What South Carolina's Electricity Data Tells Us

Residential customers in South Carolina pay 14.96¢/kWh in 2025, across 2.6M metered households, placing the state 13.5% below the national residential average of 17.30¢/kWh. Commercial rates sit at 11.05¢/kWh while industrial buyers pay 7.11¢/kWh. These sector averages describe recorded revenue per kWh; this dataset alone does not establish why they differ. Annual residential sales total 33.8M MWh on roughly $5.1B in utility revenue. Sales and revenue are reported retail-series measures and should not be treated as a local load forecast.

South Carolina's industrial rate ranks 42 of 51 while its residential rate ranks 31, so the gap between what a factory and a household pay is narrower here than in most states. Nuclear carries the majority of South Carolina's in-state generation at 54.5%, though not the whole grid: natural gas supplies 21.6% and coal a further 17.5%. It is the leading fuel in 4 states. Renewable fuels (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and biomass) account for 6.2% of South Carolina's electricity output. These shares describe in-state generation, not a utility-specific customer bill.

Looking back across EIA records, residential prices in South Carolina moved from 12.65¢/kWh in 2016 to 14.96¢/kWh in 2025, a 18.3% shift over that window. States charging a similar rate include New Mexico, Georgia, Florida, a useful peer set for a sanity check. Nuclear output is close to fuel-cost-insensitive once a reactor is running, so the rate above reflects capital and maintenance recovery far more than any fuel market. That makes South Carolina's figure unusually stable year to year and unusually sensitive to what happens at a single large plant. A state average sitting modestly under the national one is the easiest kind to misread, because the spread between utilities inside South Carolina can be wider than the gap to the national figure it is being compared against.