Tennessee Electricity

What Tennessee's Electricity Data Tells Us

Residential customers in Tennessee pay 12.42¢/kWh in 2024, spread across 3.2M metered households, placing the state 24.6% below the national residential average of 16.48¢/kWh. Commercial rates sit at 12.05¢/kWh while industrial buyers pay 6.21¢/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 43.8M MWh on roughly $5445.1M 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 41.8% of in-state production, with coal providing 22.7% and natural gas supplying 21.4%. Renewable fuels, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass, collectively account for 13.2% of Tennessee'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 Tennessee moved from 10.41¢/kWh in 2016 to 12.42¢/kWh in 2024, a 19.3% shift over that window. Comparable-priced neighbors include Wyoming, Arkansas, Oklahoma, 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.