Your NYC electric bill may be skyrocketing. Here's what you can do.

What's been making you more uncomfortable this summer: the temperature outside or the electric bills that show up after you crank the AC?

The sticker shock may only get worse, with Con Edison seeking approval to raise its rates in the coming year. National Grid rates saw an increases in September 2024 and April of this year, and will rise again in 2026 as well — for a roughly 40% cumulative hit.

WNYC's Stephen Nessen recently spoke with Laurie Wheelock, executive director of the Public Utility Law Project, on "All Things Considered" about what you can do if you're smacked with a higher-than-expected bill. The group advocates for low-income utility customers in New York City. A lightly edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Stephen Nessen: Con Edison says it's seeking rate hikes to help fund infrastructure upgrades and meet increasing demands. Is that why we're seeing such high electricity bills this summer?

Wheelock: So this summer we are seeing higher electricity bills for a couple of reasons. The first is the supply side of the bill. During the summer, we have had a number of heat waves, and typically what happens during the heat waves is that we have an increase in demand on the electric side of our utility bills and often lower supply.

And so the supply charge on Con Edison bills has been higher for a lot of customers because it has been hot. And there's been more need to run our AC units. And then on the delivery side of the bill, Con Edison does have a rate plan where electric and gas rates go up every January. And so technically with rates going up January 2025, this is the first summer that we have those new set of delivery rates.

Con Edison is doing another active rate case right now. But what it's seeking right now, this summer, won't probably come into effect until this winter.

How do you think customers should be reading their bills to make sure that what they're charged is actually what they use that month?

So on the Con Ed bills, what we encourage people to do every single month is to look at the first page, and the Con Ed bills in the upper-right-hand corner have a chart of your daily usage, and that can be very helpful seeing how much you're using.

Does it feel right to you? Keep your bills from last summer or again, keep them in the future, and cross-compare them. Making sure that your usage does kind of track these weather patterns is really important.

Also, on the first page of the bill, you're going to see, under your new charges, the number of days that you're being charged for.

And Con Edison customers often have a range. Sometimes it's 28 days, it could be 32 days, but it's not by the calendar. But if you see something that is many more days than that, 60, 120 days, that's often a sign that there is something wrong with your bill or your meter or maybe some correction.

And so we always tell people: Read that first page of the bill and then go to page two. That's where you'll actually see how much you've used, how much you're being charged for. If you have concerns, call Con Edison and you can talk to them and you can actually also request tests or investigations.

Let's say you see really high usage and you weren't home, maybe, during the month of July. What you can actually do is ask Con Edison to come out and test your meter. Or sometimes we see situations where maybe a tenant is actually paying for the usage in their unit, but then also maybe common areas like the elevator or the lights in the hallway. And so that could be a shared meter situation. And Con Edison can come and investigate that, too. And they actually do a test where they will shut off all the electricity in your apartment and then they check your meter. And if there's still usage on that electric meter, that's typically a sign that you know what you are drawing off of somewhere else.

What are some resources people can look into if they feel like they can't afford their high electricity bills?

What we typically recommend is that one, the utility be contacted first. Talk to them about your individual situation. And then you can go to myenergy.ny.gov. If you're low- and moderate-income, you might be able to get an energy audit or rebate.

And we also have regional clean energy hubs that can give resources for low- and moderate-income households.

Let's say you figure out that your bill is accurate after all. Do you have any tips that you can share that will help lower your usage and help conserve energy?

Energy efficiency is huge. Having Energy Star Appliances, using LED light bulbs. We typically encourage people to clean out the filter in their AC unit once a month, if you can remember, because if that filter is dirty, that machine's going to draw more energy. It's working harder.

We also always warn people about the energy vampires: Go around your house, unplug things, use power strips to try and pull things out of the socket, because they do draw even though it's at a lower usage, drawing the curtains in the hot summer.

And then one of my favorites is the ceiling fan. In the summer, you typically want it to spin counterclockwise to push the air down to help create a cool breeze. And then around Halloween, what we typically do in the fall months is switch it to clockwise to actually help rotate the warm air once you switch over.

Con Edison's website includes energy-efficiency tips on its website, as well as information on tools to help customers monitor usage. The site also describes available financial assistance programs.