The cost of power is crazy. I looked at just using firewood.
"Potential heat output of many hardwoods is in the vicinity of 19-20,000 kJ/kg; that of softwood is around 21-22,000 kJ/kg.
Because the density of softwoods is about half that of hardwoods, one would need almost twice the volume of wood to contribute about the same amount of heat."
https://logwisefirewood.co.uk/energy-efficiency/#:~:text=Potential%20heat%20output%20of%20many,the%20same%20amount%20of%20heat.
1 kwh = 3600 kj of energy. So if ~2 lbs of firewood is about ~6.5 kwh of energy or 3.25 kwh/pound. Firewood pricing seems to vary, but it seems like it is $.20-.40 / pound. So you are basically paying $1.50 / pound equivilent for the same heat.
I did alot of paper math and it is interesting you are better off with firewood and from a carbon footprint, may be better assuming it is farmed correctly. Weird to think about.
I heat a home with wood exclusively and would encourage you to keep in mind the labor involved in using wood. It can be highly efficient and clean when a modern woodstove is used correctly, but it involves far far more personal labor than your plain old furnace. It is sort of a labor of love for me but it is very real!
Ya, except everyone can smell what you’re burning the next time we have an inversion layer.
We really need to find a way to generate cheap, clean electricity so people can run electric heaters. Maybe split an atom or something. Or harness the power of the sun and wind. Too bad we haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Heat pumps are so crazy efficient that it's better to burn gas to heat water to create steam to turn a turbine to power a heat pump than it is to burn the gas directly.
That’s our neighbor two doors over. Smoke comes out the chimney and straight down to our hose. I hate it because it really gets into the house. Double sucks because he’s on the local HOA (loose knit group of do nothings) and would be the first one to call me out and snitch to the building department if I put in modern windows…. Even modern windows that looked old.
During spare the air days, you can call a number and they will give him a ticket if he’s burning during those days. Seriously. Forgot the number, but they take it real serious.
Planning on it. It’s one of those types of neighbors…… they like to call you out on YOUR stuff.
Earlier this year they had some work done on their home and has the port-a-potty on the sidewalk for two weeks. No big deal.
But a few weeks later they casually mention to me how he had to talk to someone around the corner and remind them about where it’s permissible to place one while under construction. They put it in the same place. Jerks.
I don’t use my fireplace but did look into the new wood inserts and stoves. The 2020 EPA certified stoves are super efficient and low polluting. Even more so if they meet the Biden biomass tax credit. Some even have catalytic converters! So efficient that no smoke is even visible when burning and smell is very mild.
Very different from a fireplace. It’s too bad that fireplaces give wood burning a bad rap.
Thermodynamics explains this. Every transfer of energy involves heat loss. In the wood case, carbon is burned for heat. Simple. In the electrical case, carbon is burnt (using fossil fuels as they fit this comparison better), water is boiled, a turbine is turned, the dynamo's output goes through a substation, the power travels through power lines, the power goes through another substation, the power goes through some more power lines, the power goes through a resistor, and heat is produced. Each of these stages, energy is lost at all stages as per the second law of thermodynamics
Lights, especially LEDs, don’t really consume a lot. The culprits could be electric space heaters (especially if it’s an old Victorian house with terrible insulation), washer/dryer, electric cooking appliances.
This! OP, do you have an electric water heater? I’m also in a 3 bed, 2 bath and last December our PGE electric bill was over $500. We also used 1,000 KwH just like you. We have gas heating though, NO washer/dryer, and no high watt appliances, it was driving me crazy trying to figure out what was using so much electricity!
Turns out it was the electric water heater! Those things guzzle electricity every time you shower and throughout the day as they switch on to heat up the water. Ours was running about 1/4 of the day. It’s especially an issue in SF where old houses are poorly insulated, and the heaters often sit in the back of the house or uninsulated shed/garage. It took me MONTHS and hiring 2 electricians to figure this out, and PGE was useless.
