Please learn to use units and multipliers. Do you mean milli-volt-amps (mVA), mega-volt-amps (MVA), or something completely different?

MEGA VOLT AMPERES.

Ok, no need to shout.

All of the old rules are useless now. The price of metals is so volatile that even if you had one today, it would be meaningless next week.

No, there isn't.

Not necessarily a rule of thumb, but I recently received quotes for six 28/28MVA units, 132/13.8 KV, 60HZ, with LTC's. The price range was $35k-$40k/MVA, with a 1-year lead time for the first unit.

If I've interpreted that correctly, that's about a $1M order(?)

That's $1M each, total order is $6M. Every proposal also included an escalator clause of up to 10% for material cost.

Just out of interest (no names/no pack drill, it's not my field anyway), how many responses did you get from your invitation to tender? How many declined to tender?

6 tenders (3 national/international & 3 smaller regional players). We advertise globally on a procurement website, so I don't have a hard number of declines. However, the specs were downloaded 17 times, and we usually get "secondary" bids from people who subscribe to other websites which pull info from ours.

Unfortunately, some people really shouldn't be in the business. One of the vendors called to ask what we meant by "Load Tap Changer".

The savvy ones usually ask on CR4 first, so they don't look total prats when they call you !