It’s too bad bank accounts don’t come with surge protectors. After a yearly $400 rate spike, PG&E customers in San José and much of CA now scramble to make their household budgets work—one San Francisco resident saw her energy bill jump by $100 in a single month. SF Chronicle’s Julie Johnson reports.

North Beach resident Serena Satyasai never thought much about her utility bill, but that was before February when California’s electricity prices rose to become the highest in the contiguous United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

Satyasai’s Pacific Gas and Electric Co. bill jumped by about $100 compared with the same month last year. Like many of PG&E’s 5.5 million customers, she’s having to rescript her monthly budget around these rising costs.

Propelled in large part by PG&E, which hiked residential electricity rates by 20% for about 16 million Californians in January, the state’s high electricity prices are second only to Hawaii, which is always an expensive outlier because of the costs of shipping oil to the far-flung archipelago.

It is unusual for Californians to pay higher prices than the East Coast in the depth of winter. This year alone, typical Northern and Central California households (which use about 500 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month) will pay over $400 more annually on their PG&E bill. 

Californians’ utility bills could also be impacted by a controversial proposed monthly fixed charge of about $24.

Read the whole thing here.

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