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Global economic forces are aligning to usher in a period of sharply higher electricity rates in North Carolina, which has long enjoyed access to some of the nation's cheapest power.

Many energy experts agree that North Carolina's era of cheap electricity, in which some customers have grown accustomed to paying as much as 25 percent below the national average, is coming to an end. Electricity costs are destined to surge as customers are called on to pay for new multibillion-dollar power plants and alternative energies. Meanwhile, electric utilities are trapped between growing energy demand and global warming.

Cost predictions are not widely available, but enough information has dribbled out from the power industry recently to suggest that in North Carolina, electricity costs could surge by 50 percent in the next decade. That would be nearly $50 a month added to a typical monthly bill of $97 for a Progress Energy residential customer.

Bigger electricity bills will increase the cost of living, pinching household budgets and increasing the cost of doing business, especially for energy-intensive industries. The state could lose one of its draws for recruiting new businesses: relatively inexpensive power that yielded annual savings of tens of thousands of dollars a year on an annual corporate budget.

"When these price-increase storms hit, they can have a lot of consequence, and a lot of damage can be left in their wake," said Lawrence Makovich, a senior power adviser at Cambridge Energy Research Associates near Boston. "This is material for many families. Electricity is a necessity. It's not a nonessential item that you can live without." (more…)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 6:49 am and is filed under Daily News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.