ALLETE, Inc. electricity rates

What a house costs to run on this rate

Every figure on this site is watts × duty cycle × hours × days × your rate. Only the last term changes here, so this is the same arithmetic as everywhere else with 15.66¢ in place of the national average.

Annual running cost on each rate. The middle column uses this utility’s 2024 average; the right-hand column uses the state’s June 2026 average, which is both a different year and a sales-weighted blend of every utility in the state.

What a typical bill looks like on this rate

A West North Central household uses about 10,705 kWh of electricity a year — that is the RECS figure for this census division, not a national average, so it already carries the region’s climate and its mix of gas and electric heating. At 15.66¢ that is $1,676 a year, or $140 a month.

The same household on the Minnesota average of 17.52¢ would pay $1,876, and on the national average of 18.34¢ it would pay $1,963. Those three numbers differ by the rate alone: identical house, identical appliances, identical habits.

West North Central household averages from EIA RECS 2020, costed at this utility’s 2024 rate. These are conditional means — each is averaged over the households that use electricity for that purpose — so they describe the typical electric user of each end use rather than summing to one household’s bill.

The three big ones are heating, water heating and cooling, and they are big everywhere. That is why the comparisons on this site concentrate on them: a few percent off the largest item beats halving something small, whatever the rate.

What one always-on watt costs here

Anything left plugged in and drawing power does it for all 8,760 hours of the year. At 15.66¢ a single watt of standby costs $1.37 a year, against $1.61 at the national average. A house with 50 W of always-on load — a set-top box, a games console left in standby, a couple of chargers, an old second fridge’s electronics — is paying $69 a year before anything is switched on.

That is the number worth memorising on any rate: multiply the watts left on by $1.37 and you have the annual cost. The always-on calculator totals a whole house, and the guide to phantom load covers which of the usual suspects actually matter and which are folklore.

Against the other large utilities in Minnesota

All 2024, so these are comparable with each other in a way none of them is comparable with the state average above. ALLETE, Inc. to Lake Country Power is 1.1× — inside one state, for the same commodity.

Utilities in Minnesota serving 100 or more zip codes. Residential average, EIA-861 2024.

What the difference is worth

Against the national residential average of 18.34¢, this rate is 15% lower. On the 10,705 kWh a typical West North Central household uses, that is a difference of $287 a year — less than the national average, for the same electricity.

Inside Minnesota the picture is different again. The cheapest of the 3 large utilities here is ALLETE, Inc. at 15.66¢ and the dearest is Lake Country Power at 17.9¢. A household using 10,705 kWh would pay $1,676 on the first and $1,916 on the second — $240 apart, in one state, for identical consumption. On this utility’s rate the same household pays $1,676.

None of that is a switch you can make. The wires into a house are served by one utility and you do not choose it — in a deregulated state you choose who generates the electricity, while delivery stays with whoever owns the poles. What the comparison is good for is knowing whether the number on your bill is normal for where you live, and how much of it is the rate rather than your habits.

What it means that this is an investor-owned utility

An investor-owned utility is a private company with shareholders, regulated by a state commission that approves what it may charge. It has to earn a return on the poles, wires and substations it builds, and that return is part of every bill. Investor-owned utilities serve most of the American population and, in this dataset, average several cents above public power — partly because of that return and partly because they serve the dense, expensive-to-supply places.

ALLETE, Inc. serves about 113 zip codes in Minnesota. That territory is why its costs are what they are: the same electricity delivered over more miles of line to fewer meters costs more per kilowatt-hour to deliver, whoever owns the company.

Where this number comes from

Form EIA-861 is the annual census every US electric utility files. The residential figure is that utility’s total residential revenue divided by its total residential sales for the year, which makes it a true all-in average: the fixed monthly charge is already inside it, spread across the kilowatt-hours. That is why it usually sits a little above the energy charge printed on a tariff sheet, and why it is the right number to multiply an appliance’s kilowatt-hours by.

It is also an average across every residential customer that utility has, on every rate plan. If you are on a time-of-use tariff, an all-electric discount or a low-income rate, yours differs — the guide to time-of-use pricing covers what that changes.

Questions

Source: NREL/OpenEI, U.S. Electric Utility Companies and Rates: Look-up by Zip Code (2024), from U.S. EIA Form EIA-861, 2024. U.S. Government work, public domain.

How every figure here is computed · Where the data comes from