On March 19, 2024, Fayetteville Public Works Commission in North Carolina opened twelve bids for four 2,500 kVA three-phase pad-mount transformers and the unit prices ran from $64,285 to $219,000, a 3.4x spread on one stock number, with quoted lead times from 18 weeks to 64. Every one of those twelve numbers is a public record, and until today none of them was in a table anyone could search. The Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book launches as version 0.1 with 2,712 award lines and 2,567 vendor bids, including the losing ones, transcribed from public utility, municipal, state and federal procurement documents, normalized to $/kVA, $/kW, $/ton and $ per unit, and published as 51 price bands that each carry n, the buyer count, the states and the award-date range.
This piece gives away the headline bands, walks through the five portals the rows came from and the rules that turned a PDF line into a band, prints the coverage table and the biases, reads the pad-mount, switchgear, genset and chiller bands, credits every buyer whose tab we used, and says what version 1 adds.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (compiled from public procurement awards and bid tabulations; as of September 2026)
Across 297 award lines dated January 2024 to August 2026, the median public price was $115 per kVA for single-phase 10 to 50 kVA units (n=59), $89 for single-phase 75 to 167 kVA (n=90), $153 for three-phase 75 to 167 kVA (n=26), $69 for three-phase 225 to 500 kVA (n=60, 11 buyers in 11 states), $47 for three-phase 750 to 1,000 kVA (n=29) and $30 for three-phase 1,500 to 2,500 kVA (n=27, 6 buyers), with the interquartile range on the 225 to 500 kVA band running $53 to $84.
What the Price Book Is
Version 0.1 is public record only: 2,712 award lines from 141 buyers in 44 states, award dates April 2016 to September 2026, every row with the URL of the document that states the price. There is no panel, no contributed quote and no survey behind any number here. A row is one awarded line item (a 500 kVA pad-mount at $26,544) or, where the document gives only a total, one award with the unit price left blank. A bid row is one vendor’s price on one line, so the Fayetteville tab above yields one award row and twelve bid rows. Bands are computed from award rows that carry a unit price, a rating and no bundled installation.
The unit conventions are the ones a buyer uses to check a quote. Distribution transformers are $/kVA by phase, mount and kVA band. Generator sets are $/kW by stationary or portable and kW band. Chillers are $/ton by cooling type and tonnage. Substation and power transformers are $ per unit by HV voltage class, because only 14 of the 33 power transformer rows state MVA. MV switchgear is $ per lineup for metal-clad and $ per unit for pad-mounted switches; none of the 155 switchgear documents states a section count, so $/section waits for version 1. Each band prints n, buyers, states, min, p25, median, p75, max, the award-date range and the share of rows from the largest single buyer, in two windows: all (2015 on) and recent (awards dated January 1, 2024 or later).
What it is not is a survey of what a datacenter developer pays. The buyers are Austin Energy, Ocala Electric, Greenville Utilities, the Air Force and 137 others who buy to a public spec in small lots. Those prices are still the only dated, linkable transaction prices that exist for this gear, and the $2,850 category report carries none.
Five Portals That Publish Prices
We tried dozens of procurement sites. Most sit behind a login (BidNet, Bonfire, PlanetBids) or post the solicitation and never the tabulation. Five kinds of source produced 2,554 of the 2,712 rows; state portals and school boards gave the rest.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (n=2,712, public awards 2016 to 2026)
Open-data purchase-order lines are 1,671 rows, Legistar board memoranda and attached bid tabs 379, USAspending federal awards 220, utility websites 177, state portals 129, city websites 107 and BoardDocs school boards 29.
The first and largest is the City of Austin open-data portal, Socrata dataset 3ebq-e9iz, which publishes every commodity purchase-order line with description, quantity, unit price, vendor and date, no login required. Austin Energy’s lines from 2019 on are 1,665 rows of the Book; one is a 2,500 kVA feed-through pad-mount at $68,851 from WESCO on July 8, 2026, $27.54 per kVA.
