Defeat the Peak

Electricity is a real-time service.  As energy use fluctuates throughout the day, we must generate the exact amount of power our customers need at the exact moment they use it.

That requires more resources during on-peak hours, including infrastructure we wouldn’t need if customers conserved power during those periods. We also pay a steep premium on the energy we purchase to meet summer peak demands.

Rising on-peak usage also poses an increasing risk to reliability. In recent years, extreme heat in the western United States has threatened to drive peak electric use beyond the level our regional grid can serve.  If energy supplies can’t keep up with demand, our grid operators must find ways to reduce usage to balance the loads and resources.

We start by asking large industrial users to suspend operations and by shutting off service to customers that have agreed to occasional interruptions through “demand response” programs or interruptible rates. Next, we appeal to the public for conservation, urging customers to turn up their thermostats and take other steps to conserve energy. If this doesn’t work, our last resort is to create “rolling blackouts” – short power outages that are rotated from one area of town to another to limit the impact for any one group of customers.

TEP’s reliability remains among the top tier of U.S. electric providers, so our customers have rarely experienced these kinds of interruptions. But the bottom line is that using less energy between 3-7 p.m. helps ease the pressure on our system, limiting our need for expensive on-peak power and reducing the threat of energy shortages, particularly during an extended Western heat wave.

If you keep an eye on our Clean Energy Tracker, you’ll see that our solar energy systems produce the most power around noon, when the sun is directly overhead. You also may see that our wind farms are most productive during the early morning and later in the evening, after the sun sets.

So when you shift the majority of your energy usage to mornings and early afternoons, a larger share of the energy you’re using for your dishwasher, washing machine and other appliances and electronics is coming from the sun.

Similarly, your evening energy use taps into our wind energy resources. Sunset is when winds start to kick up in southeastern New Mexico, allowing us to generate clean wind power at our wind farms, including Oso Grande and Borderlands.

If you shift your energy use away from 3-7 p.m., you could save money if you’re on one of our three Time-of-Use pricing plans. These plans reward customers with lower rates when they use less energy during our summer and winter peak hours. That means 3-7 p.m. weekdays in the summer through September and from 6-9 a.m. and 6-9 p.m. in the winter, October through April. All weekends and major holidays are always off-peak.

Once you form some new habits – with the tips we’ve identified above - it’s easy to save money and energy on these plans.

You can use our Pricing Planner tool to help you decide which plan might be right for you. This tool uses your past 12 months of energy usage to project what you might pay for power over the upcoming year on TEP’s various residential pricing plans. It does not account for changes in rates, taxes or surcharges, and it assumes identical energy use over the upcoming year.