Oregon commercial building operators deal with two major investor-owned utilities — Portland General Electric (PGE) and Pacific Power — and their tariff structures are not the same. If you manage a portfolio that spans the Portland metro and the rest of Oregon, you may be optimizing for completely different demand charge windows depending on which buildings are on which utility. This guide is for facilities managers who need to understand what they're actually paying for.
A note before we start: utility tariffs change, and the specific rate values can be updated through Oregon PUC proceedings without much notice to end customers. Always verify current rates directly against your utility's current schedule tariff filings at the Oregon PUC website (puc.oregon.gov). This guide describes the structural features of PGE and Pacific Power commercial tariffs as they stood in early 2026 — the structures themselves are more stable than the specific dollar figures.
PGE Commercial Tariffs: What You're Likely On
PGE serves the Portland metro area — Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, and parts of adjacent counties. For commercial buildings, the most common rate schedules are:
Schedule 32 (General Service, Medium Demand): Applies to commercial customers with demand typically in the 20–200 kW range — a mid-size office building, a multi-tenant retail strip, a smaller institutional building. Schedule 32 includes both a demand charge component and an energy charge, with time-of-use pricing in recent versions. The demand charge is applied to the highest 15-minute interval during on-peak hours (defined as specific weekday afternoon windows, typically 4–9 PM in the summer season and different windows in the winter season under the time-differentiated structure).
Schedule 29 (General Service, Large Demand): For higher-demand customers, typically 200 kW and above. This schedule has both a summer and winter demand charge rate, a facilities charge, and an energy charge. The demand charge under Schedule 29 has historically included a ratchet provision — the billed demand cannot fall below a specified percentage of the highest measured demand during the trailing period. This is the ratchet clause discussed in our earlier post on demand charges, and it matters for large buildings that have occasional demand spikes.
Schedule 48 (Time-of-Use, Medium General Service): An opt-in TOU schedule for customers who want more granular on-peak/off-peak energy pricing in exchange for time-differentiated demand charges. Buildings with flexible HVAC loads can benefit significantly from this schedule compared to Schedule 32, because the off-peak energy rate is meaningfully lower and the demand charge only applies to on-peak intervals.
The peak demand window under PGE's current TOU structures generally runs 5 PM to 10 PM in the summer season and 6 AM to 10 AM in the winter season — a split-peak structure that penalizes both the morning startup load in winter and the afternoon cooling load in summer. If your building's biggest demand event is a Monday morning HVAC ramp-up from weekend setback, the winter morning peak window is the relevant constraint.
Pacific Power Commercial Tariffs: Key Differences from PGE
Pacific Power serves areas outside the Portland metro — the Willamette Valley south of Salem, the Oregon coast, eastern Oregon, and large portions of southern Oregon. For commercial buildings in these service territories, the main commercial schedules are structurally similar to PGE but with important differences in peak window timing and seasonal structure.
Schedule 74 (General Service, Large Commercial): Pacific Power's primary commercial tariff for mid-to-large buildings. Includes demand charges, energy charges, and a time-differentiated rate structure. Pacific Power's peak demand window has historically been defined as weekdays 6 AM to 10 PM — a much broader window than PGE's tighter afternoon/morning peak structure. Under a broad peak window, the demand charge applies to any 15-minute interval in that 16-hour window, which means the morning HVAC startup and the afternoon cooling peak are both in-scope for demand charge contribution.
Seasonal rate structure: Pacific Power's summer season demand rates are typically higher than winter rates, with the differential varying by service territory. In years with above-average summer heat events in southern Oregon (which has seen significant heat stress in recent years), the summer peak demand charge can be a larger fraction of total energy cost than in the Portland metro due to higher cooling loads against a backdrop of already-elevated demand charge rates.
The practical implication: if you're managing buildings on Pacific Power, the broad 6 AM–10 PM peak window means you have less flexibility to shift HVAC load to off-peak hours. Pre-conditioning at 5 AM (before the peak window opens) is one of the limited avoidance strategies available. Any control system operating against Pacific Power tariffs needs to know the 6 AM window start precisely — starting pre-conditioning at 5:00 AM rather than 6:30 AM is the relevant intervention window.
