Commercial energy for medical & dental practices

A medical or dental practice is close to an ideal brokerage account and almost never treated like one. The load is clean and predictable, the business is stable, and there is nobody on staff whose job description includes reading a supply contract. So the contract auto-renews, the practice administrator approves the direct debit, and the rate drifts.

Practices also have a real operational constraint that ordinary offices do not: temperature and humidity control is not a comfort question when there is refrigerated storage and sensitive imaging equipment on site. That means HVAC runs to a tighter tolerance and the base load never drops as far as an office’s does — which, in procurement terms, is actually an advantage worth putting in front of a supplier.

For multi-provider groups and practices with several locations, the same aggregation logic applies as anywhere else: combined volume prices better, and one end date is much easier to manage than four.

How medical practices draw power

Weekday clinic hours with a persistent overnight base — refrigerated storage for vaccines and specimens, servers, sterilisation equipment on standby, and imaging systems that draw even when idle.

What drives the bill

• HVAC across clinic hours, with tighter tolerances than ordinary office space
• Imaging and sterilisation equipment demand peaks
• Refrigerated storage running continuously
• Server and practice-management systems

The term that catches this vertical out

Auto-renewal. Practices are the single most likely commercial account type to have auto-renewed at least once without anyone noticing, because the bill is on autopay and the administrator has no reason to look.

The Houston angle

The Texas Medical Center anchors a metro-wide network of outpatient clinics, imaging centres and specialist practices reaching into every suburb we serve. It is one of the largest concentrations of small, stable, unshopped commercial meters in Texas.

What we look at before shopping anything

The order matters. We read your existing position first, because roughly one account in five turns out to be on a contract worth keeping, and finding that out costs you nothing but tells you something worth knowing.

• Your current rate and rate type — fixed, variable, indexed, or a holdover rate you rolled onto when a contract expired.
• Your contract end date — the single fact that determines how soon anything can change and how much leverage you have.
• Early termination exposure — whether leaving early costs a fixed fee, a market-based calculation, or nothing at all.
• Your load shape — the pattern described above, taken from interval data rather than assumed from your business type.
• The split between supply and delivery — so you know what proportion of the bill is genuinely in play before anyone talks about savings.