City of Holyoke electricity rates

It is a smaller system, serving 15,040 residential customers, which means its fixed costs are spread across a narrow base. At 16.58¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in Massachusetts, 42.5% under the statewide average of 28.82¢.

Its customers use very little electricity by national standards, 599 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 Holyoke customer went 62 minutes without electricity across 1.26 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.

12 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 0.09 megawatts. That works out to 0.8 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.