What a household pays, and where it goes

The bill is a tariff sheet, not a market price

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A household in Everett or Marysville buys electricity from Snohomish County PUD, a public utility district run by an elected commission. What it pays is written on a rate sheet the commission adopts, not set by a market: from 2026-04-01 the residential energy charge is $0.10613 per kilowatt-hour, and a daily base charge of $0.49 to $1.86 depends on the size of the service ([1]).

Worked example, with the assumptions in the open: a home on a medium service using 900 kWh in a 30-day month pays 900 × $0.10613 = $95.52 for energy plus 30 × $0.80 = $24.00 for the connection, about $119.52 before taxes and any adjustment clause the commission has switched on. Change the usage or the service size and the number changes; the sheet does not.

The atlas carries a different, backward-looking number from the same utility: in 2024 its 346,532 count residential customers bought 3,933,257 MWh for 452,788,000 USD, an average of 11.51 cents/kWh. That is revenue divided by sales as reported to EIA-861, a realized average over every home and every month, and it is not the price on anyone's bill. The tariff and the average answer different questions; the atlas shows both and labels which is which.

Snohomish County PUD's plants and area ↗(opens the atlas in a new tab)

The utility keeps the wires and buys most of the electricity

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The district owns very little generation: 132.8 MW of operating capacity against Washington sales of 6,950,952 MWh disclosed for 2024. Its own annual report says where the rest comes from: purchased power cost $332.5 million in 2025, and $235 million of that went to the Bonneville Power Administration for about 80 percent of the energy it delivered ([2]). Washington's fuel mix disclosure says the same thing from the supply side: 86.9 percent of the district's 2024 sales were supplied through BPA, and two thirds of the mix was hydro.

So of the $119.52 in the example, most is passing through. The district's own costs are the poles, lines, substations, meters, crews and billing that make it a utility, plus the interest on its debt; the electricity itself is largely a BPA invoice. The split between those two is in the annual report's income statement, not on the bill, which is one reason a rate sheet alone cannot tell a customer what the power cost.

Snohomish County PUD's plants and area ↗(opens the atlas in a new tab)

BPA sells federal power at cost, under a rate case

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Bonneville Power Administration markets the output of the federal Columbia River dams. The plants that report into its balancing area, Bonneville Power Administration, hold 27,571.3 MW of operating capacity, most of it hydro run by the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. BPA is a federal agency that must recover its costs and repay the Treasury; it sets its prices in a public rate case every two years, and the current Priority Firm rates took effect on 2025-10-01 after FERC's interim approval ([3]).

What Snohomish pays BPA is therefore not a secret price but a formula applied to the district's contract quantities. The formula is public; the executed contract is not posted, though BPA publishes each customer's rate-period high water mark, its load forecast and its contract demand quantities, so the quantities the formula applies to are also public. BPA's own books close the loop: $4.37 billion of operating revenue in fiscal 2025, three quarters of it power sales, and $570 million of its own purchased power ([5]).

One more flow runs through the same rate: the Residential Exchange Program, under which BPA pays $286.1 million a year to the residential customers of investor-owned utilities like Puget Sound Energy, funded by all of BPA's customers. A public utility district is on the paying side of that exchange, and its rate sheet passes the cost on ([4]).

Federal hydro reporting to BPA ↗(opens the atlas in a new tab)

What is public along the way, and what is not

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Three prices in this chain are public documents: the district's tariff sheet, BPA's rate schedules, and the EIA-861 averages every utility files. Two quantities are public: the district's disclosed fuel mix and BPA's per-customer contract quantities. The annual reports of both organizations give the totals.

Three things are not public, and the atlas says so rather than guessing. The executed contract between the district and BPA is not posted. Any bilateral purchase the district makes outside BPA is reported to EIA only as a quantity, not a price. And the bill of any particular customer is exempt from disclosure by state law ([6]); the example above is arithmetic on a published sheet, not a record of anyone's account.

Washington plants by capacity ↗(opens the atlas in a new tab)