Commercial Energy in Arlington Heights, IL: Electricity & Gas

Arlington Heights is one of the larger northwest-suburban business communities, with a busy downtown, a strong retail and dining scene, office space, and significant ongoing redevelopment. The commercial base is diverse — professional offices, medical and dental practices, restaurants and bars, multi-tenant retail, and the service businesses that fill them. For those accounts, procuring electricity and natural gas well starts with understanding the utilities and reading the bill.

Utilities in Arlington Heights

• Electricity: ComEd is the delivery utility, with commercial supplier choice available. See the ComEd commercial guide.
• Natural gas: Nicor Gas is the delivery utility, with commercial supplier choice through Choices for You. See the Nicor Gas commercial guide.

Confirm both utilities from a recent bill. The utility continues delivery and emergency service when a business chooses a supplier.

Supply vs delivery: what you can and cannot shop

A commercial bill in Arlington Heights separates into delivery and supply. Delivery is what ComEd charges to run the wires, and what Nicor charges to run the pipes, plus metering, billing, and emergency response — a regulated cost set by the Illinois Commerce Commission that stays the same no matter who supplies the energy. Supply is the commodity itself, and that is the shoppable part.

In ComEd territory, an eligible commercial account can take its electricity supply from a licensed Alternative Retail Electric Supplier (ARES) under contract or remain on ComEd's default utility supply, which resets on a set schedule. Nicor's Choices for You program does the same for gas: a certified alternative supplier provides the gas commodity while Nicor continues delivery and safety response. Switching a supplier does not touch reliability — ComEd still restores power after a storm and Nicor still handles a gas emergency. Only the supply line on the bill changes.

What shapes energy costs here

• Downtown retail and restaurants — restaurants in particular carry both electricity and significant natural gas load.
• Office accounts benefit from clean supply comparison and a bill review.
• Larger single meters (office buildings, big-box retail) may be demand-billed, making demand charges relevant.

Most small offices and shops are billed mainly on the energy they use (kWh) plus delivery, so a clean supply comparison and a careful bill review are usually the highest-value steps. Larger single meters — an office building, a supermarket, a big-box store — often carry a demand (kW) component, where the monthly peak drives a meaningful part of the charge, and in the ComEd/PJM market that peak behavior also feeds a capacity tag that follows the account into future supply cost. Restaurants sit in their own category: cooking, water heating, and space heating give them real gas load, so procuring natural gas alongside electricity matters more for them than for a typical office. Gas load is seasonal, concentrating in winter, so contract shape and term are worth weighing against the headline price.

Getting started

Provide a recent electric and (where applicable) gas bill for an Arlington Heights business — 12 months of usage helps for anything demand-billed — and the account can be reviewed and priced on matched terms through the procurement process. Have the utility account numbers, the rate class on each bill, and any existing supplier contract's end date ready so the timing aligns with the renewal window.

A practical note on timing: supply is usually shopped in a window ahead of the current term's expiration, which leaves room to compare offers rather than deciding under a deadline or drifting onto a hold-over rate. A downtown business with both electric and gas load can review the two together and align their renewal dates so the account is looked at once a year instead of twice. No savings figure is promised in advance — the aim is a clear, matched-terms comparison the business can act on.