In a recent article, the Dallas Morning News reported that Texans should not be surprised if we are asked to take a conservative approach to our power consumption this summer. According to the article, ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas) has indicated that “the state should have enough electricity, but if the summer is very hot and everyone uses more electricity than usual, people might have to conserve or face outages.”

Unfortunately, we’re familiar with outages. Rolling black-outs occur when the demand for power exceeds the statewide capacity to produce it. In order to maintain stability across the grid, areas of the state are taken offline for relatively short period of time. This provides some relief to the grid, but, as anyone who has lived through them can tell you, is a thorn in the side of residents and commercial electricity customers alike.

“Power generators will bring around 2,000 megawatts of capacity back online by firing up some old, mothballed plants,” the article says. “That’s enough to power about 400,000 homes in the summer.” Hopefully, it will be enough to get us through the coming summer, which is forecasted to be “warmer and drier than the 15-year average, although less extreme than the inferno last August.”

But it won’t provide us with a permanent solution.

In order to address the growing need for additional energy production in Texas, the PUC (Public Utility Commission) is currently considering a proposal to raise the Power Balance Penalty Cap and System High Cap to $4500 as soon as August of this year. And it won’t stop there. By 2015, the cap could be as high as $9000. The hope is that the promise of higher profits will entice energy producers to build more plants so that the state’s rising demand can be met. That’s the upside. The downside is that it will likely drive the cost of commercial electricity up.

But summer is coming. The temperature is already on the rise, and so are commercial electricity rates. We are just beginning to see the low prices we’ve been enjoying level out and rise, but there are a number of indicators in the market that suggest that commercial electricity rates will not remain as low as they have been.

What that means for business owners like you is that if you aren’t already considering taking a look at your commercial electricity arrangements, now is a good time to do so.

Here at Live Energy, our top priority and our passion is to enable you to make the best commercial electricity decisions you can make. That means we keep a close eye on the market—everything from the weather patterns to regulatory changes to the cost of natural gas and fluctuating heat rates—so that we can tell you the best time to buy, and the best product to purchase. You have dozens of choices when it comes to commercial electricity, and we’re here to help you sift through them all and find the one that fits best. If you’d like to take advantage of the fact that prices are still low while you still can, please give us a call at (817) 810-7770.

Don’t wait until the price is high to make your move. Give us the opportunity to save you money on your commercial electricity rate now.