The second is the Legistar public API. Any city on Granicus Legistar answers webapi.legistar.com/v1/<client>/Matters with a title filter, and the attachments endpoint returns the bid tab PDF or the staff report with the bidder table. Riverside, Ocala, Idaho Falls, Naperville, Mesa, Silicon Valley Power and a dozen counties came in this way, 28 clients in all. The Idaho Falls Power tab of September 27, 2022 has seven vendor columns; Ocala’s quarterly stock-contract price list moves a 2,500 kVA ERMCO unit from $54,322 in Q2 2022 to $69,647 in Q1 2024.
The third is the pair of North Carolina municipal utilities that post full multi-vendor tabs on their own sites. Greenville Utilities Commission posts a tab sheet for every past bid, 46 of them from 2019 to 2025 with up to eleven bidders per line and a total-ownership-cost evaluation; its RFB 25-43 of August 2025 awarded 150 kVA pad-mounts at $10,100.69 against eleven bids with a 14-week delivery. Fayetteville PWC posts its tabs as PDFs and confirms the award in Commission minutes; it gave the twelve-bid 2,500 kVA line and an eight-bidder power transformer tab in June 2025.
The fourth is the City of Dover, Delaware bid tabulations index, 39 PDFs from FY2020 to FY2027, 31 of them tabs for distribution transformers and S&C PME switchgear bought for stock, which we parse by column position. Dover’s July 2025 three-phase tab has 30 priced columns on the 1,000 kVA line, from $24,435 to $95,610, awarded to PulseMac at $26,000. The fifth is the USAspending API, queried by product service code and keyword from FY2022 on; it supplies most genset and chiller rows. The Georgia Procurement Registry, Florida Vendor Bid System, Texas SmartBuy and South Carolina’s SCEIS filled in the state rows; what was tried and what sat behind a login is in the model’s provenance file.
From Document to Band
Every row goes through six steps, written down on the model page so a reader can rebuild a band.
Classification comes from the commodity code and the description: liquid-filled distribution transformers (pole-mount flagged in subclass); power transformers, meaning an HV winding of 34.5 kV or more or 2,500 kVA and up at a substation; MV switchgear from 5 to 38 kV, split into metal-clad lineups and pad-mounted switches (PME, Vista, SF6, VFI); LV switchgear; gensets with a stated kW; chillers with stated tons. Dry-type and instrument transformers, UPS, parts, rentals, repairs, rewinds and testing are excluded at normalization.
Unit price is taken as stated on PO lines and bid tabs. For USAspending awards it is award amount divided by quantity only when the description states the quantity (“TWO (2)”, “QTY 3”, “4 EA”) or names a single unit; otherwise the row keeps its extended price and never enters a band. Installation is flagged Y when the award bundles construction, and those rows stay out of every band; partial means freight, startup or permit fees sit inside the price, and the row stays in with a note. Sales tax is separated where the memo gives the pre-tax figure and flagged where it does not; California awards are commonly tax-included, Texas PO lines are tax-exempt.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (n=166, public awards 2016 to 2026)
Of the 166 excluded rows, 138 are awards with a total and no stated quantity, 10 had a $/kW outside 90 to 3,000, 7 a $/kVA outside 8 to 600, 6 a $/ton outside 150 to 6,000, one a per-unit price outside its class bounds, 3 were dated before 2015 and one carried an option-period date after the build.
The plausibility bounds are deliberately wide, and they caught parts orders and lump-sum obligations, not real outliers. A $633,581 Navy task order for four 900 kW generator packages is in the bands at $176 per kW because the quantity is stated; a $566,885 Texas Parks and Wildlife award titled “Generators” with no count is excluded. The bounds are 8 to 600 $/kVA for pad-mounts, 90 to 3,000 $/kW for gensets, 150 to 6,000 $/ton for chillers, $40,000 to $20 million per power transformer, $8,000 to $6 million per MV switchgear unit and $3,000 to $3 million per LV unit. Nothing is dropped silently.
The last rule is n. A band is published only when five or more award lines sit in it; below five, bands.csv prints insufficient and blank statistics, and no article may quote it. Of 80 class-and-spec bands computed across the two windows, 51 pass. Five is a low bar, chosen so a reader sees a thin band and its buyer share rather than nothing; the Equipment Price Benchmark cells that merge into version 1 hold to five contributors and eight quotes.
