Molly Mandel is on a budget. Like many others her age, the 77-year-old retiree depends on her Social Security check and a small monthly pension to cover her expenses. She only buys food that’s on sale at the grocery store. She thrifts her clothes because the prices at department stores are too high these days. “You go into Penney’s, and you look at a blouse, and it’s 24.99!” she said. 

But despite all her penny-pinching, her spending is still more than she sees in her monthly checks. “I’m economizing in as many places as I can, but the inflation of almost everything I use is outpacing my income,” she said. 

Now her electricity provider, Arizona Public Service, is proposing to raise her electricity bills for the third time in three years. So when the opportunity came to speak at a town hall on the potential rate hike in Sun City, a retirement community north of Phoenix, she was one of the first to share the way rising costs were already impacting her tight budgeting. 

Sitting at a roundtable near the front of the room, she spoke directly to the state attorney general, Kris Mayes, who convened the meeting. “I am a retiree who lives on Social Security and a small pension, and with increases in the Medicare costs that are deducted from Social Security, the food costs, and tariff costs for almost every product brought into the United States, an increase of 16 percent seems outrageous to me,” she said. 

She was one of around 40 people who had shown up to the meeting, the first in a series of town halls organized by the attorney general, after the state’s largest electricity providers announced potential rate hikes.

‘The new eggs’ 

For people across the country, rates are going up at a fast clip, with some experts now calling electricity “the new eggs.” 

Over the last year, electricity prices have risen twice as fast as inflation. And residents in 41 states are looking at even higher costs for electricity and natural gas due to proposed rate hikes this year and next, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan think tank. 

In some states, like Arizona, the increases have been particularly stark. As Mayes noted at the town hall, “The cost of electricity in Arizona has risen faster in the past two years than in the previous nine.” The latest request would raise residential bills by an estimated $240 a year. 

For Arizonans, the price increase is on top of the already skyrocketing bills residents are paying in the summertime due to extreme heat, which continues to worsen from climate change. 

Utilities have various reasons for raising their rates. In Arizona, for example, an explosion of data centers is leading to a skyrocketing demand for electricity. Extreme weather, like heat and wildfires, is also straining the grid, and the need to upgrade existing infrastructure like transmission lines is raising costs for utilities. 

But many utilities are also for-profit entities. Arizona Public Service, one of two utilities asking for rate increases, made a net profit of $608 million in 2024, after raising rates 8 percent last year and the year before.  

The CEO of APS, Ted Geiser, has said the rate hikes are necessary to pay for needed upgrades to infrastructure and that the new rate proposal also includes a new way to charge large electricity consumers like data centers to pay for the strain they are putting on the system.

But Mayes, who formerly served on the Arizona Corporation Commission, the body responsible for approving rate hikes, is intervening in this rate case in the hopes of stopping the hike. She thinks it’s obvious that the consecutive hikes are a sign that residents are shouldering some of the cost. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” she told The 19th in an interview. “I’ve been watching utilities for 25 years. I was a utility regulator, and I’ve never seen a situation like this where such incredibly profitable companies are asking residential consumers to subsidize their electricity costs.”

“Enough is enough,” she continued. “Arizonans can’t afford these rate increases anymore and the utility shouldn’t be trying to foist them on people that are already struggling.” 

Who is impacted 

At 77, Mandel is emblematic of the people who stand to be hit disproportionately by the rising costs: older women. 

This demographic is typically living on a fixed income with less in retirement savings and Social Security benefits than men. Women over 65 are also more likely to be living in poverty than men of the same age. 

Those realities are translating to worries over how to make ends meet. According to an April poll by the AARP of adults 50 and older, women were more likely to say they were concerned about their electricity bills going up over men, with 50 percent of women saying they were very concerned compared to 35 percent of men. 

“High energy costs can lead to older adults having to make difficult decisions between paying for heating, cooling, medication, or food,” said Jenn Jones, vice president of financial security and livable communities at AARP, in an email. “The bottom line is stable, affordable energy helps ensure people’s safety, comfort, and health — particularly during extreme weather.” 

The elderly are also more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. They have a harder time regulating their body temperature, making them more susceptible to heat illness, which is becoming more common due to rising temperatures.