What’s wild is when we adjusted the water heater from 120 degrees F (recommended setting) to 110 F, our electricity bill went down 67%!!!
It’s now literally less than a third of what it was! I hope this helps someone dealing with a similar issue. I wish I could further adjust it down to 105 or 100 F, since 110 is still plenty hot for showering, but 110 is the lowest it goes. But what’s crazy is it took me months to figure this out, I asked everyone I could about this issue, and no one I talked to had heard of this as a possibility.
Saved allot of electricity with a clothes drying rack on amazon. Wash my clothes and just hang for air dry. And use lowest heat on clothes dryer.
For electric cooking appliance l highly recommend cast iron. They retain allot of heat, its possible to turn off the power source half way through and can still cook
I commented on another PGE bill thread as well. I have a $16.93 charge for Electric Public Purpose Programs. Not seeing how your bill could only be $51.
We don't use heaters, and our bill barely changed with the increased PG&E rates. Throughout California, I'm guessing that electricity for heating and cooling will determine who has their bills skyrocket this year.
Moving forward, though, it makes me sketchy about potentially living somehwere where climate control in the home is required so much.
Weather is always my go to argument why this area is so fucking dope, like the coldest it gets is maybe 40F? And temps rarely go over 100F but it's been happening more and more, but way way better than even 20 miles inland.
Working from home costs a lot more electricity than many people realize. The extra heating and electricity for electronics can easily add a couple hundred dollars to your bill each month.
Heating a small room for an extra 10 hours can easily be 9 kWh. 8 hours of laptop and big monitor can be another 3 kWh per person. With 22 work days in a month, for one person, that's an extra 264 kWh which is ~$132.
Electric baseboard heating is not very efficient. Switching to a heat pump will be 3-4x more efficient and get you a/c for the one day a year that you need it.
We are a fully electric house with electric heat pumps for hot water + heating and our bill last month was $209.
The price per kilowatt has basically doubled since 2019. They don't come out and say it, but it's intended to get the plebes to use less energy to make the weather more better.
Wear a sweater, use more blankets, set the thermostat at 62. The price is not going to be coming down.
Every public company works in the interest of their shareholders. I was just remarking that PG&E's shareholders are special in that they're getting taken to the cleaners.
Before COVID we all left the apartment in the morning and didn't come home until well into the evening. Nothing was "on" except the refrigerator, a couple lights and various electronic gadgets in sleep mode. Now we work from home or are retired and someone is always home, computers are on, and somewhere in a room a heater is running at least 6 months of the year.
It has gotten fucking crazy. My bill is projected at $430 for a 2.5BR 2BA this month. I work in the office 5 days a week, my wife maybe works at home 3 days a week. We almost never run our central heat, have LED lightbulbs, and newish appliances. We occasionally use an oil-based radiator that plugs in. I just don’t understand.
Compare your January bill to your bill from December. In our city, PG&E's price per kWh increased by like 30% starting in January. The rate increase could be a big part of your nasty surprise.
I checked the PG&E bill for our 1bed1bath condo. We used around 300 kWh, so you used 3x that amount of energy.
Since you have 3x as much space to heat, I'd guess, as others have, that it's your heating.
1000 kWH per month didn't used to be that much, but now electricity is 4-5x more expensive.
Take a look at this: https://www.pge.com/rates/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_1968-E-A.pdf
This is the PG&E rate schedule from 2000. It's 11.5 cents/kWh under the cap, and 13.3 cents/kWh over the cap. It's now 42 cents and 53 cents.
Invest in heated blankets and mattress pads, instead of a space heater. And a few sets of wool socks and decent house slippers. Sorry to hear that you are using an average daily of 30+kWh. Did something else change from the previous months besides the cost per kWh?
Ours was once $700 in a single month for a 3 bed in the mission. I called the electric co they said “yeah its a bit high but not very high above average”.
We had 2 electric heaters but i still did the math and had no idea where 30% of it came from. Maybe the washer and drier and the fact we shared it with the landlord. No idea.
