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What Ontario Businesses Should Do Before the May 1 GA Peak Season Begins
Ontario’s Global Adjustment (GA) peak season begins May 1, 2026, and the June 15 opt-in/opt-out deadline for the Industrial Conservation Initiative (ICI) is fast approaching. This blog post is designed to educate energy managers, facility managers, and operations leaders at Ontario industrial and large commercial businesses on how to prepare.
This pack includes the long-form blog post and a closing call to action linked to Active Business Services’ Global Adjustment Optimization page. For additional content development or amendments, please contact marketing.
The Class A Playbook: What Ontario Businesses Should Do Before the May 1 GA Peak Season Begins
What if curtailing your energy usage during just five key hours this year could shape your electricity bill for the next twelve months? For Ontario’s largest industrial and commercial consumers, that’s the reality of how the Global Adjustment (GA) charge works under the Industrial Conservation Initiative (ICI). Those five hours shape an entire year of charges, and the window to prepare is closing fast.
The 2026 GA peak season begins May 1, and the June 15 opt-in/opt-out deadline is only weeks away. A single summer afternoon of high consumption can lock in elevated GA charges for a full year, while a well-executed curtailment strategy can translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings.
Who Qualifies as a Class A Customer?
Class A status isn’t automatic. Use this as a quick reference to confirm where your organization stands before the June 15 deadline.
- Your facility’s average monthly peak demand exceeds 1 MW during the IESO-defined base period
- Your facility operates in a qualifying industrial sector with a lower threshold of 500 kW
- Your Local Distribution Company (LDC) has notified you of your eligibility status (notifications go out before May 31)
- You have actively opted in — eligibility alone does not make you Class A
If your facility doesn’t meet these thresholds, you fall into Class B, where GA is charged on a volumetric basis per kWh consumed. The opt-in decision is significant because Class A is the unique mechanism providing organizations with the ability to use curtailment to actively control their GA exposure.
What Is Global Adjustment?
The Global Adjustment (GA) is a charge that appears on the electricity bills of virtually every commercial and industrial customer in Ontario. The charge funds conservation initiatives, pays contracted generators, and maintains the province’s generation capacity. It represents all electricity costs that exceed the hourly market price. For large industrial consumers, the GA is typically the single largest line item on their electricity invoice, often representing more than half of the total bill.
The Industrial Conservation Initiative (ICI) is the program that gives eligible large consumers a mechanism to actively influence how much of that cost they bear. Under the ICI, Class A members do not pay a set volumetric fee; instead, their portion of the GA is calculated by comparing their power usage to the province’s five peak demand periods annually.
How Class A Works
Class A customers have their GA charges determined by their peak demand factor, which is calculated based on how much electricity they consume during the five highest-demand hours on the Ontario grid in a given year. Your portion of the GA pool decreases if your facility successfully lowers its demand during those critical five hours. However, should your consumption rise during these peak periods, your organization’s costs will then increase.
A strong curtailment hit rate across the top-five peaks can translate into meaningful reductions on the GA line of your electricity invoice. For some facilities, that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The 2026 Dates That Matter
- May 1, 2026 - New GA peak season begins. Hours begin to count toward your peak demand factor.
- Before May 31, 2026 - Eligible customers are notified by their Local Distribution Company (LDC) of their ICI eligibility status.
- June 15, 2026 - Opt-in/opt-out decisions are due. Missing this deadline means your election carries over by default.
What to Do Before Summer Hits
Outlined below is how to ensure you are Class-A-ready.
1. Review last year’s peak hit rate
Pull your curtailment performance from the 2025 season. How many of the top-five peaks did you respond to? Where did you miss, and why? Understanding this pattern is the first step to improving it, where a facility that curtailed on three of five peaks saved significantly.
2. Confirm curtailment capacity with operations
An energy manager’s curtailment plan is only as good as the operations team’s ability to execute it. Walk through your load-shed capacity with operations leadership now, before July. What can realistically come offline in 15 minutes? What can’t? Agreeing on that in advance can prevent a mid-peak scramble.
3. Set up a peak notification channel
Peak forecasting is only useful if the alert reaches the right people quickly. Whether you’re using IESO’s public tools, a third-party notification service, or an energy advisor’s alerts, confirm that your notification chain is working and that the person who needs to act will receive the message promptly. Ensure to test the channel before June.
4. Align finance and operations leadership on response protocols
Curtailment decisions sometimes conflict with production targets. A brief pre-season alignment meeting between finance, operations, and whoever manages your energy program is worth more than any amount of reactive coordination in August.
5. Run a dry-run curtailment before summer
If you haven’t stress-tested your curtailment procedure since last year, do it in May. A dry run surfaces equipment issues, communication gaps, and response time problems while there’s still time to fix them.
6. Partner with an Energy Management Advisor
For most industrial and commercial organizations, GA optimization is one priority competing against many. Monitoring market conditions, interpreting IESO forecasting, coordinating curtailment across shifts, and keeping finance and operations aligned is a significant ongoing commitment.
Working with an experienced energy management partner means that work doesn’t fall through the cracks. Active Business Services monitors peak conditions on your behalf, provides timely alerts through our ActiveAI™ platform, and works directly with your team to build a curtailment strategy that reflects your actual operational constraints. For organizations participating in the ICI for the first time, we also handle the analysis behind the opt-in/opt-out decision so you’re not making a year-long financial commitment without the data to back it up.
The Opt-In/Opt-Out Decision
An importation consideration is whether Class A will actually save you money given your specific load profile and operational flexibility. For example, a facility with consistent, heavy load and limited ability to curtail may find that Class B pricing is more predictable and less expensive. A facility with strong curtailment capacity and clear peak patterns may find that Class A delivers substantial savings. The answer depends on your data.
This is the natural point to run the analysis, and it’s where having an experienced energy advisor in your corner makes a measurable difference. Active Business Services offers a complimentary assessment that models your specific load profile against both Class A and Class B outcomes so you can make the June 15 decision with confidence rather than guesswork.
Where Most Businesses Leave Money on the Table
Even Class A customers who are engaged with the program often underperform. The most common failure points are:
- Missing top-five peaks due to noisy or late forecasting. A peak alert that arrives 30 minutes later is often too late.
- Curtailing too aggressively. Over-curtailment that hurts production creates pressure to abandon the program entirely after one difficult summer.
- Curtailing too little. Partial curtailment that doesn’t meaningfully reduce peak demand still costs you the production disruption with none of the savings.
- Running a generic strategy across different facility types. A food processor and an auto parts plant operate under fundamentally different constraints. The curtailment strategy should reflect that.
The facilities that consistently achieve strong peak demand factor reductions are the ones working with advisors who understand both the grid mechanics and the operational realities of their industry.
The Deadline is Approaching
May 1 is the start line, and June 15 is the deadline that determines your options for the full year. Coming into summer with a tested curtailment plan, aligned teams, and a clear opt-in/opt-out decision can position your organization to capture the full value of Class A participation.
Learn more about Active Business Services’ Global Adjustment Optimization program or reach out to book a complimentary assessment before the June 15 deadline.