Los Alamos County electricity rates

It is a smaller system, serving 7,742 residential customers, which means its fixed costs are spread across a narrow base. At 14.15¢ per kilowatt-hour it tracks the New Mexico average of 14.12¢ closely, which is what you would expect from a utility large enough to shape that average itself.

Consumption here is below the national norm at 661 kilowatt-hours a month against 871, which softens the effect of the rate on the final 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 Los Alamos County customer went 30 minutes without electricity across 0.29 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.

480 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 2.83 megawatts. That works out to 62 installations per thousand customers, against a median of 8 across the utilities reporting it.

Adoption here is exceptionally high. That usually means some combination of a high retail rate worth displacing, strong sunshine and favourable export rules, and it tends to bring its own regulatory argument about who covers the fixed cost of the network. What exports are actually worth.