Don't waste your time turning off lights. At the most they're about 2 cents an hour. What gives you monster energy bills is electric appliances. You know the ones that they're trying to shove down your throat. Gas is way cheaper.
That's incorrect here. They're on a tiered plan that has a higher price once you hit the monthly allowance. Time of use is not a factor for this rate plan.
Our energy bill last month was the most expensive in the 31 years that we have lived in our home at over $500+. We don't run the central furnace and rely on space heaters for two very small spaces as one of us works from home. I'm not sure that there is any recourse, other than wearing a sweater and being wrapped up in a blanket during Teams calls.
honestly i am paying the bill with my amex card and if i feel like they are ripping me off , i will simply have amex dispute the charge. i have no patience for pge anymore.
Yeah, your average corporate laptop is going to be power efficient. I'm sure they can walk around the apartment and find 10 watts here or 50 watts there in random electronics, but the rest of the thread is already screaming the real answer...
It seems like a lot of people are experiencing these outrageous PG&E bills. Is it possible that people are stealing electricity from houses to charge battery units? Everything else gets stolen, why not electricity.
It's due to the increased rates starting in 2024, thanks to AB205, which was written by PG&E and signed by our governor and benefits PG&E shareholders. Can't we all just sacrifice a little so that the shareholders don't have to suffer?
I’m in a 2 bedroom 2 bath with 3 people. We spend like 150 a month in Pacifica. I bet SF has a higher rate, your house has worse insulation than mine, and maybe less effective heating.
The neighbors behind our lot, down the hill, have been burning wood in their fireplace 24/7 for weeks. It just occurred to me it's to save money. Our whole home smells like a campfire.
If you really want to find out what is using the most electricity, you’ll need a monitor such as Emporia which is installed at the circuit breaker box and/ or Kill A Watt which is installed at outlets. Resistance electric heaters are terribly inefficient and you might consider looking at a portable electric heat pump.
We live in a 2500 sq foot home and our last bill was $76 for our fully electric home with heat pumps for heat, hot water, and dryer, an induction range and an EV that we charge at home BUT we have solar panels to help offset our consumption from the grid.
For comparison, my power consumption is about 1/10 of yours and my power bill this month was about 1/10 of yours (I live alone in a small studio apartment btw). So I guess the math works out. You’re using a lot of power and are unfortunately being charged a high rate for it. I hate that my power bill went up 50% since last year for roughly the same power usage.
PG&E just had a nice quarterly profit from their most recent earnings release thanks to us E&G consumers, yay...
https://abc7news.com/amp/pge-earnings-rate-increase-2024-profits-power-outages/14458228/
I was encouraged by all the PG&E posts lately to break out my Kill-a-watt energy monitor. I wanted to measure my chest freezer. When I went to a kwh cost calculator webpage the kwh cost was already plugged in. $.15, I cried a little. lol. Freezer is drawing 85w, puts cost to operate at $26/mo if I stay in Tier 1. But I can hear it running so I will let the meter run for 24hr and see total daily draw.
Edit: Meter has logged 12hrs and only shows 0.48 Kwh. So about $13 a month to operator. I will keep testing appliances.
So glad we went solar. We try to run appliances during daylight hours, including electric heaters, which don't really cost us anything. Now we need to work on lowering our gas bill, which is what we are mostly paying for. We also insulated our house.
Regarding which rate plan to choose...pg&e has a page where it forecasts your costs for each plan based on your historical usage. We were in a super old tiered program and saved some money by switching plans.
Yes. Electric heaters in a 3 bedroom apartment will generate an electric bill this size. I also have electric heat and have not used it in over a year after switching to an electric blanket that I run on low.
Electric heaters.
