South Carolina Electricity

What South Carolina's Electricity Data Tells Us

Residential customers in South Carolina pay 14.23¢/kWh in 2024, spread across 2.6M metered households, placing the state 13.7% below the national residential average of 16.48¢/kWh. Commercial rates sit at 10.64¢/kWh while industrial buyers pay 6.84¢/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 32.5M MWh on roughly $4632.1M 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 53.9% of in-state production, with natural gas providing 22.9% and coal supplying 16.9%. Renewable fuels, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass, collectively account for 6.0% of South Carolina's electricity output, a figure that matters because each renewable megawatt-hour displaces fuel costs that otherwise flow through to retail bills. Legacy fuels still dominate here, which tends to tie retail rates to commodity cycles.

Looking back across EIA records, residential prices in South Carolina moved from 12.65¢/kWh in 2016 to 14.23¢/kWh in 2024, a 12.5% shift over that window. Comparable-priced neighbors include New Mexico, Kansas, Florida, 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.