City of Ames electricity rates

It is a smaller system, serving 24,979 residential customers, which means its fixed costs are spread across a narrow base. At 12.10¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in Iowa, 14.4% under the statewide average of 14.14¢.

Its customers use very little electricity by national standards, 570 kilowatt-hours a month against 871 nationally. Dense housing, a mild climate or heating that runs on gas rather than electricity all push consumption down, and any of them can leave a household with a modest bill despite a high rate.

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 City of Ames customer went 39 minutes without electricity across 0.47 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.

210 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 0.88 megawatts. That works out to 8.4 installations per thousand customers, against a median of 8 across the utilities reporting it.

Adoption is above the national median, which generally tracks the retail rate more closely than it tracks sunshine. What exports are actually worth.