Every summer, ERCOT's four coincident peaks decide what your building pays in transmission charges for the next twelve months. BOT forecasts the risk daily, pre-cools and coasts through the window, and verifies the avoided kW at 15-minute resolution — on our own buildings first, then on yours.
Each month from June through September, ERCOT records the single highest 15-minute interval of system-wide demand. Those four intervals are the four coincident peaks — the 4CPs. Under ERCOT's published 4CP methodology, your building's average draw during those four windows sets its transmission cost responsibility for the entire following year.
Read that again, because it is the strangest pricing rule on a Texas commercial electric bill: roughly one hour of operation, spread across four summer afternoons, prices twelve months of transmission charges. A building that happens to be running flat-out at 4:45 PM on the wrong August day pays for that coincidence until the next season resets the number.
The flip side is the opportunity. Commercial buildings burn roughly 40% of U.S. electricity, and most of them treat the transmission line on the bill as weather — something that happens to you. It isn't. If your building simply draws less during those four intervals, your share of the grid's transmission costs falls. No enrollment, no aggregator contract, no rebate paperwork. It is a pure operating play, which is exactly why it rewards buildings that are actually operated. For the full primer on the mechanics, see our explainer, ERCOT 4CP, explained.
"Demand charge reduction" is really two disciplines that get lumped together. One is set by your worst 15 minutes; the other by the grid's. They respond to different tactics, and confusing them wastes effort.
| NCP — Distribution demand | 4CP — Transmission demand | |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it | Your building's single highest 15-minute interval each month, regardless of grid conditions. | The grid's highest 15-minute interval in each of June–September; your draw during those four windows. |
| Billing horizon | Resets monthly — one careless morning costs you thirty days. | Sets your transmission ratio share for the entire following year. |
| When it happens | Whenever your equipment stacks up — classically the 8:00 AM all-at-once start. | Hot summer weekday afternoons, typically late in the day, June–September. |
| Can you see it coming? | Yes — it's your own load. Meter it and you know. | Not with certainty. Nobody knows which afternoon set the peak until the month closes. Forecasting is the whole game. |
| How you fight it | Staggered starts, demand limiting, startup-surge trimming, pre-cooling into the morning. | Daily peak-risk forecast → pre-cool ahead of the risk window → coast through it drawing less. |
Both games run on the same instrument: interval data. If you only see your load as a monthly kWh total, you are playing neither. More on the monthly game in demand charge reduction for commercial buildings, and on where these lines sit on the bill in commercial electricity rates in Texas.
Here is the honest problem with 4CP: the peak interval is only declared after the fact. Curtail every hot afternoon and you burn comfort, equipment hours, and tenant goodwill on days that didn't matter. Curtail none and one ordinary Thursday sets your transmission bill. Most buildings resolve this by doing nothing, which is a choice — just an expensive one.
BOT's ERCOT 4CP program publishes a daily probabilistic 4CP-risk outlook for the system peak window, June through September, driven by load and weather data. We publish risk levels with confidence intervals — not pretend-certain calls — and we verify the forecast after every season against ERCOT's declared peaks. Each morning, Ada, our optimization intelligence, consumes that risk read and folds it into the day's operating plan, with our operators reviewing the call. Nothing here runs unsupervised.
The playbook itself is old-fashioned building physics. On a high-risk day, the building pre-cools ahead of the risk window, banking cooling in its thermal mass while grid demand is still moderate. When the window opens, it coasts — compressors backed off, the space riding its stored cooling through the critical intervals. Tenants feel a well-run building; the meter shows a building drawing less power during exactly the fifteen minutes that price next year.
The same machinery handles the monthly NCP game. Demand-response modeling on one of our buildings, 11111 Wilcrest Green, built on its real daily peaks, shows startup-surge trimming alone is worth roughly $3,500–$8,000 per year depending on cap depth. And it executes cheaply: the Atenea BAS runs on edge microcontrollers with zero licensing — we built it for under $50 per controller, while other landlords pay $50–200K a year in BAS licensing to do less.
A curtail call that isn't measured is a story. After each season we document the avoided coincident-peak kW, and that documentation feeds the same M&V record as everything else we do: continuous AI-driven measurement and verification at 15-minute resolution, IPMVP Option C, with baseline models holding R² above 0.96. Most M&V in this industry is a $10–25K study performed once a year; ours runs automatically every 15 minutes, so the peak we shaved on an August afternoon shows up in the record that same day.
We proved this on our own money first. We own and operate 4 buildings totaling ~421,000 SF in Houston, with 19+ years of below-CPI operating expenses. At 800 Wilcrest, annual energy use fell roughly 50% from 2015 to 2025 (time-normalized, not weather-normalized). At 11200 Richmond — acquired September 2025 — we verified a 22.4% energy reduction about eight months in. And on one building, peak demand dropped 36%, from 372 kW to 239 kW. The platform behind it, RMS, also serves ~600 K-12 schools and Harris County, with 44 validated M&V reports across 15 buildings.
Send a recent utility bill — we'll show you what's hiding in your interval data: where your demand and transmission money is going, and what a pre-cool-and-coast season would hold onto. Free RMS trial — all it needs is one recent utility bill.