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.
Free calculators built on this model
Articles built on this model
Dry Cooler or Cooling Tower: What the Water Bill Says in 15 Markets
A thousand gallons of water and sewer costs $24.80 in Douglas County, Georgia and $8.68 in Baton Rouge as of October 2026, and since a 50 MW open cooling tower needs about 300 million gallons a year, Open Factory's MEP Cost Table puts the gap at $3.6 million a year.
Fiber Laser Cutters: What a $500,000 Price Gap Buys
A Chinese 6 to 12 kW fiber laser sells for $45,000 to $85,000 FOB in December 2025 and lands at about $128,000 after the 41% duty stack, while federal buyers paid $645,000 to $1.75 million in 2025, a $504,000 gap to the cheapest award Open Factory's Equipment Price Benchmark itemizes.
Tariffs, September 2026: The Actual Schedule for Machinery and Electrical Gear
As of September 2026 a 2,500 kVA pad-mount transformer pays 25% US duty from every origin and 50% from China, while a low-voltage panel with its PLC pays 0% from Mexico, 10% from Germany, 12.5% from Japan and 40.2% from China, per Open Factory's Tariff Exposure Calculator.
SendCutSend: How a Bootstrapped Reno Shop Became a $1 Billion Parts Factory
SendCutSend cuts an aluminum bracket in 2 to 4 production days with no minimum quantity, has shipped more than 30 million parts to 300,000 customers from three US plants, and raised $110 million at a $1.01 billion valuation in May 2026. Open Factory's Lead-Time Monitor tracks the turnaround.
Modular Is Not Cheaper: A 50 MW Prefab Electrical Room, Line by Line
A prefabricated electrical room for a 50 MW datacenter is not cheaper: Open Factory's Datacenter MEP Cost Table lands the skid route at $3.51M per MW against $3.47M stick-built, 1% more, but 27 weeks faster at 95 weeks from power-block PO to energization against 122, as of August 2026.
The Recommended Spares List Is Where the Margin Hides
On public awards Open Factory can read, the spares line is 0.8% of a transformer award, 2% of a genset and 20% of a breaker buy, and the City of Ocala paid $40,197.50 per ABB R-Mag breaker in November 2023 and $44,499.75 in November 2025 with no second quote.
800 VDC Will Strand Your White-Space Frame Agreement
NVIDIA set a ship date for 800 VDC on August 11, 2026, with the MGX power rack due in the second half of 2026. Open Factory finds a five-year 415 V UPS and AC busway frame agreement puts 40 to 60% of its dollars into superseded SKUs.
Liquidated Damages at 0.5% a Week: Why Caps Sit at the Vendor's Margin
Liquidated damages in public transformer, switchgear and genset contracts run about 0.5% of price a week, capped at 5%, so as of July 2026 a week of delay on a 50 MW datacenter hall costs about $2.7 million against $74,000 of LDs, per Open Factory's Large-Load Cost Table.
How to Write an RFQ for Capital Equipment in 2026
An equipment RFQ in 2026 has to settle escalators, LDs, milestones and tariff refunds: the City of Ocala agreed $8,070,340 for two 105 MVA autotransformers in August 2023 and approved $9,170,340 for the same units on April 28, 2026, a $1.1 million PPI escalator, per Open Factory's Bid-Tab Price Book.
CloudNC and Limitless Labs: AI Is Coming for the CNC Programming Bottleneck
CloudNC and Limitless Labs raised $40 million between them from 16 June to 8 September 2026 to automate CNC programming for the 4,790 CNC tool programmers in America's 16,619 machine shops, and Open Factory's seat math shows a 50% CAM cut returns about $22,139 a year per programmer.
The R-454B Summer: What the Refrigerant Switch Did to Chiller Prices
A 20 lb cylinder of R-454B cost $345 in 2021 and $700 to $2,000 in July and August 2025, the switch raised Carrier chiller list prices 10% in March 2024 and March 2025, and Open Factory finds the 563 lb charge in a 500-ton chiller is 1.2% of the machine.
OFCI vs Design-Build: How Hyperscalers Buy Chillers and Colo Developers Do Not
Owner-furnished, contractor-installed chillers and CDUs for a 20 MW liquid-cooled hall cost $27.9 million against $32.8 million through the mechanical subcontract, a saving of $4.9 million or 14.9%, because OFCI strips a 15% subcontractor markup and 10% GC fee, per Open Factory's Datacenter MEP Cost Table as of June 2026.
