Retail Energy Management in the Montgomery County

The I-270 biotech corridor through Rockville, Gaithersburg and Germantown produces laboratory load — continuous ventilation, cold rooms, precise environmental control — that behaves nothing like the office space it is often classified alongside. Pepco serves Montgomery County in PJM's PEPCO zone, distinct from BGE next door in both tariffs and distribution charges. Two things recur in audits here: lab buildings on general service schedules that a time-of-use or primary schedule would price better, and multi-tenant biotech parks where the common-area and tenant meters were never rationalized after a fit-out. Pepco also assigns time-of-use eligibility from demand history rather than on request, so a lab that grew past a threshold two years ago may still be sitting on the schedule it outgrew.

Retail is not the dominant sector in this territory, where biotech and life sciences, federal research institutes, healthcare and suburban office carry most of the commercial load. That is an advantage worth using: a retail load is unfamiliar enough locally that it is routinely priced off generic assumptions rather than off your actual usage. A high during business hours, lower overnight profile at 100,000-500,000 kWh/month is the specific thing we take to market, and the contract structure follows from it: fixed, indexed, or block-and-index, sized to your actual baseload rather than to a nameplate figure.