Powerwall on ComEd Hourly Pricing

In plain English: ComEd’s Hourly Pricing program bills at the live wholesale price, hour by hour.

No fixed windows here — the price changes every hour, occasionally goes negative overnight, and spikes on hot evenings. A battery on hourly pricing is a trading desk, and it needs a clock-watcher.

What this plan means for a Powerwall

Hourly pricing inverts the usual problem: there is no schedule to memorize, only a feed to watch. The winning behavior is simple to state — charge when hours are cheap (occasionally below zero), discharge when they spike — and impossible to execute by hand at 7 PM on a Tuesday. Illinois summer spikes can put an evening hour at several times the overnight price; negative overnight hours literally pay you to fill the pack.

SolDial ingests the hourly feed for your account and prices every stored kWh against the hours it will actually offset — so “charge the Powerwall tonight” happens on the nights it’s genuinely cheap, not on a fixed schedule that hourly pricing makes meaningless.

The automations worth having

Price-threshold charging (“fill when below X¢”); spike response (“cover the house when above Y¢”); EV charging steered into the cheap hours nightly; and storm watch. On this plan more than any other, the software is the strategy.

Does this apply to my exact situation?

Plans vary by zone, season, and enrollment vintage, and utilities revise rates. SolDial matches your account to the actual published schedule from ~50,000 tariffs and recomputes the strategy — and the honest savings math — from your windows, not a blog’s snapshot. If your plan differs from this page, the app follows your plan.