The CEPO Rider: Demand Response for Commercial Buildings
Both PGE and Pacific Power offer voluntary demand response programs for commercial customers — programs where the utility pays you to reduce load during high-grid-stress events (typically hot summer days when grid demand peaks across the region). These programs go by different names: PGE has offered curtailment programs under its CL (curtailment load) program structures; Pacific Power has had demand response components in its tariff schedules.
We're not going to pretend we have detailed expertise in the current state of every demand response program — these programs change in availability and payment rates, and you should contact your utility account representative directly. What's relevant to facilities managers is this: demand response programs typically require the ability to reduce building load by a defined kW amount (often 10–50 kW minimum for a commercial building) within 30 minutes of a dispatch signal. Buildings with predictive HVAC control — including Celaxis — are well-positioned for demand response participation because the pre-conditioning capability means the building can absorb some demand reduction events without comfort impact.
We're not saying demand response participation is automatically worth pursuing for every building — the payment rates need to exceed the operational complexity and the frequency of dispatch events needs to be manageable. But for portfolio managers looking at 10+ buildings, demand response revenue can offset a meaningful fraction of energy management software costs.
Reading Your Bill: Finding the Demand Charge Line
Most commercial utility bills are not clearly structured. Here is how to find the demand charge on a PGE or Pacific Power commercial invoice:
PGE bills will typically show separate line items for "Customer Charge," "Demand Charge (kW)," "On-Peak Energy (kWh)," and "Off-Peak Energy (kWh)" if you're on a TOU schedule. The demand charge line will show both the kW quantity (your measured peak) and the per-kW rate. On non-TOU schedules, there will be a single demand charge line and a single energy charge line.
Pacific Power bills show similar structure — "Demand Charge" as a line item with the peak kW reading and rate. Look for the line that has a unit of "kW" rather than "kWh" — that's your demand component.
Once you've found the demand charge lines across your last 12 months of bills, the analysis is straightforward: what months set the highest demand peaks, what was the kW value, and what is your per-kW rate? For PGE commercial customers, demand charge rates have historically been in the $8–$18/kW range depending on schedule and season. For Pacific Power large commercial, rates are in a similar range.
Optimization Windows by Tariff Structure
Knowing your tariff structure tells you which optimization strategy is relevant:
If you're on a PGE TOU schedule with an afternoon peak window (5–10 PM summer), the primary opportunity is pre-cooling: move HVAC load from the 5–9 PM window to the 11 AM–3 PM window. Buildings with high thermal mass can absorb the afternoon heat load while running minimal HVAC in the peak window. This is the classic demand charge avoidance strategy and the one with the highest dollar value per intervention.
If you're on PGE's winter morning peak (6–10 AM), the opportunity is different: manage the Monday morning recovery from weekend setback so that the HVAC ramp-up doesn't create a peak demand spike in the on-peak window. Start heating before 6 AM on Monday mornings (targeting full recovery by 5:58 AM), then maintain. This prevents the high-demand "cold soak recovery" spike from hitting during on-peak billing.
If you're on Pacific Power with the 6 AM–10 PM broad window, the pre-conditioning window is narrower: only the 4–6 AM period is reliably off-peak for demand avoidance. The strategy focuses on overnight pre-cool (cooling aggressively from 3–5:30 AM to reach target temperature before 6 AM) and managing afternoon loads through zone-level setpoint scheduling rather than chiller cycling — using the thermal mass to absorb afternoon gain without full-load HVAC operation during the costly 2–5 PM window.
Where Most Buildings Leave Money on the Table
The optimization windows above require two things that most buildings don't have: knowledge of the exact tariff peak window (not just "it's expensive in the afternoon" but the exact time boundary), and a control system that can issue setpoint commands precisely timed to that window based on the building's thermal response characteristics.
Buildings we connect in the Portland metro are typically leaving $400–1,200 per month on the table in avoidable demand charges — not because the facilities team is doing anything wrong, but because the BMS schedule was set before the current tariff structure was in place and hasn't been updated to account for TOU peak windows. The schedule runs full HVAC at 2 PM because that's when it was programmed to. The tariff peak window that penalizes 2 PM operations came into effect later.
The most common missed opportunity we see: buildings on PGE TOU schedules where the HVAC is running at full cooling load from 4–8 PM because the BMS schedule says to, when the building could pre-cool from 11 AM–2 PM and coast through the peak window on thermal mass. The total kWh consumed is the same or slightly less. The peak demand charge contribution is 40–60% lower. The intervention is a scheduling change, not a hardware upgrade.