Board of Water Electric & Communications electricity rates

It is a smaller system, serving 10,123 residential customers, which means its fixed costs are spread across a narrow base. Its 12.63¢ per kilowatt-hour sits 10.7% below the Iowa average of 14.14¢.

Consumption is close to the national norm at 808 kilowatt-hours a month against 871, so the rate translates fairly directly into the bill.

Owned by the city it serves and governed by a local board rather than the state commission. No shareholder return is built into the rate. 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 Board of Water Electric & Communications customer went 41 minutes without electricity across 0.53 interruptions. The median across the 941 utilities that report this is 185 minutes.

That is markedly better than typical. Short outage durations usually mean an underground or heavily automated network, and they are expensive to achieve, which is part of why reliable systems often carry higher delivery charges.

26 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 0.2 megawatts. That works out to 2.6 installations per thousand customers, against a median of 8 across the utilities reporting it.

Adoption is below the national median. A low retail rate reduces what solar displaces, and export compensation set at avoided cost rather than the retail rate reduces it further. What exports are actually worth.