The most expensive kilowatt is the one you never bought

Commercial electricity conversations usually start with the price per kilowatt-hour. On a General Service demand account in Ontario, that is not the line that hurts. The distribution volumetric demand rate in Hydro One’s published 2026 example is $22.5201 per kilowatt of monthly peak — a charge for the worst fifteen minutes of the month, not for the energy you used.

The retail transmission demand rates in the same example add roughly $5.57 more per kilowatt. So a hundred kilowatts of peak costs close to $2,800 a month before a single kilowatt-hour is consumed, and shaving forty of them is worth about $13,700 a year. We put a calculator on the commercial page with those rates pre-filled and editable — put your own numbers in before you believe anyone’s business case, including ours.