The Southeast electricity rates

The Southeast never restructured. Its utilities generate, transmit and distribute, and their rates are set by state commissions through rate cases rather than by wholesale auctions. Most of the region sits outside any organised wholesale market, with the Tennessee Valley Authority operating as a federal power producer across Tennessee and parts of six neighbouring states.

Generation is diverse and largely modern. Nuclear is a substantial share in the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee; efficient combined-cycle gas dominates Florida; hydro matters in Alabama and Tennessee. Coal is shrinking everywhere.

The defining regional characteristic is not the rate. It is consumption. Hot, humid summers, widespread electric resistance heating and large detached housing stock give the Southeast the highest average household electricity use in the country.

Georgia is the clearest single story. Vogtle units 3 and 4 are the only new commercial nuclear reactors completed in the United States this century, they came in years late and far over budget, and Georgia Power's share of that cost has entered rates in stages. The plants will run for sixty years with very low fuel cost, but the capital is being recovered now.

South Carolina carries the opposite version: the V.C. Summer expansion was abandoned mid-construction, and the question of who bears the cost reshaped the state's utility landscape.

Across the region, data-centre growth around Atlanta and continuing population growth are pushing load forecasts up, which means more generation entering rate base.

Because there is no retail choice anywhere in the region, supplier shopping is not available and the levers are usage and rate schedule.

Given how high consumption is here, efficiency work returns more in the Southeast than the rate alone suggests. Duct sealing and attic insulation are the standard high-return items in the region's building stock, and moving off electric resistance heat is usually the single largest saving available to a household that has it.

Several utilities offer opt-in time-of-use and EV schedules with steep off-peak discounts. They are rarely the default and generally have to be requested.