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, regarding inflation and rising electricity costs.

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.

Rising Electricity Costs: ‘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.

Read the full article about rising electricity costs by Jessica Kutz at The 19th.