PCE disbursements in Nikolai

About this data

What a kilowatt-hour actually costs in ~190 rural Alaska communities, each

year, before and after the Power Cost Equalization credit — plus the price

the utility paid for its fuel.

PCE is the state programme that buys rural residential rates down toward

what Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau pay. It applies to the first 750 kWh a

month for residents and to community facilities; it does not apply to

commercial customers. So a community has two true electricity prices, and

which one matters depends on who is asking: the posted rate is what a

business pays, the effective rate is what a household pays.

The spread is the point. In FY2025 the posted residential rate ranged from

about 17 c/kWh to over $1/kWh between communities — the widest dispersion of

any price series this project carries.

Known issues & gotchas

• PCE communities are not all Alaska communities. The programme covers

participating rural utilities only. Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Kodiak and

the rest of the railbelt are absent by design — not missing data. Any

statewide comparison that treats this as "Alaska communities" is wrong; EIA

utility-level data (EIA-861) is the source for the non-PCE utilities, and is

not yet ingested.

• The host matters. www.commerce.alaska.gov is behind DataDome and 403s

every plain HTTP client, including from a residential IP (verified

2026-09-17). maps.commerce.alaska.gov — the ArcGIS server behind the same

division's maps — is not. Use it. This is the same trap recorded for

dcced_business_licenses.

• The effective rate can exceed the posted rate in rows where the utility

serves customers outside the PCE-eligible classes, and is null where a

community reported no eligible sales. Nulls are skipped, never zero-filled.

• DataYear is a FISCAL year ending 30 June, stored as 30 June of that

year. It is not a calendar year.

• The layer holds 2001 and 2006 and then a continuous run from 2010. The gaps

are in the published source, not in the fetch.

• `Comm