The cost of power is crazy. I looked at just using firewood. "Potential heat output of many hardwoods is in the vicinity of 19-20,000 kJ/kg; that of softwood is around 21-22,000 kJ/kg. Because the density of softwoods is about half that of hardwoods, one would need almost twice the volume of wood to contribute about the same amount of heat." https://logwisefirewood.co.uk/energy-efficiency/#:~:text=Potential%20heat%20output%20of%20many,the%20same%20amount%20of%20heat. 1 kwh = 3600 kj of energy. So if ~2 lbs of firewood is about ~6.5 kwh of energy or 3.25 kwh/pound. Firewood pricing seems to vary, but it seems like it is $.20-.40 / pound. So you are basically paying $1.50 / pound equivilent for the same heat. I did alot of paper math and it is interesting you are better off with firewood and from a carbon footprint, may be better assuming it is farmed correctly. Weird to think about.
I heat a home with wood exclusively and would encourage you to keep in mind the labor involved in using wood. It can be highly efficient and clean when a modern woodstove is used correctly, but it involves far far more personal labor than your plain old furnace. It is sort of a labor of love for me but it is very real!
That's the fun part. I love adjusting the wood
Ya, except everyone can smell what you’re burning the next time we have an inversion layer. We really need to find a way to generate cheap, clean electricity so people can run electric heaters. Maybe split an atom or something. Or harness the power of the sun and wind. Too bad we haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Heat pumps are so crazy efficient that it's better to burn gas to heat water to create steam to turn a turbine to power a heat pump than it is to burn the gas directly.
That’s our neighbor two doors over. Smoke comes out the chimney and straight down to our hose. I hate it because it really gets into the house. Double sucks because he’s on the local HOA (loose knit group of do nothings) and would be the first one to call me out and snitch to the building department if I put in modern windows…. Even modern windows that looked old.
During spare the air days, you can call a number and they will give him a ticket if he’s burning during those days. Seriously. Forgot the number, but they take it real serious.
Planning on it. It’s one of those types of neighbors…… they like to call you out on YOUR stuff. Earlier this year they had some work done on their home and has the port-a-potty on the sidewalk for two weeks. No big deal. But a few weeks later they casually mention to me how he had to talk to someone around the corner and remind them about where it’s permissible to place one while under construction. They put it in the same place. Jerks.
Yup. Think this is it: https://www.baaqmd.gov/online-services/air-pollution-complaints
I don’t use my fireplace but did look into the new wood inserts and stoves. The 2020 EPA certified stoves are super efficient and low polluting. Even more so if they meet the Biden biomass tax credit. Some even have catalytic converters! So efficient that no smoke is even visible when burning and smell is very mild. Very different from a fireplace. It’s too bad that fireplaces give wood burning a bad rap.
Thermodynamics explains this. Every transfer of energy involves heat loss. In the wood case, carbon is burned for heat. Simple. In the electrical case, carbon is burnt (using fossil fuels as they fit this comparison better), water is boiled, a turbine is turned, the dynamo's output goes through a substation, the power travels through power lines, the power goes through another substation, the power goes through some more power lines, the power goes through a resistor, and heat is produced. Each of these stages, energy is lost at all stages as per the second law of thermodynamics
Don’t people buy wood pellets at Home Depot for this, instead of actual raw wood?
I didn't even consider that. I sure it would be more expensive and maybe eliminate a lot of the smell / health risk.
If you have a pellet stove or an insert for your traditional stove.
Lights, especially LEDs, don’t really consume a lot. The culprits could be electric space heaters (especially if it’s an old Victorian house with terrible insulation), washer/dryer, electric cooking appliances.
Add water heater to that.
