Illinois Electricity

What Illinois's Electricity Data Tells Us

Residential customers in Illinois pay 15.87¢/kWh in 2024, spread across 5.4M metered households, placing the state 3.7% below the national residential average of 16.48¢/kWh. Commercial rates sit at 11.81¢/kWh while industrial buyers pay 8.83¢/kWh, reflecting the cost differentials that come from voltage level, load factor, and contract length across EIA Form-861 survey respondents. Annual residential sales total 44.9M MWh on roughly $7117.5M in utility revenue, a useful yardstick for sizing local demand against the grid mix that serves it.

The generation mix is led by nuclear at 53.2% of in-state production, with natural gas providing 16.2% and coal supplying 14.5%. Renewable fuels, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass, collectively account for 16.0% of Illinois's electricity output, a figure that matters because each renewable megawatt-hour displaces fuel costs that otherwise flow through to retail bills. Expansion headroom remains: cost curves for wind and solar have fallen faster than fossil alternatives for most of the last decade.

Looking back across EIA records, residential prices in Illinois moved from 12.54¢/kWh in 2016 to 15.87¢/kWh in 2024, a 26.6% shift over that window. Comparable-priced neighbors include Ohio, Minnesota, Alabama, which gives a peer set for sanity-checking local quotes. For anyone negotiating a supplier contract, weighing an energy-efficiency upgrade, or modeling a household budget, the combination of current rate, multi-year trend, and generation mix offers a sturdier footing than any single data point on its own.