I work in energy and data, and on my own time I built a free tool that maps residential electricity and natural gas costs across the US going back 25 years.
The site is https://energy-maps.com
It is not a commercial product. There is no signup, no advertising and no tracking, and I am sharing it here because I believe this is useful data for the general public to understand and this community is full of folks who can provide constructive feedback.
The site is based on EIA and Census data. The EIA API only goes down to state level, so the site works directly from the annual 861 and 176 filings and derives an average residential price and an average monthly bill for about 1,500 electric utilities and about 1,170 gas companies. Electricity runs 2015 through 2024 and gas reaches back to 2001. Pick a state and you see every provider in it charted against the state average, with a sortable table underneath.
The data shows a couple of interesting things worth highlighting. Within a typical state, the gap between the cheapest and most expensive utility serving at least 50,000 customers is about 35 percent. In California, Texas and New York it is a factor of two or more. The single statewide averages most coverage relies on hide all of that.
From 2019 to 2024, customer weighted residential bills at municipal utilities, cooperatives and political subdivisions rose about 12 percent, against about 27 percent at investor owned utilities and 23 percent inflation. That is a pattern and not a verdict. Ownership types differ in storm and wildfire exposure, capital cycles, territory density and access to federal hydropower, and the data says what happened rather than why. I would genuinely like to hear how people inside utilities read it.
A few notes on methodology. A utility filing in several parts has its parts summed before any ratio is taken. Bundled, energy only and delivery only filings are never combined, so no synthetic all-in number exists anywhere on the site, and in restructured states the partial nature of a filing is labeled. EIA state level adjustment rows are excluded. The same definitions reproduce EIA's published state figures, and a handful of utilities were hand checked against the source workbooks.
Corrections and suggestions are welcome at [email protected]. Thanks