Commercial Energy Procurement in Illinois: The Process

Commercial energy procurement is a decision process, not a rate lookup. Done well, it produces a defensible choice on both price and contract terms for a specific Illinois account — and a paper trail showing why that choice was made. This page walks through the full sequence, what each step actually involves, and where the process most often goes wrong.

Who this is for

Facilities managers, operations managers, controllers, and CFOs preparing to price or renew commercial electricity or natural gas supply in Illinois — especially accounts with demand charges, multiple meters, or a contract nearing expiration. It applies to both ComEd and Ameren electric territory and to the Nicor, Peoples, and North Shore gas territories. Businesses in municipal-electric communities such as Naperville or Springfield don't procure electricity supply (there's no competitive supplier to choose), so for them the work is usage, efficiency, and — where applicable — natural gas.

The procurement sequence

1. Define the accounts and the decision

List every meter, the serving utility, the current supplier and contract end date, the delivery dates you need, and who signs. This inventory sounds clerical, but it's where most avoidable problems start: a forgotten meter that quietly rolls to a holdover rate, or two sites that turn out to be in different utility markets. Multi-site portfolios especially need this before anything else — see multi-location procurement.

2. Gather usage

Pull 12–24 months of bills and, for larger or load-shape-sensitive accounts, request interval data. Reconcile the interval sums to billed kWh so the data can be trusted. Usage is the raw material of pricing — a supplier prices what your account actually does across the day and year, not a generic profile, so the quality of this step sets a ceiling on the quality of every offer that follows.

3. Establish the benchmark

Identify the applicable utility default-supply comparison — the price to compare — so any offer is measured against the right baseline rather than a national average or last year's rate. The benchmark is also the honest test of whether shopping is worth it at all: sometimes utility default supply is the better outcome, and a good procurement will say so.

4. Request comparable offers

Ask eligible suppliers for offers on matched delivery dates and a matched scope of included components. This is the step most often done loosely, and it quietly breaks the comparison: a July start and an October start are different products, and one supplier's rate that excludes capacity isn't comparable to another's that includes it. Specify the delivery window and the required scope up front so the offers come back on the same footing.

5. Normalize and compare

Line up energy, capacity, transmission, line losses, any renewable obligation, ancillary services, and fees, plus volume tolerances and credit terms. A lower headline rate with wide exclusions or a tight usage bandwidth can cost more than a slightly higher, fully-loaded one. The apples-to-apples worksheet covers the mechanics; the discipline is to compare total, loaded cost and terms, not cents-per-kWh in isolation.

6. Review the contract terms

Pricing exclusions, bandwidth/swing clauses, change-in-law, termination, renewal, and post-expiration language often matter more than a small price difference. The rate gets the attention, but these terms determine what you actually pay over the life of the contract. See contract review for what to read before signing.

7. Decide, enroll, and verify

Execute the choice, confirm enrollment with the utility and supplier, and — critically — check the first bills against the agreed terms. Verification is the step most often skipped, and it's where enrollment errors, wrong rate classes, or mismatched start dates get caught while they're still easy to fix.

Where procurement goes wrong

Most poor outcomes trace to the same handful of process failures, none of which are about picking the "wrong" supplier:

• Starting too late — compressing the timeline into the last few weeks removes options and forces a decision under a deadline.
• Comparing un-matched offers — different start dates or included scopes make the lowest number look best when it isn't.
• Treating a supply-rate gap as whole-bill savings — delivery, riders, and taxes stay with the utility, so a supply change moves only part of the bill.
• Ignoring demand and capacity — for demand-billed accounts these can matter as much as the supply rate and respond to different levers.
• Skipping verification — assuming the first bill will be correct.

What procurement does not do

It does not promise a specific saving, treat a supply-rate difference as whole-bill savings, or assume a switch is always the answer. Where utility default supply is the better outcome, that is the recommendation.

What to have ready

Recent bills and account numbers, service addresses and utilities, 12–24 months of usage, interval data where available, the current executed contract and any amendments, and a meter/account inventory. A worked example shows the full flow on a single account, and what a commercial energy quote requires is the short version of the checklist.