TOU-DR-1 Desert Baseline Region

Estimates, not quotes. We run three made-up but realistic households through this tariff hour by hour for a full year — including the way air conditioning loads the afternoon and an EV loads the small hours. Your own bill depends on when you actually use electricity, which is exactly the thing a per-kWh number hides.

This is a time-of-use plan, which means the clock decides your bill as much as the meter does. At the worst hour you pay 57.8¢ a kWh; at the best hour, 27.0¢ — 2.1× apart for identical electricity.

That gap is worth real money only if you can move load into it. Every kilowatt-hour a day you shift from 4pm to midnight is about $112 a year. A dishwasher run is roughly 1.5 kWh; an EV commute charge is 8 to 12. If your day is fixed — you are home in the evening and the air conditioner runs when it runs — a plan like this costs you more, not less.

There is a usage cliff to watch. The first 15.9 kWh you use each day are billed at 27.0¢; past that line the rate steps up to 37.7¢ — 39% more for every unit after. The last kilowatt-hour of a heavy month is the expensive one, which is why cutting a little off a big month saves more than cutting the same amount off a small one.

Before a single kilowatt-hour moves, this plan charges $290 a year in fixed fees. On the apartment above that is 13% of the whole bill; on the house with a car charging in it, 5%. Fixed charges are invisible in a cents-per-kWh comparison and they punish small users hardest — if you use very little electricity, the headline rate is the least important number on this page.

Expect the bill to move with the calendar. The same family home costs about $467 in July and $272 in February — a $195 spread driven by heating and cooling far more than by anything you chose. Budget against the July figure, not the average, and a summer bill stops being a surprise.

Everything below stays inside Desert Baseline Region. Your zone is set by where you live, not by anything you can pick, so a cheaper plan in a different zone is not an option you have.

Measured against the other residential plans this utility files, a family home lands 2nd cheapest of 8. The cheapest option, TOU-DR Desert Baseline Region, would run about $10 a year less.

Against DR - Desert Baseline Region, which looks like the plan you land on by default, this one comes out $368 less per year (8%). We infer the default from the tariff structure rather than a flag in the data, so confirm it against your own bill before you switch.