Coverage by Class
| Class | Award lines | With unit price | Bid rows | Buyers | States | Unit | Bands published (all / recent) | Award dates |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pad-mount and pole-mount distribution transformers | 2,138 | 2,098 | 2,140 | 26 | 22 | $/kVA by phase, mount, kVA band | 15 / 13 | Jan 2019 to Aug 2026 |
| Substation and power transformers | 33 | 33 | 117 | 13 | 9 | $ per unit by HV class | 1 / 1 | Apr 2016 to Sep 2026 |
| MV switchgear 5 to 38 kV | 155 | 151 | 110 | 18 | 11 | $ per lineup or per unit | 3 / 3 | Dec 2016 to Aug 2026 |
| LV switchgear and switchboards | 8 | 8 | 6 | 6 | 4 | $ per unit | 0 / 0 | Sep 2018 to May 2025 |
| Diesel and gas generator sets | 205 | 202 | 113 | 82 | 34 | $/kW by type and kW band | 5 / 1 | Apr 2019 to Aug 2026 |
| Chillers | 167 | 162 | 79 | 50 | 30 | $/ton by type and tonnage | 5 / 3 | Jul 2018 to May 2026 |
| CNC machining centers | 6 | 6 | 2 | 4 | 2 | $ per unit | 1 / 0 | May 2020 to Nov 2023 |
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (n=2,712, public awards 2016 to 2026). CSV
Pad-mounts are 79% of the lines and carry 28 of the 51 published bands. Gensets have the widest buyer base, 82 buyers in 34 states, because every federal base, park and prison buys a standby set. LV switchgear at 8 lines does not band; the six CNC rows are Georgia technical-college awards at a $71,572 median (2020 to 2023) that the Haas VF-2 cost piece uses as rows.
The Biases, Stated Plainly
Austin Energy is 1,665 of the 2,712 lines and 1,574 of the 2,138 pad-mount lines, so the all-years single-phase bands are largely one utility’s price history. The top_buyer_share column exists for that reason: the single-phase 10 to 50 kVA band is 95% Austin in the all window (n=680) and 80% in the recent window (n=59). The three-phase 225 to 500 kVA band is the healthiest in the Book, 48% top-buyer share across 13 buyers in the all window and 40% across 11 buyers since 2024, and it is the one to quote first. Any band above 0.8 is a price history, not a market; the Dover, Greenville, Fayetteville, Idaho Falls, Ocala and Douglas tabs are the cross-check.
Public buyers only. No investor-owned utility, developer, EPC or contractor price is in the Book. Municipal utilities buy stock units in lots of two to forty; federal rows are obligations at award, not invoices, with ratings parsed from free text. Small utilities pay more for one or two units than a 200-unit blanket order clears at, and the Book does not adjust for it.
Dates spread across an inflation. The all window mixes 2019 with 2026 prices in a period when the three-phase 225 to 500 kVA median went from $30.61 to $74.11 per kVA; the Lead-Time Monitor carries the PPI series for the same years. Use the recent window for anything price-sensitive.
Power transformers are per unit by HV class, not $/MVA, because 19 of the 33 award memos never state the MVA. The one published band, 34.5 to 99 kV class, has a $1,886,464 median across 14 units from 7 buyers (2018 to 2026) and $2,132,514 across the 6 units since 2024. The 100 kV and 200 kV classes have 4 and 3 rows and do not band, but the rows are public: Ocala’s 105/140/175 MVA 230 kV autotransformer at $4,003,500 per unit (August 2023, two bids), Silicon Valley Power’s 336 MVA 115 kV units at $6,346,745 and 560 MVA 230 kV units at $8,098,959 from HD Hyundai (October 2023, seven proposals), and Rocky Mount’s 168 MVA 230 to 66 kV unit at $3,362,000 (July 2025, three bids). The transformer lead-time piece is why they ordered when they did.
What the Bands Say: Pad-Mounts
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (n=950, public awards 2019 to 2026)
The single-phase 10 to 50 kVA median went from $46.72 per kVA in 2021 (n=128) to $99.80 in 2023 (n=67); three-phase 225 to 500 kVA from $33.35 (n=22) to $69.02 (n=27); three-phase 1,500 to 2,500 kVA from $15.61 (n=7) to $30.30 (n=12); and 2026 to date stands at $114.80, $48.19 and $29.68, which is 2.5x, 1.4x and 1.9x the 2021 level.
