The quoted kWh rate may be incomplete
A published electricity price may describe only one part of a bill. Your applicable tariff can depend on the service class, contract, location, billing period, and load profile. Use your utility’s current documents and account terms instead of a generic national average.
For planning, classify each charge by its basis: energy in kWh, power demand under the tariff’s measurement rules, fixed account fees, or another stated basis. This guide is a worksheet method, not a description of every utility or legal tariff requirement.
Step-by-step
- Identify the correct contract. Record utility, service class, effective date, currency, and any eligibility conditions. Ask the utility to resolve ambiguous terms.
- Extract charge bases. Separate energy prices by period, demand measurement rules, fixed charges, adjustment factors, and taxes. Do not combine different units into a single unsupported rate.
- Model your profile. Apply rates to expected consumption in each billing interval. Reconcile a sample invoice and note charges the site’s calculator does not handle.
Worked example
Illustrative example. A hypothetical bill charges USD 0.08/kWh for 1,000 kWh plus a USD 20 fixed fee. Its total is USD 100 before other charges, so the effective rate for that period is USD 0.10/kWh.
That effective rate changes if consumption changes. It should not be reused as a universal marginal price for additional mining hours.
Common mistakes
- Treating a fixed fee as proportional to every kWh.
- Applying another customer’s service-class rate.
- Leaving tariff dates and adjustment charges out of the worksheet.
Questions and answers
Should I use average or marginal cost?
Use the figure that answers your question and label it. Allocating total site costs differs from estimating the incremental expense of one additional miner.
Apply this to your setup
Copy one invoice into a worksheet with quantity, unit rate, charge basis, and effective date for every line. Reproduce the total before modeling additional miners. Keep average allocated cost separate from incremental operating cost. If a tariff term cannot be explained, ask the utility rather than replacing it with an assumed flat kWh rate.
Sources and next steps
Continue with time-of-use scheduling and demand-charge planning.
How this guide was prepared: AI-generated drafting with the linked technical references and illustrative calculations. It does not report first-hand equipment tests or a named specialist review.