Town of Reading electricity rates

It is a smaller system, serving 27,405 residential customers, which means its fixed costs are spread across a narrow base. At 15.86¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in Massachusetts, 45% under the statewide average of 28.82¢.

Consumption is close to the national norm at 789 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 Town of Reading customer went 46 minutes without electricity across 0.66 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.

Town of Reading offers time-of-use pricing to residential customers. 827 households were enrolled, about 3% 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.

311 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 2.44 megawatts. That works out to 11.3 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.