French Broad Elec Member Corp electricity rates

It is a smaller system, serving 36,147 residential customers, which means its fixed costs are spread across a narrow base. At 14.78¢ per kilowatt-hour it tracks the North Carolina average of 15.09¢ closely, which is what you would expect from a utility large enough to shape that average itself.

Consumption here is below the national norm at 774 kilowatt-hours a month against 871, which softens the effect of the rate on the final bill.

Owned by the customers it serves, with directors elected by members. Co-ops are frequently outside state rate regulation. 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 French Broad Elec Member Corp customer went 68 minutes without electricity across 2.79 interruptions. The median across the 941 utilities that report this is 185 minutes.

That is markedly better than typical. Short outage durations usually mean an underground or heavily automated network, and they are expensive to achieve, which is part of why reliable systems often carry higher delivery charges.

309 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 5.09 megawatts. That works out to 8.5 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.