The Edison Electric Institute has floated the idea that demand charges should be renamed as “efficiency rates.” Demand charges measure the maximum use in a month, and once a customer reaches that demand level in a month, a portion of the usage is free below that demand level. Providing power for free encourages more use, not less, which is the opposite of what “efficiency rates” should do.  Apparently this proposal is part of a larger effort to relabel everything that utilities find objectionable, such as distributed energy resources.

Demand charges can have a place in rate making, but the best such tool, made feasible by the rollout of “smart meters,” is daily demand charges that reset each day.