NYC Building Owners Wary of Real-Time Pricing Plans

Con Edison’s hourly pricing plan, which has been available to New York’s largest building owners since 2007, will be expanding in May 2011, but so far has not attracted much participation.

Con Ed’s hourly pricing program installs smart meters in buildings and sets hourly prices a day in advance based on actual costs.

Only about 100 of an eligible 790 buildings are currently enrolled in the program, a Con Ed spokesman told the New York Times. The expanded program has thus far only signed up about a quarter of eligible participants.

In addition to uncertainty about price volatility, many smaller landlords may lack the resources to do the monitoring of prices that makes hourly pricing a possible source of savings.

An hourly pricing pilot study conducted in upstate New York by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory discovered that 70 percent of participants “rarely or never” checked power prices.

Despite Con Ed’s program, most of the large building owners in New York have continued to buy fixed-rate contracts from energy services companies (ESCOs). Those contracts help protect customers against spikes in power prices—and the providers compete aggressively with each other on prices.

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