather, and it is the reason a budget built on your spring bill will break in July.

There is a usage cliff to watch. The first 17.68 kWh you use each day are billed at 40.6¢; past that line the rate steps up to 51.2¢ — 26% more for every unit after. The last kilowatt-hour of a heavy month is the expensive one, which is why cutting a little off a big month saves more than cutting the same amount off a small one.

Before a single kilowatt-hour moves, this plan charges $72 a year in fixed fees. On the apartment above that is 4% of the whole bill; on the house with a car charging in it, 1%. 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.

Everything below stays inside Mountain Baseline Region. Your zone is set by where you live, not by anything you can pick, so a cheaper plan in a different zone is not an option you have.

Measured against the other residential plans this utility files, a family home lands 3rd cheapest of 10. The cheapest option, TOU-DR Mountain Baseline Region, would run about $94 a year less.

Against DR - Mountain Baseline Region, which looks like the plan you land on by default, this one comes out $274 less per year (6%). 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.