Otter Tail Power Co electricity rates

It serves 50,118 residential customers in Minnesota. At 11.33¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in Minnesota, 33.2% under the statewide average of 16.95¢.

Consumption is close to the national norm at 842 kilowatt-hours a month against 871, so the rate translates fairly directly into the bill.

A shareholder-owned company whose rates are set by the state regulator, including an approved return on the capital it has invested. 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 Otter Tail Power Co customer went 155 minutes without electricity across 1.28 interruptions. The median across the 941 utilities that report this is 185 minutes.

That is better than the typical American utility, though the figure includes major storm days and can move sharply from one year to the next.

Otter Tail Power Co offers time-of-use pricing and critical peak pricing to residential customers. 17,383 households were enrolled, about 34.7% 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.

71 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 0.89 megawatts. That works out to 1.4 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.