“We’ve had multiple heat-related deaths in Arizona, and one of the reasons I am being so aggressive in these rate cases is because I am very worried that more and more folks are going to feel like they have to turn their AC off so that they can afford their bills,” said Mayes, who is currently investigating the death of an 82-year old woman who died in Sun City in May after her electricity was shut off due to failure to pay her bills. 

While there are no nationwide studies on electricity burden that focus on gender and age, in August, the Gender Equity Policy Institute published a California-specific analysis, finding that women are hit hardest by rising energy costs in the state. It also found that senior women — or those 65 and older, were most likely to be energy-burdened — more than senior men and younger adults of any gender. Someone is considered energy burdened if they pay six percent or more of their household income on energy costs. The report also found that in California, the energy burden is worse for Black women and Native women. 

The reasons for rising electricity costs vary by state, but some trends in the report can help explain why those costs may be causing older women across the country to feel more anxiety over their utility bills. “A lot of this goes back to the gendered inequalities that women have experienced over their whole life. They on average are more likely to have earned lower wages and accumulated less wealth. And women live longer than men,” said Nancy Cohen, founder and CEO of the institute, and author on the report. “It is understandable and pretty much predictable that senior women would experience this difficulty.” 

The report also found that 31 percent of women-led households were energy burdened compared to 24 percent of men-led households and that 37 percent of families headed by single mothers are energy burdened compared to 28 percent headed by single mothers.

Trump policies

At the same time that rates are going up, policies that could make bills go down are being upended by the Trump administration. Funding to bring more clean energy into the mix, which has consistently gotten cheaper, has been gutted. Energy efficiency standards, which ultimately help consumers save money by incentivizing appliances that use less electricity, have also been rolled back. 

And despite Trump’s promises to lower energy bills, his landmark legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is expected to further impact energy prices. According to an analysis by Princeton University, the legislation, which repeals clean energy tax credits and rescinds funding for renewables, is expected to increase electricity costs by $165 a year by 2030, and up to $280 a year by 2035. 

And now due to the government shutdown, the Low Income Household Energy Assistance Program, one of the few that helps low-income Americans pay their energy bills, and that prioritizes the elderly, the disabled and those with young children, is in limbo, with funding delayed. 

Usually states would have received their allocation by late October or early November – 80 percent of which is distributed for heating costs. Now, the best estimate by the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, an organization that works with state directors of the program, says that funding won’t come until December at the earliest. 

According to the organization, the cost of heating a home is expected to increase by 8 percent this year, largely due to the increase in electricity prices, making the dispersal of money even more urgent. 

As a result, the organization is asking utilities to voluntarily pause shutoffs for customers who don’t pay their bills. “No family should be forced to choose between heat and food because of a federal funding delay,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of NEADA, in a news release. “Utilities must act in the public interest and pause shutoffs until federal aid is available again.”

Competing costs

For older people it’s not just electricity that’s rising; health care costs are going up as well.

62-year-old Margaret Mohr, who also was in attendance at the Sun City town hall, is facing $800 a month premiums on her health insurance; she is not old enough to qualify for Medicare. She works part time as a licensed counselor, a job she had wanted to transition to long before she retired from law enforcement, but now it’s become the way she can afford her rising costs. “Everything goes up except income,” she said. 

Even for those on Medicare like Mandel, costs are also going up. Her premiums are rising by $21 a month, a cost that eats up the recently announced cost of living increase to Social Security. Mandel also worries about the price of medications. She just got a proposal from Cigna, her healthcare provider, which would require her to cover a higher percentage of the cost of certain prescription drugs. 

Mandel considers herself lucky. She owns her home and has some resources she can draw from if forced to. But she worries about people she knows who have no financial buffer at all. “It is not just the energy cost, it is the cumulative effect of all those,” she said. “Even if you have additional assets they are depleting those the longer you live.”

She herself worries she might have to relocate. “I might have to downsize, or consider moving outside the country,” she said. “But because I have so much family here I don’t know if I want to make that drastic move.”

Editor’s note: After publication, Molly clarified that she meant to say that with the rising inflation, she worries her costs could outpace her income in the future.