PUD No 1 of Benton County electricity rates

It serves 50,072 residential customers in Washington. At 8.81¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in Washington, 41.1% under the statewide average of 14.95¢.

Consumption here is high, 1,220 kilowatt-hours a month against a national average of 871. Long cooling seasons, large detached homes and electric resistance heating are the usual causes, and together they matter more to the bill than the rate does.

A public body created by the state or county, governed by an elected or appointed board rather than by shareholders. 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 PUD No 1 of Benton County customer went 53 minutes without electricity across 0.5 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.

1,124 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 9.13 megawatts. That works out to 22.4 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.