Grainger's 2017 Confession: The Year a Distributor Admitted Its List Prices Were Fiction
On April 18, 2017, W.W. Grainger told investors its first quarter fell short because customers responded to across-the-board list price cuts and new web prices on about 450,000 SKUs, and US gross margin fell 1.7 points in one quarter, a reset Open Factory's Bid-Tab Price Book traces through 2026.
Reading a Switchgear Quote: The Eleven Line Items That Hide the Schedule
A medium-voltage switchgear quote has eleven line items and four of them move the delivery date more than the price. Riverside Public Utilities paid $2,561,551.88 for one 15 kV metal-clad lineup in June 2024 and it was still in the factory eighteen months later, per Open Factory's Bid-Tab Price Book.
1,250 Hours: Reading BMW's Humanoid Pilot as a Buyer
BMW's Figure 02 humanoid pilot delivered about 1,250 operating hours in ten months at Spartanburg in 2025, or 0.6 of one worker's year, moving more than 90,000 sheet-metal parts, and it is the only pilot with a disclosed runtime among the nine Open Factory's OEM Disclosure Scorecard scores.
The $306k Machine: A Record Half-Year With Fewer Units
US manufacturers ordered a record $3.44 billion of metalworking machinery in the first half of 2026 on 11,243 machines, 2.6% fewer than in the second half of 2025, so the average order rose to about $306,000 from $277,000, as tracked in Open Factory's Bid-Tab Price Book.
Grainger vs McMaster vs Amazon Business: A 50-SKU Price Basket
Open Factory priced the same 50 MRO items at six distributors on 10 September 2026: Fastenal's median web price was 126% above the cheapest storefront, McMaster-Carr's was 37% above, and Amazon Business was the floor, cheapest on 34 of 48 SKUs with a comparison.
A Robot Costs $61k. The Cell Costs $150k
North American buyers paid $61,198 per robot arm in 2025, but a working cell costs 1.9 to 2.4 times that, $113,336 to $144,432 for three common cobot cells priced line by line in Open Factory's Bid-Tab Price Book as of September 2026.
Who Gets the IEEPA Refund
The IEEPA refund goes to the importer of record, not the buyer who paid a surcharge, and CBP puts the pool at about $166 billion across 53 million entries and 330,000 importers as of March 2026. Open Factory's Tariff Exposure Calculator flags the refundable lines on every 2025 entry.
Compressed Air Is 10% of Your Factory's Power Bill
Compressed air takes about 10% of a typical plant's electricity by DOE's count, and a 200 hp rotary screw compressor running 6,000 hours a year at the 2025 US industrial rate of 8.62 cents per kWh costs about $70,000 a year. Open Factory finds a leak program worth $83,000.
Five Majors Bought Their Way Into Liquid Cooling. Here Is the Price List
Five majors paid $16.3 billion of disclosed prices for liquid cooling companies in seventeen months, with Ecolab buying CoolIT for $4.75 billion at 29 times EBITDA on March 20, 2026 and Eaton closing Boyd Thermal at $9.5 billion and 22.5 times, per Open Factory's deal table.
Recips vs Turbines vs Fuel Cells for a 100 MW Bridge
A 100 MW bridge plant over five years costs $96 per MWh on solid oxide fuel cells, $104 on gas reciprocating engines and $112 on aeroderivative gas turbines at 85% utilization and $3.78/MMBtu, with first power in 17, 27 and 30 months, per Open Factory's MEP Cost Table in 2026.
Nox Metals: The Detroit Startup Cutting Aluminum Plate in 36 Hours
Nox Metals quotes saw-cut aluminum plate instantly and delivers in an average of 36 hours, against the 3 to 5 days a typical service center takes to quote, after an $11.5 million seed on 14 June 2026, and Open Factory's Lead-Time Monitor lists cut plate as its first raw material.
The 2 MW Plant Service Upgrade Nobody Budgets Right
A 400-person plant adding 2 MW of service pays $400k to $1.2M for the items the switchgear quote omits, and with the utility-owned pad-mount at 52 to 104 weeks the crane lands in week 74. Open Factory's Large-Load Cost Table shows the sequencing that pulls energization forward by 20 weeks.
