You can routinely get ~2 c kWh in Chicago:

https://hourlypricing.comed.com/

That's not the total price.

It doesn't include Transmission, distribution, taxes or whatever a "Capacity Charge" is.

Capacity charge is how they reduce the shitstorms that happen when the cost of electricity skyrockets and real time pricing becomes national news. They're basically forcing you to hedge your future electricity usage.

If you shut off your bitcoin miners during the warmest parts of the day, your capacity charge will go down.

On my last bill that added 4.2c per kWh.

The bill previous was 3.9.

The majority of those fees are fixed cost so don’t scale linearly with usage.

I did the math in my area/provider and it came out to a .01 discount on the standard rate, which is not much of a discount at all. Even for the largest industrial, multi megawatt plans, which was surprising.

Bloody hell, not in the UK. £0.15/kWh is pretty standard. If you go wholesale there are microscopic portions where it dips as low as minus-£0.10/kWh but generally you're still looking at 10p a unit or more.

Of course this is moot when you're not paying the bill, as this story says.

That's amazing. When I lived in Chicago in the 1990s the rates were some of the highest in the country, ~$0.11 or so at that time.

Hourly rates/smart meters were not yet available to consumers (commercial customers could get different plans, IIRC).

My actual billed amount ranges between 10-12 c per kWh. The hourly rates are highly variable and my usage needs are pretty constant. But if you had a high variable load keeping your rate below 5 c per kWh doesn’t seem that hard in Chicago.