North Carolina Electricity

What North Carolina's Electricity Data Tells Us

For 2024, EIA data puts North Carolina's residential electricity rate at 14.13¢/kWh, reaching 5.1M metered households, versus a national residential average of 16.48¢/kWh, a difference of 14.3% below. Commercial customers pay 10.56¢/kWh, and industrial customers are billed 7.77¢/kWh, reflecting the cost differentials that come from voltage level, load factor, and contract length across EIA Form-861 survey respondents. 61.7M MWh of residential power was sold over the year, translating to roughly $8.7B in revenue for utilities, a useful yardstick for sizing local demand against the grid mix that serves it.

North Carolina's power comes primarily from natural gas, which accounts for 41.3% of in-state generation; in second place is nuclear, at 32.2%, and coal rounding out the top three at 12.7%. Across solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass, renewables account for 13.5% of electricity generated in North Carolina, 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 North Carolina moved from 11.03¢/kWh in 2016 to 14.13¢/kWh in 2024, a 28.1% shift over that window. Comparable-priced neighbors include Florida, Kansas, Georgia, 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.