The step happened in 2022, when every band’s median rose 53% to 84% in a single year, and the 2,500 kVA class went from $16.82 to $30.30 per kVA between 2019 and 2023. Put into the Transformer Sizing and Cost calculator, the recent band prices a 2,500 kVA service at about $75,900 with a $69,200 to $86,200 interquartile range (n=27, 2024 to 2026), not a 2021 number escalated by a PPI that fits stock items better than engineered ones.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (n=1, public awards 2024 to 2024); Fayetteville PWC bid tab and Commission minutes, April 10, 2024
PulseMac (Jiangsu Daelim) bid $64,285 with no lead time stated, Alpha Plotter (Eaglerise) $65,530.50 at 18 to 20 weeks and won all six lines for $767,188.10, five bidders sat between $71,600 and $100,612 at 36 to 54 weeks, JST was $118,000 at 30 weeks, WEG $148,650 at 48 to 50 weeks, and Technology International (Larson) $219,000 at 10 to 15 months; the median bid was $100,241, 53% above the award.
Read that tab against the same utility fifteen months earlier. In January 2023 the 2,500 kVA line drew five bids from $102,000 to $259,897, JST won at $102,000 with a 196-day lead, and the Commission minutes of January 25, 2023 confirm the award, and the tab’s own footnote records that UTB Transformers and Flanders Electric, who bid ERMCO units via Maddox at $169,408 and $259,897, “stated they could not honor their bid” after opening. By March 2024 the low bid on the same stock number was $64,285 and the bidder count had gone from five to twelve. That is the 2024 pad-mount market in one public document, and the switchgear cost piece tells the same story for lineups.
The lead-time premium is visible the same way. Ocala Electric’s April 2024 critical purchase of a 2,500 kVA Prolec GE unit from Irby at $163,750 sits in the staff report next to a JST quote at $102,566 with 32 weeks and a Hitachi quote at $159,905 with 156 to 158 weeks; the utility paid $61,184 above the low quote for a unit it could get. A band cannot tell you which of the three you will be offered; the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule exists because that answer moves the PO date more than the price does.
MV Switchgear, Gensets, Chillers
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (n=133, public awards 2019 to 2026)
Pad-mounted 15 to 38 kV switches have a $57,415 median across 122 awards from 9 buyers (2019 to 2026, interquartile $19,575 to $91,314, 73% Austin) and $73,715 across the 24 awards since 2024 (8 buyers, 58% top share); the “other MV” band, mostly breakers and reclosers, is $113,224 across 11 units.
Metal-clad lineups are off that scale. Fourteen lineups from 5 buyers in 4 states, 2016 to 2026, have a $1,579,382 median with a $930,308 to $2,137,025 interquartile range; the six since June 2024 have a $2,019,662 median, from Snohomish PUD’s $1,540,000 13.8 kV lineup of April 2026 to Naperville’s $3,827,000 34.5 kV indoor lineup of September 2024. A lineup is not a unit, as Reading a Switchgear Quote showed on Riverside’s $2.56M lineup; $/section is the fix, and it needs section counts no tab states.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (n=110, public awards 2019 to 2026)
Stationary sets ran $840 per kW at 20 to 249 kW (n=58, 21 buyers, interquartile $516 to $1,142) and $760 in the 30 awards since 2024, $462 at 250 to 499 kW (n=18) and $335 at 500 to 999 kW (n=11, $270 to $488), while portable and trailer sets were $1,025 per kW at 20 to 249 kW (n=13, 12 buyers) and $528 at 500 to 999 kW (n=10).
The recent window is thin above 250 kW: 3 stationary awards at 250 to 499 kW and 3 at 500 to 999 kW since 2024, both insufficient, and nothing above 1 MW bands at all, which is the market the genset allocation piece covers. The Genset TCO calculator’s capital-cost line should start from the 500 to 999 kW band, n=11, rather than from a list price.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (n=96, public awards 2018 to 2026)
Air-cooled chillers were $1,385 per ton at 10 to 99 tons (n=16, 5 buyers) and $1,369 at 100 to 299 tons (n=7); where the description does not state the type, the medians were $1,423 at 10 to 99 tons (n=40), $1,046 at 100 to 299 tons (n=27) and $1,150 at 300 to 999 tons (n=6), and the two recent-window bands jumped to $2,308 (n=12) and $1,876 (n=13).
