West Virginia Electricity

What West Virginia's Electricity Data Tells Us

Residential customers in West Virginia pay 15.07¢/kWh in 2024, spread across 866.5K metered households, placing the state 8.6% below the national residential average of 16.48¢/kWh. Commercial rates sit at 11.62¢/kWh while industrial buyers pay 7.81¢/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 10.7M MWh on roughly $1609.1M in utility revenue, a useful yardstick for sizing local demand against the grid mix that serves it.

The generation mix is led by coal at 85.1% of in-state production, with natural gas providing 7.5% and wind supplying 4.0%. Renewable fuels, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass, collectively account for 7.1% of West Virginia'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 West Virginia moved from 11.44¢/kWh in 2016 to 15.07¢/kWh in 2024, a 31.7% shift over that window. Comparable-priced neighbors include Nevada, Alabama, Texas, 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.