City of Carthage electricity rates

It is a smaller system, serving 7,106 residential customers, which means its fixed costs are spread across a narrow base. At 14.06¢ per kilowatt-hour it tracks the Missouri average of 13.68¢ closely, which is what you would expect from a utility large enough to shape that average itself.

Consumption is close to the national norm at 925 kilowatt-hours a month against 871, so the rate translates fairly directly into the bill.

Owned by the city it serves and governed by a local board rather than the state commission. No shareholder return is built into the rate. That matters because a bill is not only the cost of generating electricity: it also carries the cost of the network, and who owns that network changes how it is paid for.

In 2024 the average City of Carthage customer went 243 minutes without electricity across 3.37 interruptions. The median across the 941 utilities that report this is 185 minutes.

That is worse than typical. Overhead lines through wooded or storm-exposed terrain are the usual explanation, and the fix is vegetation management and circuit automation, both of which are recovered through rates.

63 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 0.57 megawatts. That works out to 8.9 installations per thousand customers, against a median of 8 across the utilities reporting it.

Adoption is above the national median, which generally tracks the retail rate more closely than it tracks sunshine. What exports are actually worth.