The $950 Summer: How South Jersey Braces for the Electric Bill

You can hear it before you feel it. Walk down almost any street in Camden or Burlington County on an afternoon like this one and it’s there under everything — the low, steady hum of a thousand air conditioners working overtime, a sound so constant you stop noticing it until the day it goes quiet during an outage and the whole neighborhood holds its breath. That hum has a price tag this summer, and it’s a big one.

New Jersey households are staring down electric bills that would have seemed unthinkable a couple of years ago. As of late last year, folks in this state were already paying about 25 percent more than the national average for their electricity. Then the 2026 rates arrived. PSE&G customers saw their May bills come in roughly 20 percent higher than the year before — around $122 for a single month — and that was before the real heat set in. If prices climb this summer the way they did last summer, the total June-through-September electric bill for a typical household could land somewhere near $950.

The brutal physics of a hot day

Nine hundred and fifty dollars to keep your house livable for four months. For a lot of South Jersey families — the young couple with a new mortgage, the retiree on a fixed income, the single parent already juggling the grocery bill — that isn’t a line item. It’s a decision. And the physics are brutal: the amount of electricity it takes to cool your house to 75 degrees when it’s 95 outside is about 300 percent higher than when it’s only 85 out. The hottest days — the ones where you most want the cold air — are exactly the days your meter spins the fastest. Behind the household numbers is a bigger force most people never see: PJM, the regional grid operator, saw its wholesale capacity prices surge to $329.17 per megawatt-day, a 22 percent jump over last year’s figure, which was itself a record.

What’s still in our hands

But here’s the thing that makes me love this corner of the world even in a summer like this one. South Jersey doesn’t just absorb a hardship. It organizes around it. Public libraries across the region quietly double as cooling centers on the worst days, air-conditioned rooms where a senior without central air can spend an afternoon in comfort and nobody makes them feel like they’re imposing. Neighbors check on the older man two doors down, the one who’s too proud to say his window unit died. The grandmother who keeps her thermostat high to save a dollar gets a granddaughter who shows up with a box fan and a stern little lecture about heat exhaustion.

None of that lowers the wholesale price of a megawatt. But it’s the difference between a community that lets its most vulnerable suffer alone and one that pulls a chair up to the cool spot and says, sit here a while.Max Cedar

The bills are going to be what they’re going to be this summer. That much is out of our hands. What’s still in our hands is the checking-in, the box fan on the porch, the open library door. Keep an eye on your neighbors — especially the ones who won’t ask. That hum will quiet down come October. Until then, South Jersey does what South Jersey does: it takes care of its own.

Based on reporting from Third Way, News 12 New Jersey, NJ Spotlight News, and PSE&G.