South Carolina Industrial Power Costs: Forecasting 2026 Manufacturing Energy Profiles
South Carolina\'s legendary "I-85 corridor" manufacturing boom—anchored by automotive, tire, and aerospace sectors—was largely built on the promise of exceptionally low, stable industrial power rates. However, heading into 2026, the trifecta of utilities dominating the state (Dominion Energy SC, Duke Energy, and Santee Cooper) face immense capacity constraints. The retirement of legacy baseload coal and the massive surge in new industrial and data center demand are collectively driving industrial tariffs upward, forcing manufacturers to rethink their peak demand and load factor profiles.
Executive Impact
- →The Three-Headed Geography: A factory\'s energy operating cost is entirely dictated by zip code. Dominion Energy controls the central and southern corridors, Duke dominates the upstate/Piedmont, and Santee Cooper supplies massive wholesale generation to local co-ops.
- →The Capacity Crunch: Santee Cooper and Dominion have explicitly warned of winter generation shortfalls due to unprecedented load growth, accelerating the timeline for new (and expensive) natural gas plant capital expenditures.
- →Tariff Engineering Focus: In a regulated state with no retail choice, large consumers must focus on "Tariff Engineering"—auditing ridings, demand ratchets, and power factor penalties to artificially lower bills.
The Utility Trifecta
Unlike more uniform states, South Carolina's industrial power landscape is heavily fragmented.
- Duke Energy (Carolinas & Progress): Serving the massive manufacturing upstate (Greenville/Spartanburg). Duke is currently navigating massive interconnected rate cases across both Carolinas to fund its grid modernization and coal-retirement transition.
- Dominion Energy South Carolina (formerly SCANA): Anchoring the midlands and Charleston corridor. Following the VC Summer nuclear failure, Dominion's rates remain under heavy scrutiny, but the sheer load growth of the state is forcing new infrastructure costs.
- Santee Cooper (State-Owned): A unique, massive state-owned utility that provides direct service to immense industrial giants and supplies wholesale power to twenty independent electric cooperatives.
The Rate Structure Shift for Heavy Industry
For decades, the name of the game in South Carolina was volume. High utilization (a flat load profile running 24/7) resulted in an exceptionally low blended cents-per-kWh cost.
Today, the pricing structure is aggressively shifting from energy charges to demand (capacity) charges. The utilities are burdened by maintaining enough physical wire capacity to support sudden spikes in manufacturing logic, rather than just the raw fuel cost of generating power.
As a result, industrial facilities in 2026 are heavily penalized for having "peaky" usage patterns. Facilities operating on standard commercial tariffs must audit their "demand ratchets"—a punitive clause where a single severe 15-minute usage spike in July will dictate the minimum billed demand for the subsequent 11 months, completely destroying the facility's winter budget.
Combating Costs in a Monopoly
Because a tire manufacturer cannot simply "switch suppliers" to lower their rate, industrial procurement officers in South Carolina must deploy complex Tariff Engineering:
- Interval Data Auditing: Scrutinizing 15-minute load data to ensure the facility is placed on the optimal, highly specific industrial rate schedule authorized by the Public Service Commission of South Carolina (PSCSC).
- Power Factor Correction: Installing capacitor banks. South Carolina utilities will aggressively fine, or apply multipliers to, industrial loads that operate with inefficient inductive loads (poor power factor).
- Coincident Peak Shedding: Participating in specialized interruptible tariffs. Factories agree to shut down specific production lines simultaneously during grid emergencies in exchange for massively reduced baseline tariffs year-round.