Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator Instructions]. Your first question will come from the line of Steve Priceman [ph] of Catapult. Please proceed.
Unidentified Analyst
Yes, hi, gentlemen how are you?
Jimmy Addison - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Great.
Unidentified Analyst
You mentioned I think you said you're maintaining your guidance but you're kind of ahead of your internal plan?
Jimmy Addison - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Right.
Unidentified Analyst
Are you basically just watching the weather and such and just seeing, what if any concerns do you have in second half of the year, because it does look like you're potentially at the top end or beating this range.
Jimmy Addison - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Yes, Steve, obliviously the weather is a huge factor particularly the third quarter our electric business and the fourth quarter in our gas business. So it's way too early to consider changing the guidance, we're solidly in our range at this point, if we had normal weather for the balance of the year we would project to be in the range. But we are slightly ahead of our plan at this point.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay, could you just give us a sense of how the economy in your service area is doing?
Jimmy Addison - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Yes, Steve we seem to be doing based on the governmental information that I released here locally in the State of South Carolina and the States of North Carolina, Georgia we seem to be doing somewhat better than the national averages. For example, foreclosures here in South Carolina, our main territory are much lower in the housing market than is the national average. We continue to see good customer growth on the system, you see in our supplemental metrics there were up 2.1% over this point last year.
Not a lot of growth over the last three months in our electric business, but very consistent with last year's second quarter. There is not a tremendous amount of growth that typically happens in that period. The industrials and commercials are still holding up well up over 1% each, year-to-date and electric consumption with fairly comparable weather between the two years. So things seem to be going better here than the national results.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay.
Jimmy Addison - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
One other bit of information, I was looking at our top industrial customers that we forecast consumption individually buy [ph] and about two-thirds of our top 20 or so customers have used more energy this year on a KW basis not just a pricing basis because we had an increase but more energy is issued than they did last year and take note there is a positive sign in this table [ph].
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