No Usage History Yet? How a New Business Gets an Honest Electricity Quote

A new restaurant signing a lease in a 3,200-square-foot space in Frisco has zero kWh of billing history, but the walk-in cooler, hood vents, and dining room HVAC still need power priced before the doors open. As a labeled example: a similar-sized quick-service restaurant running about 18,000 kWh/month on a 9 cents/kWh supply rate would pay roughly $1,620/month in energy charges alone, before TDU delivery charges and fees. Example numbers to show the math, not a live quote. Suppliers can't pull that number from a meter that doesn't exist yet, so they build the quote a different way, and if you don't understand how, you'll either overpay through an inflated estimate or get turned away by suppliers who only quote accounts with a track record.

Every commercial account in Texas gets tied to an ESI ID, the unique identifier the TDU uses to meter and bill that specific location. On a brand-new build-out, or a suite that's never had commercial service, that ESI ID either doesn't exist yet or has no usage attached to it. So the supplier's underwriting team falls back to two data points: square footage and business type. A 2,500-square-foot retail store and a 2,500-square-foot restaurant with a full kitchen draw very different loads, so the estimate isn't just size times a flat number, it's size adjusted for what you're actually doing in the space.

Usage varies widely by business type. A restaurant with a full kitchen and long seating hours will draw far more power per square foot than a quiet retail storefront or a small salon, and a professional office falls somewhere between depending on equipment load. If a supplier's estimate for your space seems far out of line with what similar businesses in your category would use, ask them to explain why. It may mean they defaulted to a generic square-footage formula instead of accounting for your actual equipment load.

Not every supplier in the ERCOT market will quote a new account. Some commercial programs, especially index and block-and-index pricing built for larger accounts, require a longer history of interval data to model the load shape, and they'll exclude a new business outright. That's not a red flag on your business, it's just a pricing model that doesn't work without history. Plenty of other suppliers write fixed-rate contracts for new accounts off nothing but square footage and business type, you just need to know which ones to approach instead of getting a rejection and assuming no one will quote you. Expect a deposit request either way. New businesses with no established utility payment history and no business credit can expect a deposit request, our estimate rather than a published figure, of roughly one to two months of estimated usage at the quoted rate, held until the business has built a track record of on-time payments. If your LLC is brand-new, the supplier may also want a personal guarantee from an owner instead of relying on the entity's credit alone.

• Business type and specific use: fast-casual restaurant vs. full-service kitchen, medical clinic vs. general office
• Square footage of the leased or owned space
• Major equipment: walk-in coolers, commercial ovens, HVAC tonnage, server rooms, industrial machinery
• Hours of operation and days open per week
• Owner or entity credit history, since the business itself has none yet
• Whether the space is a new build-out or a takeover of a previously occupied suite

If you're moving into a space that already had a commercial tenant, whether it's a strip-mall restaurant that closed or an office suite between leases, you have a shortcut most new business owners never use. Ask the landlord for the last 12 months of electricity bills tied to that suite's ESI ID. On a triple-net lease, landlords frequently keep utility records for CAM reconciliation, so this is usually a normal request, not an unusual one. Real interval data from the same address, on the same TDU, with the same HVAC package units and electrical panel, is a far better predictor of your usage than any square-footage formula a supplier builds from scratch. It's also a fast way to walk into supplier negotiations with leverage instead of guesswork.