What a Haas VF-2 Really Costs in 2026
A new Haas VF-2 lists at $70,995, which is 35% of the roughly $172,523 net ten-year bill for a one-shift job shop once maintenance, one spindle, power, coolant and cutting tools are added, per Open Factory's Bid-Tab Price Book worked example as of September 2026.
What 2,439 Public Change Orders Show About Electrical and Mechanical Contractors
Across 1,096 federal electrical and mechanical construction contracts awarded in fiscal years 2019 to 2024, with 2,439 priced change orders, the median contract closed 1.8% above its award price and the dollars closed 9.5% above it. Open Factory's Public Bid-Tab Price Book holds the full dataset.
Copper at $6.77: How a 50% Tariff Shows Up in a 200-Amp Panel
COMEX copper set a record $6.77 per pound on August 7, 2026, and Open Factory's panel math shows a 200-amp residential service that carried $270 of copper at 2024 prices now carries $440, about $30 of it the tariff expectation priced into COMEX.
The Used and Refurbished Market Nobody Indexes
Fifteen vendors bid $41,200 to $101,253 on one 2,500 kVA pad-mount transformer for Fayetteville's public utility in September 2025, a 2.5x spread at 10 to 35 week lead times, and a dealer shipping from stock lists it at $104,000, 1.77x the median bid, per Open Factory's Bid-Tab Price Book.
1872, Foundational Industries and Hadrian: Three Blueprints for the Autonomous American Factory
Between July 2025 and August 2026, 1872, Foundational Industries and Hadrian raised $1.41 billion to build autonomous American factories: $15 million, $25 million and $1.37 billion respectively, with Hadrian's four plants totalling just under 3 million square feet. Open Factory's Lead-Time Monitor will track each one's delivered lead time.
Japan Is Eating the US Capex Boom
Japanese machine tool builders booked JPY 40.65 billion of North American orders in June 2026, up 44% from June 2025, and in the first half of 2026 US buyers sent them $1.29 billion of the $3.44 billion placed for metalworking machinery, 37 cents of every dollar, by Open Factory's arithmetic.
Who Bought the EV Plants' Machines
Companies cancelled, closed or downsized 61 US clean-energy projects worth $34.8 billion in 2025, but most was never built, and the EV plant machines that did reach the secondary market sold at 3% to 37% of reference value in the court records Open Factory read.
When a Megapack Beats a Static UPS
A 24 MW, 48 MWh block of twelve Tesla Megapack 2 XL units costs about $14.4 million installed at January 2026 prices, $10.1 million after the 30% storage credit, against about $17.5 million for the N+1 static UPS in a 20 MW hall, per Open Factory's Datacenter MEP Cost Table.
The OEM Disclosure Scorecard: Who Tells Buyers Anything
Open Factory's OEM Disclosure Scorecard version 0.1 finds that the eighteen largest electrical, power and cooling OEMs publish only 12 of 90 cells a buyer needs, with 16 Partials and 62 Noes: GE Vernova alone scores 2 of 5, ten score 1 and seven score 0, as of September 2026.
Rockwell's 250 Basis Points: How Tariffs Show Up in Your PLC Quote
Tariffs are 100 basis points of a Rockwell Automation bill in fiscal 2026, inside the 250 basis points of total price the company guided on its August 4, 2026 call, and Open Factory's Bid-Tab Price Book tracks the pass-through against the 150 basis points of underlying price.
Datacenter Construction Is Eating Your Electricians
Loudoun County electrical contractor payrolls rose 138% from 5,615 people in 2019 to 14,022 in March 2026, while the national BLS median electrician wage rose 12.5% against 25.6% CPI from May 2019 to May 2025, per Open Factory's Large-Load Cost Table.
Why Your Switchgear Costs 50% More Than in 2021
The BLS producer price index for switchgear stood at 394.8 in July 2026, 78% above January 2021, and medium-voltage switchgear is up 50% since 2021 per Wood Mackenzie. Open Factory's decomposition finds inputs explain 36 of the 78 points and margin the other 43.
