Dakota Electric Association electricity rates

It serves 108,097 residential customers in Minnesota. At 14.00¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in Minnesota, 17.4% under the statewide average of 16.95¢.

Consumption here is below the national norm at 716 kilowatt-hours a month against 871, which softens the effect of the rate on the final bill.

Owned by the customers it serves, with directors elected by members. Co-ops are frequently outside state rate regulation. 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 Dakota Electric Association customer went 25 minutes without electricity across 0.35 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.

Dakota Electric Association offers time-of-use pricing to residential customers. 17 households were enrolled, about 0.1% 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.

1,548 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 15.35 megawatts. That works out to 14.3 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.