Peak Time Savings is a program that rewards you with bill credits for voluntarily reducing electricity usage during certain Peak Time Savings periods. If you use less energy during the event window compared to what you typically would have used, you earn credits on your next bill.

Each season (summer and winter), PSE sends welcome letters to selected eligible electric customers who are automatically enrolled in Peak Time Savings. Customers may choose to unenroll at any time. Customers who join other Flex programs or move are removed from Peak Time Savings. At the end of the season, all automatically enrolled customers are unenrolled, and each season resets with a new selection of customers who are automatically enrolled. If you have unenrolled or become ineligible, you will not be contacted again for the program.

Peak Time Savings periods happen on select weekdays during the winter (Nov. 1 – March 31) and summer (May  1 – Sept. 30). On these Peak Time Savings days, peak periods will happen at most once per day between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. These peak periods typically last two to four hours and will never take place on holidays (see list below). There can be up to five Peak Time Savings events each season.

Holidays:

• New Year’s Day
• Memorial Day
• Independence Day
• Labor Day
• Thanksgiving
• Christmas Day

No. Reducing electricity usage during Peak Time Savings periods is 100% voluntary. There is no requirement to participate.

To make it easy for everyone to save and participate on a large scale, eligible residential PSE customers are automatically enrolled in Peak Time Savings. You can always opt-out of receiving notifications by unsubscribing via links in related emails or following the opt-out steps in text and phone messages. Or simply visit PSE.com/ManagePeakTimeSavings to opt out.

You can also manage your notification preferences at the site above. Select or clear the checkboxes for how you’d like us to contact you and click Save. Make sure we have your correct email address and/or phone number so we can notify you about the next Peak Time Savings day.

We look at your most recent 10 weekdays and select the 5 weekdays when you use the most electricity.

We focus only on the same time as the Peak Time Savings period. For example, if the Peak Time Savings period is from 5 to 7 p.m., we look at your usage from 5 to 7 p.m. on each of those weekdays.

We then average your usage during that time. That average is your typical use baseline that we compare to your usage during a Peak Time Savings event.

On a Peak Time Savings day, if you use less electricity than your typical use baseline during event hours, the difference is counted as your electricity savings and you will earn $0.50 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in bill credits based on those savings.

EV charging can be one of the largest electricity uses in a home, and it often happens during the same periods when reducing electricity demand can help support the grid. On a Peak Time Savings day, delaying EV charging until after the event is very helpful for the grid. A level 2 EV charger can be especially power-hungry, using up to 11.5 kilowatts per hour. Shifting when you charge your EV can be a great way to earn bill credits. You can use your charger’s scheduling app to make this even easier.

Within a week after a Peak Time Savings day, you’ll receive a notification letting you know how you did. This includes your estimated electricity savings for the event and shows you how many bill credits you earned for participating.

You can also view your result any time by signing in to your PSE account and navigating to the My Usage section. Here you can use the Peak Time Savings web tool to see your performance and bill credits. Additionally, usage and cost graphs show information about bill credits earned during a Peak Time Savings day. This information can be viewed under the Bill View tab.

You will also see the bill credit show up on your bill in the next billing cycle, if you saved, under the Other Charges and Credits, ‘Peak Time Savings Credit (MM/DD/YY).

Peak Time Savings is available to residential PSE electricity customers whose electricity is billed by PSE and who have an AMI meter (advanced meter) that provides usage data at the sub-hourly level. If you’re enrolled in any of PSE’s Flex programs, you are not eligible for Peak Time Savings because you will be earning rewards and incentives for those programs separately.