Transformer Lead Times Hit 143 Weeks: Who Gets Delivered First
A generator step-up transformer ordered in the United States was quoted at 143 weeks in the second quarter of 2025, a substation power transformer at 128 weeks and medium-voltage switchgear at 44, per Wood Mackenzie, against about 50 weeks in 2021, and Open Factory's Lead-Time Monitor lists both readings.
Quote Check: What Your Switchgear Quote Should Have Said
Open Factory's Quote Check tool places a switchgear quote against public awards: Riverside Public Utilities paid $2,254,387.50 for a 15 kV metal-clad lineup in May 2025, 52% above the $1,481,321 median of 12 public awards dated December 2016 to May 2025 in the Public Bid-Tab Price Book.
One Steel Mill Gates Every US Transformer
Every pound of domestic grain-oriented electrical steel in a US transformer core is melted at Cleveland-Cliffs Butler Works, a plant with a 920 mm maximum coil width, and the transformer PPI is up 91% since December 2019 at 381.8 in July 2026, per Open Factory's Lead-Time Monitor.
MES Is a Consulting Product
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing has paid $110.1 million for MES support services since May 2021 against $4.64 million of Oracle licences in FY2025, about five dollars of consulting per dollar of software, the pattern Open Factory found across 44 public MES and SCADA awards as of October 2025.
Tariff Bill of Materials: What Sections 232 and 301 Add to a UPS, a Lineup, a Genset and a Megapack
A 1 MW UPS assembled in the United States carries about 17 points of duty and the same UPS imported from China carries 55, under the tariff stack in force on October 10, 2025. The 50% copper tariff is 3.8 of those 17 points, per Open Factory's Tariff Exposure Calculator.
The Copper and Wire Price Sheet, Weekly
Open Factory's Copper and Wire Price Sheet, refreshed every Monday, prices a foot of 500 kcmil copper at $9.48 of metal at the IMF's $6.14 a pound for July 2026, or $9.70 at that month's $6.28 COMEX open, with a price per foot for 13 conductor sizes.
The $2,850 Report That Says Nothing
IBISWorld's $2,850 ProcurementIQ switchgear report prices the whole category at one $37,300 benchmark, while the 118 public awards in Open Factory's Public Bid-Tab Price Book run from $12,492 for a pad-mount switch in 2019 to $3,827,000 for a 34.5 kV lineup in September 2024.
Building the Missing Index: Realized Auction Prices for Used CNC Machines
Used CNC machines lose about half their hammer value every 3.9 years, based on 144 realized auction lots from June 2023 to September 2026 in Open Factory's Bid-Tab Price Book, and a five-year-old Haas VF-2SS hammered at $36,600 in November 2025, 43.6% of its $83,995 list price.
Introducing the Public Bid-Tab Price Book
Open Factory's Public Bid-Tab Price Book launches as version 0.1 with 2,712 public award lines and 51 price bands, and across 297 lines dated January 2024 to August 2026 the median three-phase pad-mount price runs from $153 per kVA at 75 to 167 kVA to $30 at 1,500 to 2,500.
Cummins and Caterpillar Are Sold Out Through 2028
Cummins is taking generator orders well into 2028 and Caterpillar closed June 2026 with $72.1 billion of firm backlog, and Open Factory's Lead-Time Monitor shows published lead times of 50 to 66 weeks for a 1,500 to 2,000 kW diesel genset and 90 to 110 weeks above 3,500 kW.
The 171-Day Capex Lead Time: ISM's Most Ignored Table
The average US manufacturing buyer commits to capital equipment 171 days ahead of need in the August 2026 ISM report, with 27% committing more than a year out, against 147 days in December 2019. Open Factory's Lead-Time Monitor rebuilds the series back to 2007.
Book-to-Bill League Table, Q2 2026: Every Electrical OEM
Powell Industries posted a book-to-bill of 3.0 in the quarter to June 30 2026, booking $934 million of switchgear orders against $312 million shipped, and all eight electrical OEMs that print a ratio sit above 1.0, down to Eaton at 1.2, in Open Factory's Book-to-Bill League Table.
Introducing the Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor
Schneider Electric quotes low-voltage switchgear at 50 weeks from release to manufacturing in its September 2026 Lead Times Guide, and Open Factory's Lead-Time Monitor, launched as version 0.1, puts all eleven equipment classes in one table, of which only four have an OEM-published lead time.