Commercial energy for office buildings

Office buildings have the peakiest load shape of the common commercial verticals: a narrow, tall weekday afternoon spike over a modest continuous base. That shape is more expensive per kWh for a supplier to serve than a warehouse’s flat draw, which is one reason offices rarely see the headline rates advertised to industrial accounts.

What an office building can control is the peak itself. Billed demand is set by a single fifteen-minute interval, so a pre-cool strategy that brings the building to temperature before the afternoon rather than during it can lower the number that gets billed all month. This is separate from procurement and worth mentioning because it often moves more money than the supply rate does.

The current live issue is occupancy. Buildings that lost a third of their weekday load to hybrid working and never revisited their contract forecast may be well under their contracted volume band — which, depending on the terms, can cost money rather than save it.

How office buildings draw power

A pronounced weekday profile — ramping before opening, peaking mid-afternoon, dropping in the evening — over a base load of server rooms, security and life-safety systems that run continuously.

What drives the bill

• HVAC across the occupied day, and the pre-cool ramp before it
• Billed demand set by the afternoon peak
• Server rooms and IT closets running 24/7
• Lighting, lifts and life-safety systems

The term that catches this vertical out

Occupancy change. Hybrid working has permanently altered many office load profiles, and a contract forecast against pre-2020 usage can now sit badly outside its tolerance band.

The Houston angle

Houston’s office market has been through real occupancy upheaval, and buildings across the Energy Corridor, Westchase and the Galleria are operating on load profiles that look nothing like the ones their contracts were written against.

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.