About kWh Index

kWh Index answers one question in as many ways as the public data allows: what does this cost to run? Not what it says on the box — what it costs, at the price of energy where you live, this month.

The idea

A SEER2 number is not an answer. A SEER2 number multiplied by your state’s price per kilowatt-hour is. Every page here is that multiplication: a rate published by a government agency, times a rating published by a certification programme, with both sources and both dates printed beside the result. When the rate moves, every page on the site moves with it.

Where the data comes from

• Energy prices — the U.S. Energy Information Administration, monthly by state for electricity and natural gas, and the annual EIA-861 survey for utility-level figures, service territory and reliability. Public domain.
• Heating, cooling and hot water — the U.S. EPA’s ENERGY STAR certified product data, used with attribution.
• Solar, inverters and batteries — the California Energy Commission equipment lists, a public record published for eligibility under California programmes.
• Electric vehicles — fueleconomy.gov, from the Department of Energy and the EPA. Public domain.
• Texas retail plans — the Public Utility Commission of Texas’ Power to Choose board, via its published “Export Offers” file, read daily.

What we are careful about

• A price carries its month. EIA publishes about two months behind and the utility survey about ten. A figure presented as “today’s rate” would be wrong by a season, so every page names the month or the data year it is quoting.
• A suppressed figure is absent, never zero. EIA withholds cells; 227 of 972 utilities file no reliability figures; most equipment registers leave ratings blank. A blank on this site means “not published”, and we never render it as a number.
• A row is not a product. The heat pump register publishes 282,665 rows for about twelve thousand models — one per outdoor unit and indoor coil combination. We collapse them onto the model and show the range across its configurations, rather than quoting whichever row sorted first.
• The advertised Texas rate is not the price. We keep all three published prices, sort on the usage you pick, and flag plans whose headline applies at one usage level and nowhere else.
• We do not publish a predicted bill. That needs a heating load, and a heating load is a number we would have to invent.

Who runs it

kWh Index is an independent publication operated by Ospan (Nevada, USA). It is not affiliated with EIA, EPA, DOE, the California Energy Commission, the Public Utility Commission of Texas, any utility or any manufacturer, and nothing here is an official publication. Our companion sites cover import duties and training programme outcomes.

Corrections and removal

If a page disagrees with its source, that is a bug and we want to know: tell us with the page and what you expected. A named business that believes a page about it is wrong can ask for a correction or removal; we act on those first.