That's a pretty good rate. We're a few towns outside of Austin, and we're paying around 10.3 cents per kWh. The rates inside of Austin appear to be in the 14-16 cents range.
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That's a pretty good rate. We're a few towns outside of Austin, and we're paying around 10.3 cents per kWh. The rates inside of Austin appear to be in the 14-16 cents range.
My take: There may be other costs per kWh that you don't see in your bill (as a residential customer) and have to do research. In my case with Alabama Power, they add a fuel cost rider to the per kWh charge, then a 4% state tax on top of that.
If your bill doesn't have a full breakdown of how much you pay for every kWh you add to your bill, it may be that the only way to determine that is to subtract the flat monthly fees. In other words, in Alabama in May, Alabama Power's website says we pay 12.6207¢/kWh. But the true rate was 15.6¢/kWh. How can you determine that? On that same page it says there's a flat rate of $14.50 per month. Then on their Rate Riders and Rules page you can find the Natural Disaster rate rider, which is currently at 50¢ per month. Combine that with the Tax Rate of 4%, then the first $15.60 of your bill is just flat rates plus tax.
I painstakingly went through the other riders and those are per kWh riders, but they don't specifically say how much (they vary). The one that's probably largest is the fuel rider charge (if it costs them more to buy coal and natural gas, etc. to fuel their plants, they pass it on to their customers).
So if you're an Alabama Power customer, subtract the first $15.60 from your bill to get what I call the total usage charge. From that divide the kWh you pulled from the grid that month and you have the real per kWh rate. That's the in-depth research I did as soon as Brandon entered the WH 3 years ago to determine if it was worth making most of my own power with solar. Back then it was $15.86 in flat fees (the natural disaster rider then was 75¢, now it's 50¢, a fee actually went down).