Data layer · shown for every 1 km site in published U.S. regions · not part of the composite score
For energy-intensive uses, the price of power is not a line item — it is the site decision.
Manufacturing, data centers, cold storage, controlled-environment agriculture: for these, electricity is among the largest recurring costs a location imposes, and it varies more than almost anything else about American geography. Power in the cheapest service territories costs less than half what it costs in the most expensive, and the gap between neighbouring territories inside one state is routinely several cents — a spread that outweighs most tax, labor, and logistics differentials a site comparison will ever surface.
Arcanium reports the average retail price of electricity for the utility that actually serves each site — not a state average, which conceals the co-operative charging eleven cents inside an investor-owned territory charging fifteen. Prices are computed from federal regulatory filings: each utility’s reported revenue divided by its delivered energy, on the residential tariff, and mapped through each utility’s authoritative service-territory boundary.
The residential rate is the published figure for a reason. It is the one class every utility in the country files on the same basis, so it compares cleanly from territory to territory, and it is the one a reader can check against a bill they have actually paid. Industrial averages are lower — often six or seven cents — but they are lower because industrial load is interruptible, high-load-factor and frequently negotiated one contract at a time. Publishing that number as the price of a place would read as a market rate when it is really a contract class, and would flatter exactly the territories where a newcomer has the least chance of being offered it.
Three honesty notes. Electricity prices vary by service territory, not by kilometer, so every site inside one territory shows one figure — the resolution of the underlying market, stated rather than interpolated away. And the figure is a realized average, not your tariff: large loads negotiate down from it, and time-of-use structures reward flexibility. Treat it as the comparable baseline between places, which is what a screen needs; the deal you strike comes after the shortlist.
The third is about the boundaries themselves. Published service areas overlap, and some are drawn as a single coarse outline over a whole region rather than surveyed around what a utility actually reaches. Where two of them claim the same ground, the site takes the rate of the utility serving the more households per unit of the area it claims — the one whose claim the meters support. That is the right answer where a metropolitan utility with millions of customers and a rural co‑operative with thirty thousand both cover a city block. It also means a genuine co‑operative pocket inside a dense metro can read as the metro utility, because at that grain the published boundaries do not record the pocket at all. The figure is the rate of the territory the site sits in; it is not a statement about which company will run the line.
The Energy Cost Index is shown alongside the nine scored variables and is not folded into the composite opportunity score.
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