The short answer is – maybe. There are many factors that go into determining if a customer will be able to save money by switching to a TOU rate. Some of these factors include the total amount of electricity used per month, the individual customer usage patterns, willingness to adapt lifestyle in order to shift usage to Off-Peak hours, etc. In order to save money, customers must be able to shift enough usage to the Off-Peak times.
As a general rule of thumb, an average customer will need to shift at least 78% of the total monthly usage to Off-Peak hours with the remaining 22% On-Peak in order to save money. The more usage that a customer is able to shift to Off-Peak hours, the more money that customer might save. For example, a customer who uses 1000 kWh in a month and is able to shift 85% or 850 kWh to the Off-Peak hours will save approximately $13.14 per month over the regular residential rate schedule. However if this same customer is only able to shift 60% or 600 kWh to the Off-Peak hours then he will have actually spent $29.61 more than the regular residential rate. Contact a GCEC representative at (928) 485-2451 to discuss how you might be able to save money on TOU rates for your individual circumstances.