Electric bills have shocked Duke Energy customers across North Carolina in recent months, with some households reporting bills of over $1,000. More than 70,000 people have signed a petition launched by a Raleigh resident calling for an audit of the company’s billing system and refunds for customers.

Duke Energy spokesperson Jeff Brooks told WRAL News that unusually cold weather was to blame, with heating use rising during a key winter billing period.

Cold weather was a real factor. But it is not the whole explanation – and for many customers, it may not even be the primary one.

A clearer view of bill changes

To isolate the effect of rate changes from usage changes, the Energy and Policy Institute (EPI) calculated the impact of Duke Energy Progress rate adjustments on a residential customer using a constant 1,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per month. This is Duke Energy’s own standard reference customer for its filings before the North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC).

Rate changes alone increased the reference monthly bill by about $50 between 2020 and 2025 – a jump of nearly 45%.

Even a customer who used exactly the same amount of electricity every month would be paying 45% more today than in 2020.

What’s driving higher bills?

Between 2020 and 2025, Duke Energy Progress customers absorbed a dozen separate bill increases. They came from three directions simultaneously and built over time:

• Fuel costs. A December 2021 fuel adjustment – the second largest in recent years – raised bills by 12.8% as natural gas prices rose after COVID shutdowns. December 2022 brought another increase of 8.4%. Duke Energy does not profit from its purchases of gas, but it also doesn’t experience any losses when the price of gas increases. Some states require utilities to bear a share of the burden when fuel costs rise, to create an incentive for them to reduce fuel risk, but North Carolina does not.

• Storm recovery. In 2021, a new charge appeared on bills to pay costs related to Hurricanes Florence and Michael. These costs are financed through bonds that customers repay over time. In 2025, a second round of storm recovery charges, covering Hurricane Helene, added another layer.

• Base rates. In October 2022, the NCUC approved Duke’s request for a three-year rate plan spreading increases across 2023, 2024, and 2025. Together, those steps added about $18 per month to the typical bill.

Duke’s base rates embed within them the profits that the utility earns and keeps for its shareholders, which are not segmented out in customers’ bills. In 2025, Duke Energy Progress kept 17.4 percent of the revenue that it collected from customers as profit. That margin hovered between 14.9 and 17.4 percent from 2021 to 2025, according to EPI’s analysis of Duke’s financial filings.

An accumulation of increases

There was one moment of relief. In December 2024, Duke lowered fuel rates by 4.5% as gas prices fell.

The relief did not last. Within months, the new base rate increases and storm recovery charges more than offset the decrease.

The result is a higher starting point for every Duke Energy bill.

New hikes may be coming

Those increases are not over. Duke Energy is now asking the NCUC to approve another rate hike. Under the proposal, typical residential bills for Duke Energy Progress customers would increase about 18%, while Duke Energy Carolinas customers would see about a 16% increase.

Public hearings on that proposal begin March 30 in Raleigh.