Coldwater Board of Public Util electricity rates

It is a smaller system, serving 6,393 residential customers, which means its fixed costs are spread across a narrow base. At 14.86¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in Michigan, 32.5% under the statewide average of 22.01¢.

Its customers use very little electricity by national standards, 574 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 Coldwater Board of Public Util customer went 29 minutes without electricity across 0.46 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.