North Carolina Electricity

What North Carolina's Electricity Data Tells Us

Residential customers in North Carolina pay 14.13¢/kWh in 2024, spread across 5.1M metered households, placing the state 14.3% below the national residential average of 16.48¢/kWh. Commercial rates sit at 10.56¢/kWh while industrial buyers pay 7.77¢/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 61.7M MWh on roughly $8726.6M in utility revenue, a useful yardstick for sizing local demand against the grid mix that serves it.

The generation mix is led by natural gas at 41.3% of in-state production, with nuclear providing 32.2% and coal supplying 12.7%. Renewable fuels, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass, collectively account for 13.5% of North Carolina'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 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.