ModelVersion 0.1Compiling data
Public Bid-Tab Price Book
Transaction prices from public utility, municipal, state and federal procurement awards for transformers, MV switchgear, gensets and chillers, normalized to $/kVA, $/section, $/kW and $/ton bands with n, region and award date.
$69 /kVAPad-mount 3-phase 225 to 500 kVA, median of 60 public awards, 11 buyers in 11 states, 2024 to 2026. Public headline as of August 24, 2026.
- 2,712
- Award lines with a unit price and a document URL, 141 public buyers in 44 states, 2016 to 2026
- 2,567
- Vendor bid rows from bid tabulations, including losing bids and no-bids
- 51
- Published bands (n of 5 or more) across transformers, MV switchgear, gensets and chillers; 29 more held as insufficient
- 1,665
- Pad-mount rows from Austin Energy alone; top-buyer share is printed on every band
What it covers
Awards from public procurement for pad-mount and substation transformers ($/kVA by class), MV switchgear ($/section by voltage and type), gensets ($/kW by fuel and tier) and chillers ($/ton), each row with the awarding body, bid number, bidders, engineer's estimate where published, award date and the document link. Bands by class, region and award-year with n. Public record throughout: no private quote, no NDA, no panel.
- Cadence
- Rolling additions; bands recomputed quarterly once the launch threshold is met
- Compiled from
- City of Austin open-data purchase orders; USAspending.gov awards; Legistar board agendas and bid-award memoranda for municipal utilities (Riverside Public Utilities, City of Dover and others); BidNet, Bonfire and PlanetBids postings; state procurement portals; FOIA responses as they arrive
- Delivered as
- Excel workbook, Web dashboard
- Updates
- Quarterly updates, one year included
- Onboarding
- Onboarding call
- Support
- Ad hoc analyst calls
- Tier
- Bands free; full table Pro; rows and API Institutional
Who uses it and what it decides
- Sourcing and procurement managersWhether a quote sits inside the band for its spec and region before the negotiation starts.
- Estimators at contractors and EPCsA defensible budget number before OEM quotes arrive, with the award it came from.
- OEM pricing and market-intelligence teamsWhere competitors' awards landed, by region and quarter.
- Public utilities and municipalitiesWhether their engineer's estimate is in line with what peers paid.
Methodology
Where it stands
Version 0.1 is built: 2,712 award lines with a unit price and a document URL from 141 public buyers in 44 states, 2016 to 2026, plus 2,567 vendor bid rows from bid tabulations, reduced to 51 published bands (n of 5 or more) across pad-mount and substation transformers, MV switchgear, gensets and chillers, in an all-years and a 2024-onward window. Plausibility bounds moved 166 rows to an excluded file with the reason on each. Austin Energy supplies 1,665 of the pad-mount rows, so every band prints its top-buyer share. The method, the portals and the biases are in Introducing the Public Bid-Tab Price Book; Quote Check reads the bands directly.
The first normalized rows are already public beside Reading a Switchgear Quote: the Riverside Public Utilities 15 kV switchgear bids 2018 to 2025 (four bidders on SUB-806, low bid $1,343,878 against a $1,450,000 engineer’s estimate) and the City of Dover PME-9 pad-mounted switchgear bid tabulation (five unit bids from $20,703 to $28,235, November 2019).
What it is compiled from
- Municipal utilities. Board agendas and bid-award memoranda through Legistar (Riverside, Santa Clara, Dover and others), which publish bidders, amounts, engineer’s estimates and the specification.
- Cities and states. The City of Austin open-data portal purchase-order lines; BidNet, Bonfire and PlanetBids postings; state procurement portals.
- Federal. USAspending.gov awards by NAICS 3353 (electrical equipment), 335312 and 333611 where the description names a transformer, switchgear lineup, genset or chiller.
- FOIA. Requests to public utilities for bid tabulations not posted online, logged with the date filed and the date answered.
Every row keeps its link. Every band prints n, the region, the award-date range and the unit convention.
What is free and what is paid
- Free: bands by class with n and date, this page, and the Quote Check and Transformer Sizing and Cost calculators with default inputs once bands exist.
- Pro: bands by region and award-year, and the full award table with specs.
- Institutional: row-level data with documents, the API, quarterly updates for a year, an onboarding call and ad hoc calls.
Articles built on it
Reading a Switchgear Quote: The Eleven Line Items That Hide the Schedule, How to Write an RFQ for Capital Equipment in 2026 and What a Haas VF-2 Really Costs in 2026 use the first public award and list-price rows. Index-level price context comes from the PPI series in the Lead-Time Monitor.
Version history
- 0.1 (September 2026, collecting). Raw pulls from Austin, USAspending and Legistar; first normalized switchgear rows published with articles. Launch threshold set at 300 awards across six classes.
What version 1 adds
Contributed quotes from the Equipment Price Benchmark merge into the same bands under the cell-size rules (five contributors, eight quotes, no contributor above 40%, all quotes three months old or older), and machine-tool awards from university and community-college procurement open a fifth and sixth class.
Known gaps
Federal award descriptions often bundle equipment with installation. Those rows are excluded from unit bands until the split is documented. Legistar coverage depends on which utilities post attachments. Sales tax treatment differs by state and is stated per row.
Questions
Why public awards and not private quotes?
Public awards are verifiable, dated and linkable. Every band can be traced to bid tabulations anyone can open. Private quotes arrive later through the Equipment Price Benchmark, under its cell-size rules.
How are prices normalized?
Each award is reduced to a unit price ($/kVA, $/section, $/kW, $/ton) with the spec that drives it kept alongside (voltage class, kVA, ampacity, fuel, tier, tonnage). Sales tax, freight and installation are separated when the tabulation states them and flagged when it does not.
Why is the headline one pad-mount band and not a single price for transformers?
A price without n is a quote. The headline is the recent-window band with the widest buyer base (60 awards, 11 buyers, 11 states). Fifty other bands print at n of 5 or more; 29 are held as insufficient.
Can I see the raw awards?
Bands and chart data are free. The row-level files (2,712 award lines, 2,567 vendor bid rows, 166 excluded rows with reasons) are Pro, linked from the launch post. Every row carries its document URL.
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