PECO Energy serves southeastern Pennsylvania — Philadelphia and the surrounding counties — and with it the densest commercial, institutional, and multi-tenant building stock in the Commonwealth. Its Act 129 program is administered under PECO's own PUC-approved plan, and what makes filing here distinct has less to do with the measures than with the buildings they sit in.
Emergent is a registered PECO Trade Ally and files applications directly under program rules.
How the program is structured
PECO's portfolio separates into three kinds of filing. Prescriptive pays per unit against measures defined in the utility's technical reference manual, with fixed documentation. Custom pays against modeled or measured savings for measures that are not on the prescriptive list, and requires an engineering case. Demand-side measures — load reduction and response — are evaluated on their own basis again.
The important structural point is that these tracks are funded and evaluated separately. They have distinct application paths, distinct documentation expectations, and distinct review criteria. A site can file across all three in the same program year without one filing reducing another. Bundling everything into a single application is one of the more common ways value gets lost, because it pushes measures out of the track where they would have paid best.
What the custom track requires
A custom filing is an argument, not a form. It has to establish a baseline — what the affected load did before the measure — then a defensible savings calculation against it, the methodology behind that calculation, equipment documentation showing the installed measure meets the specification claimed, and a post-installation verification confirming the work matches the application.
Pre-approval matters more than anything else in that list. Custom measures generally require the application to be filed before work begins. Equipment installed first is usually ineligible, and the window does not reopen.
Where filings go wrong in PECO territory
Who files, in a multi-tenant building. This is the territory-specific failure mode. Where tenants are separately metered and pay PECO directly, the account holder for the affected load is generally the filing party; where the landlord holds the account and allocates cost internally, the landlord files. Applications submitted by the party that did not pay for the electricity get returned. In mixed buildings, the answer differs measure by measure.
Baseline in partially occupied buildings. A savings delta needs a stable starting point. In a building with variable tenancy, vacancy churn, or staged fit-outs, the pre-installation period may not represent normal operation at all. The baseline has to be defined against a period and a set of conditions that can be defended, with occupancy changes accounted for rather than ignored.
Nameplate assumptions in urban retrofits. Dense urban buildings rarely run the way the equipment schedule says. Operating hours, diversity, and load shape depart from the assumptions behind a nameplate calculation, and a savings figure built on those assumptions is easy for a reviewer to discount. Interval data on the affected circuits replaces the assumption with a record.
Multi-building portfolios treated as one project. Sites under common ownership across the territory still have their own baselines, their own measures, and their own verification. Filing them as a single project obscures the strongest measures inside the weakest.
What carries into AEC certification
The savings package built for a custom PECO filing — baseline, methodology, measured or modeled reduction, verification — is substantially the same evidence a PA Tier II Alternative Energy Credit application needs. The work is done once.
The measure keeps paying after the rebate
The rebate is a one-time capital offset. The same verified electricity reduction generates PA Tier II Alternative Energy Credits annually over the measure's remaining useful life — one AEC per MWh conserved, under 52 Pa. Code § 75.63.
The savings calculation prepared for a custom filing is the evidentiary core of a PennAEPS application. See how a rebate and a Tier II AEC stack on the same project.
For neighboring territories, see our guides for PPL Electric Utilities and FirstEnergy, or the Pennsylvania Act 129 overview.
If you have capital work planned in the next 12 months, get in touch before construction starts — that is the point at which the options are still open.