Of the 102 chiller rows in the bands, 77 are Department of Defense, mostly base replacements of 20 to 250 ton units bought one at a time with delivery, which is why the “type unstated” bands are larger than the typed ones and the recent medians run 62 to 79% above the all-years figure. No water-cooled band passes n of five. The chiller lead-time piece and the Datacenter MEP Cost Table cover the 500 to 3,000 ton machines a datacenter buys, and none of those is in a public tab we have found.
Who Is Credited
Every buyer whose document we transcribed is named in its row. The ones whose multi-vendor bid tabs make the bands worth reading are Greenville Utilities Commission (150 lines, 630 bids), Fayetteville Public Works Commission (27 lines), City of Dover Electric Department (75 lines, 31 tabs), City of Ocala and Ocala Electric Utility (184 lines), Idaho Falls Power (89 lines), Riverside Public Utilities (13 lines, four metal-clad procurements), City of Douglas Utilities in Georgia (13 lines, tabs of 12 to 15 bidders), Tacoma Power (4 preliminary results), City of High Point Electric, City of Rocky Mount Public Utilities, Wake County, Mecklenburg County, Pinellas County, Broward County, Gwinnett County, DuPage County, Dakota County, Fayette County, San Mateo County, the Port of Long Beach, Columbus Division of Water, the Florida Departments of Transportation, Health, Corrections and Agriculture, the Florida Turnpike Enterprise, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Georgia State Financing and Investment Commission, Tallahassee State College, and Georgia Northwestern, Gwinnett and Southern Crescent technical colleges.
Award memoranda and minutes without a tab came from Naperville, Mesa, Silicon Valley Power, Los Alamos, Clark Public Utilities, Snohomish County PUD, Albany Utilities, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and nine other Texas agencies, BART, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago and seven school boards; purchase-order lines from Austin and Los Angeles; federal awards from nine departments and GSA through USAspending. All 141 buyers and their document types are in buyers.csv.
What Version 1 Adds
Three things, in order of how much they move the bands. First, contributed quotes. The Equipment Price Benchmark takes private quotes from contractors, distributors and owners under the cell-size rules (five contributors, eight quotes, no contributor above 40%, every quote three months old or older) and merges the cells into the same bands, labelled as contributed, so the pad-mount bands stop being 61% one Texas utility and LV switchgear and CNC get their first bands. No individual quote is ever shown.
Second, more portals. Columbus, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs Utilities and the Ohio and Michigan state portals hold tabs reachable only through a browser, and the Fayetteville CY2025 stock-contract tab, 12 bidders across 50 lines, is downloaded and not yet transcribed because the award is not in the minutes we could find. Every portal that opens adds a buyer, and the buyer count is what fixes the Austin share.
Third, MVA capture for power transformers and section counts for switchgear, so the power transformer class moves from $ per unit by HV class to $/MVA and the metal-clad class from $ per lineup to $/section. Both need the specification, not the award memo; version 1 reads the rating schedule from the IFB where the portal posts it.
What to Do Monday
Pull bands.csv, find the band for the unit you are about to buy, and read three columns before the median: n, top_buyer_share and date_max. If n is under 20 or the share is above 0.8, open the awards behind it and read the buyer names; the Quote Check tool is built to do this for a spec, returning the band, the interquartile range and the nearest public awards with their links. If you are buying a 2,500 kVA pad-mount, your quote should sit near $30 per kVA on the recent window (n=27), and ask for the lead time on the same line as the price, because the Fayetteville tab shows a 3.4x price spread and a 3.5x lead-time spread on one unit on one day. If you are a public utility, post your tabulation as a PDF with unit prices and bidder names, the way Greenville, Fayetteville and Dover do.
The bands, the band file, the eight chart files and the coverage table are free. Behind the short paywall are the two row-level files: 2,712 award lines and 2,567 vendor bids with the document URL on every row, the files the Public Bid-Tab Price Book page describes.