Openei Urdb MCP server

@pipeworx/openei-urdb

NREL's Utility Rate Database (URDB) — US electricity tariffs: residential, commercial and industrial rate schedules with their energy charges by tier and time-of-use period, demand charges, fixed monthly charges, net-metering treatment and effective dates, keyed to the utility's EIA id.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Tools

search tariffs.

• urdbsearchrates(address? | latitude+longitude | utility | eiaid, sector?, detail?, approvedonly?, limit?, offset?, _apiKey?) —

including the 12x24 month-by-hour period schedules a bill calculation needs.

• urdbratedetail(label, _apiKey?) — the full structure of one tariff,

which utilities serve a location, with tariff counts and how many are current.

• urdbutilitiesforlocation(address? | latitude+longitude | filter, apiKey?) —

Auth

The OpenEI API takes an apikey. NREL's public DEMOKEY is accepted and returns real rows (verified 2026-09-17), so this pack works with no configuration at a low rate limit — it is not a gated pack.

Callers who exceed the DEMOKEY limit pass their own free NREL key as apiKey. Free key:

A platform key would be read from the injected platformKey argument (PLATFORMNRELKEY). It is not** declared as platformKeyEnv in the pack manifest and must not be until the secret actually exists: the gateway is at Cloudflare's 250-text-binding cap, and declaring the flag without the secret would route rate questions to a tool that could only refuse.

Data sources

• — rate search and detail.
• — utility name directory.

developer.nrel.gov/api/utility_rates/v3.json was not reachable from our egress on 2026-09-17 (connection failure, not an HTTP error) and is not used.

Traps

Every one of these returns HTTP 200.

alone returns PG&E rates; the identical call plus &radius=25 returns nothing. This pack never sends it.

• radius silently zeroes a lat/lon search. lat=37.5202&lon=-122.2758

lat/lon and by ZIP 77002 — Texas retail-choice tariffs are largely absent from URDB. That is a coverage gap, not an error, and the tools say so instead of handing back a bare empty array.

• Geographic lookup has real coverage holes. Houston returns zero rates by

it returns nothing, lat/lon or utility usually works.

• address is geocoded upstream and works for some ZIPs and not others. When

tariffs. A rate whose end date has passed is historical; is_active says so, and the tools warn when every result is superseded.

• sector combined with address narrowed several queries to zero.
• startdate/enddate are UNIX seconds, and URDB keeps superseded

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "openei-urdb": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/openei-urdb/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/openei-urdb/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.