Who usually orders the temporary electrical service from the electric utility needed during construction?
The engineer,
The owner,
or
The contractor?
Usually the builder or GC in my experience.
In years past the GCs would always take care of temporary power.
Now they just tell us to bring our own generator.
Steve's experience is what I see here in residential. They are on a generator until the TUG when the panel is set(usually as soon as the roof is black). Then you get one GFCI in the garage. Sometimes that ends up looking like Chevy Chase Christmas if you have a lot of trades stacked in there. When the production builders are rolling and the mushrooms are marching down the street they will also grab power from the building next door, across the street or 2 doors away. The problem is if you have a closed house in the middle of all that and the homeowner catches a trade using their water and power. My wife has just offered to pick up a month's bill to smooth those things over.
In my area we have to order it, we need a job number from the utility to put on the permit which has to be sealed by us, has been that way ever since i can remenber, if the engineer, or owner calls it in, we have to do it all over, shows how things differ from state to state.
In my area I would would put in the call to the power company
I should say on my jobs as the Electrical contractor.
In this area no new service is energized without the electrical inspector calling the utility telling them to go ahead.
That being the case it takes an EC to start the process of getting a new service.
Now that said, the services billing will always be in the GCs name or if there is no GC the service will be in the projects owners name.
Usually the temps we do are billed T&M to the GC until the electrical contract for the project is signed. Once the electrical contract is given out we usually own maintaining the temps.
We have the costs of temporary electric worked into the contract. We install Temp service, Have it inspected, Inspector notifies POCO. The owner or the General Contractor receives the bill.