Residents living in PG&E territory are in for a rude awakening when they receive their June bill because it will likely be a lot higher than they were expecting. On June 1, PG&E flipped a switch it flips every year – summer rate plans. Same peak hours, higher numbers. It's one of the most predictable bill increases on the calendar, and it's also one of the least explained.
You Didn't Change Anything. PG&E Did.
Most Bay Area customers are on a Time-of-Use plan. Time-of-Use means electricity costs more during peak hours, usually 4 to 9 PM, every day of the year. This plan has two seasons: winter, which runs October 1 through May 31, and summer which runs June 1 through September 30. While the peak window doesn't move, the price attached to it does. The eight winter months are priced lower than the four summer months, and electricity simply costs more per unit in summer than in winter.
So, on May 31 you were paying winter prices. On June 1 you started paying summer prices. The plan name on your bill looks identical, but you will likely have a much bigger number at the end of the month.
Why does summer cost more?
It comes back to the same thing that drives peak pricing in the first place: the grid is most strained when everyone needs power at once. In summer, the late afternoon is brutal. The sun is still high enough that demand for air conditioning is climbing, but solar generation starts falling off a cliff around 5 PM right as people get home and crank the AC. The grid has to fire up its most expensive power plants to cover that gap, and that cost lands in the 4 to 9 PM window. (This is the duck curve, and it's worth understanding if you want the full picture.)
PG&E prices that reality into the season. After the March 2026 restructure, the default E-TOU-C plan now runs roughly $0.45 to $0.50 per unit during summer peak hours, against about $0.35 to $0.38 off-peak. The summer peak is several cents higher than the winter peak you were paying in May.
What the Seasonal Flip Actually Costs You
Say you're in a Bay Area apartment and your evening routine doesn't change at all from May to June: AC on, dinner cooking, lights, TV, phones charging, roughly 5 hours of real usage in that 4 to 9 PM window.
If that's about 6 units a night, that's around 180 peak units a month. At winter peak prices, that block of usage ran you somewhere around $68 to $72. At the new summer peak price, the exact same usage runs closer to $82 to $90. That's $15 to $20 added to your bill before you've used a single extra unit of electricity.
The seasonal price bump is just force number one. Force number two is that you also use more in summer, because the AC that was off in May is running for hours in July. Higher price times higher usage is how a $90 spring bill becomes a $180 to $240 summer bill. The pricing change and the usage change hit at the same time, which is exactly why summer bills feel like they come out of nowhere.
But Didn't PG&E Just Cut Rates?
In March, PG&E lowered the per-unit price of electricity by about 5 to 7 cents and added a flat Base Services Charge of around $24 a month. For a typical customer, the net effect was a bill that dropped about $5 a month. (We broke down that change here.)
While the cut is real, it’s also tiny next to the seasonal flip. A $5 monthly rate cut does not survive a $15 to $20 seasonal price increase, let alone the usage spike on top of it.
Why We're Building Nura
You shouldn’t have to be on top of these constant changes as a consumer. That's why we're building with Nura. We connect to your smart meter data, show you what's actually driving your bill, and tell you whether a different rate plan would save you money for the way you already live.