I billed every U.S. utility's standard residential tariff in NREL's URDB and compared it with what households actually paid

Description and use

Validation of NREL URDB tariffs against EIA‑861 2025 shows overall alignment, with older entries and data errors causing deviations.

Problem

Determine whether the standard residential tariffs in NREL's URDB reflect the prices households actually paid.

Outcome

Out of 883 utilities (87% of 99.7 million core households), the customer‑weighted median ratio of URDB bill to EIA‑861 price is 0.98; 88% of households are within 25%. Current tariffs (effective 2025+) have a median of 1.04, while older tariffs (pre‑2023) have a median of 0.81. Outliers are mainly due to entry errors or mis‑assigned utilities.

Workflow

• Select each utility’s standard residential tariff from URDB without considering any price or optional attributes.
• Bill the tariff for the utility’s average household using the bundled residential revenue and sales from EIA‑861 2025.
• Compute the ratio of the URDB bill to the EIA‑861 price for each household.
• Aggregate results by median ratio and percent within 25% error.
• Segment utilities by effective year, OpenEI update status, ownership type, and identify outliers.
• Manually verify the largest outliers and correct data entry errors.
• Document findings and publish the code and data in the urdb‑audit repository.

Evidence

The rate for each utility is chosen without looking at any price (approved, residential, in effect, not optional by name, not time‑of‑use, no demand charge; then URDB's default flag, then the newest).

Source

Overall it works. The customer‑weighted median ratio of URDB bill to EIA‑861 price is 0.98, and 88% of priced households are within 25%.

Source

Code, the one‑row‑per‑utility CSV with every URDB label used, the pre‑registrations and the hand checks are in urdb‑audit 0.4.0: https://github.com/munimtechnologies/urdb-audit/blob/main/docs/price.md

Source