About NerdyWatts

NerdyWatts publishes the residential electricity tariffs that US utilities have on file, decoded from their raw filings and priced against real usage.

Why it exists

The underlying data is already public. The Utility Rate Database, maintained by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, holds the rate structures for thousands of US utilities and gives them away for free.

The problem is that it is published as a filing, not as a price. One residential tariff is spread across dozens of columns of a 737-column CSV. Tier thresholds are sometimes monthly and sometimes daily. Time-of-use schedules are 12×24 matrices of period indices. The field that looks like the price is often missing the adjustment that makes up most of the bill.

So the information is technically available and practically unusable. That gap is what this site closes.

How we work

Three commitments shape everything here:

We show our working. Every figure is produced by code from named sources, and the methodology states what is measured, what is modeled, and what we refuse to estimate at all.

We refuse to guess. Some tariffs cannot be priced from consumption alone — they need a demand reading we do not have. We publish those as reference pages with no estimate attached, rather than inventing a number.

We flag rather than fix. The upstream database contains transcription errors. We do not silently rewrite them, because a published figure has to be traceable to its source. We flag anomalies, exclude the suspect ones from rankings, and report them back upstream. Current findings are listed under coverage.

How it is funded

Nothing, at the moment. The domain and the time behind it come out of pocket, and the site carries no advertising today. Advertising may be added later to cover those costs; if it is, this page and the privacy notice will say so before it goes live.

Either way the tools stay free, with no login, no email capture, and no lead forms.

We do not sell your details to installers or suppliers, because we do not collect them. The calculator runs entirely in your browser — your usage figures are never sent anywhere.

Corrections

If a tariff here is wrong, we want to know, and the fix benefits everyone downstream of the same source data. Confirmed errors are flagged in coverage and reported back to OpenEI. Quote the rate id shown at the foot of the tariff's page when you write: contact@nerdywatts.com.

What this is not

NerdyWatts is an information source, not an adviser. Nothing here is financial advice, the estimates are not bills, and tariff availability is subject to eligibility rules that only your utility can confirm. Always check with the utility before acting on anything you read here.