Montana Electricity

What Montana's Electricity Data Tells Us

Residential customers in Montana pay 12.66¢/kWh in 2024, spread across 557.4K metered households, placing the state 23.2% below the national residential average of 16.48¢/kWh. Commercial rates sit at 11.87¢/kWh while industrial buyers pay 7.59¢/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 5.7M MWh on roughly $721.8M in utility revenue, a useful yardstick for sizing local demand against the grid mix that serves it.

The generation mix is led by coal at 36.3% of in-state production, with hydro providing 34.2% and wind supplying 21.6%. Renewable fuels, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass, collectively account for 57.6% of Montana's electricity output, a figure that matters because each renewable megawatt-hour displaces fuel costs that otherwise flow through to retail bills. A portfolio this clean typically carries lower marginal generation costs once capacity is built, though transmission upgrades can offset part of the saving.

Looking back across EIA records, residential prices in Montana moved from 10.94¢/kWh in 2016 to 12.66¢/kWh in 2024, a 15.7% shift over that window. Comparable-priced neighbors include Kentucky, Wyoming, South Dakota, 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.