CORE Electric Cooperative electricity rates

It serves 165,067 residential customers in Colorado. Its 15.04¢ per kilowatt-hour sits 6.9% below the Colorado average of 16.16¢.

Consumption is close to the national norm at 864 kilowatt-hours a month against 871, so the rate translates fairly directly into the bill.

Owned by the customers it serves, with directors elected by members. Co-ops are frequently outside state rate regulation. That matters because a bill is not only the cost of generating electricity: it also carries the cost of the network, and who owns that network changes how it is paid for.

In 2024 the average CORE Electric Cooperative customer went 212 minutes without electricity across 0.93 interruptions. The median across the 941 utilities that report this is 185 minutes.

That is worse than typical. Overhead lines through wooded or storm-exposed terrain are the usual explanation, and the fix is vegetation management and circuit automation, both of which are recovered through rates.

CORE Electric Cooperative offers time-of-use pricing to residential customers. 99 households were enrolled, about 0.1% of its residential base.

These plans are opt-in almost everywhere. They reward households that can move laundry, dishwashing, water heating or electric vehicle charging out of the late-afternoon peak, and they cost more than the standard rate for households that cannot. How to tell which group you are in.

10,006 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 57.89 megawatts. That works out to 60.6 installations per thousand customers, against a median of 8 across the utilities reporting it.

Adoption here is exceptionally high. That usually means some combination of a high retail rate worth displacing, strong sunshine and favourable export rules, and it tends to bring its own regulatory argument about who covers the fixed cost of the network. What exports are actually worth.