Residential Customer Equivalent

Residential Customer Equivalent is a unit of measures used by the energy industry to denote the typical annual commodity consumption by a single-family residential customer. Also known as "RCE" for short, a single RCE represents 1,000 therms of natural gas or 10,000 kWh of electricity.
RCE is often used to help normalize the size of energy companies. Energy companies serve a number of customers that is typically different from the RCE value consumed by those customers. For example, an Local [distribution company|LDC] or ESCO may serve 50,000 customers but many of those can be commercial or industrial customers, so that same company can be said to serve 400,000 RCE.