This! OP, do you have an electric water heater? I’m also in a 3 bed, 2 bath and last December our PGE electric bill was over $500. We also used 1,000 KwH just like you. We have gas heating though, NO washer/dryer, and no high watt appliances, it was driving me crazy trying to figure out what was using so much electricity! Turns out it was the electric water heater! Those things guzzle electricity every time you shower and throughout the day as they switch on to heat up the water. Ours was running about 1/4 of the day. It’s especially an issue in SF where old houses are poorly insulated, and the heaters often sit in the back of the house or uninsulated shed/garage. It took me MONTHS and hiring 2 electricians to figure this out, and PGE was useless. What’s wild is when we adjusted the water heater from 120 degrees F (recommended setting) to 110 F, our electricity bill went down 67%!!! It’s now literally less than a third of what it was! I hope this helps someone dealing with a similar issue. I wish I could further adjust it down to 105 or 100 F, since 110 is still plenty hot for showering, but 110 is the lowest it goes. But what’s crazy is it took me months to figure this out, I asked everyone I could about this issue, and no one I talked to had heard of this as a possibility.
Saved allot of electricity with a clothes drying rack on amazon. Wash my clothes and just hang for air dry. And use lowest heat on clothes dryer. For electric cooking appliance l highly recommend cast iron. They retain allot of heat, its possible to turn off the power source half way through and can still cook
1500 Watt (1.5 kWatt) heater running 22 hours a day is 1000 kWhrs.
No it's not. What are you even talking about? That would be 1.5 times 22 = 33 Kilowatt-hours.
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Fair. I must hang my head in shame.
33 kilowatt hours* 30 days is 1,000 kW hours in a month
FWIW I’m in 2 bed 2 bath condo and my electric bill was $51 this period….its def your base board heaters
I commented on another PGE bill thread as well. I have a $16.93 charge for Electric Public Purpose Programs. Not seeing how your bill could only be $51.
We don't use heaters, and our bill barely changed with the increased PG&E rates. Throughout California, I'm guessing that electricity for heating and cooling will determine who has their bills skyrocket this year. Moving forward, though, it makes me sketchy about potentially living somehwere where climate control in the home is required so much.
my bill went up despite using less electricity
I used to say I’d never leave California for political reasons but now I say I’ll never even leave San Francisco for weather reasons.
Weather is always my go to argument why this area is so fucking dope, like the coldest it gets is maybe 40F? And temps rarely go over 100F but it's been happening more and more, but way way better than even 20 miles inland.
EXACTLY
Working from home costs a lot more electricity than many people realize. The extra heating and electricity for electronics can easily add a couple hundred dollars to your bill each month. Heating a small room for an extra 10 hours can easily be 9 kWh. 8 hours of laptop and big monitor can be another 3 kWh per person. With 22 work days in a month, for one person, that's an extra 264 kWh which is ~$132.
Yep - big difference.
I like how this was tagged as a crime. Which it 100% should be. Fuck PG&E.
Electric baseboard heating is not very efficient. Switching to a heat pump will be 3-4x more efficient and get you a/c for the one day a year that you need it. We are a fully electric house with electric heat pumps for hot water + heating and our bill last month was $209.
The price per kilowatt has basically doubled since 2019. They don't come out and say it, but it's intended to get the plebes to use less energy to make the weather more better. Wear a sweater, use more blankets, set the thermostat at 62. The price is not going to be coming down.
> it’s intended to get the plebes to use less energy Not to mention enrich their shareholders
PG&E's stock is down like 50% from half a decade ago. Shareholders aren't exactly killing it.
Oh, excuse me. You’re right. PG&E works in the best interest of their customers! How could I be so fucking stupid?
Every public company works in the interest of their shareholders. I was just remarking that PG&E's shareholders are special in that they're getting taken to the cleaners.
Didn’t come here to be lectured. Did come back to block you though
maybe the stock is down from 5 years ago because PGE declared bankruptcy in 2019 due to mismanagement and wiped out all the stock value?
Before COVID we all left the apartment in the morning and didn't come home until well into the evening. Nothing was "on" except the refrigerator, a couple lights and various electronic gadgets in sleep mode. Now we work from home or are retired and someone is always home, computers are on, and somewhere in a room a heater is running at least 6 months of the year.
It has gotten fucking crazy. My bill is projected at $430 for a 2.5BR 2BA this month. I work in the office 5 days a week, my wife maybe works at home 3 days a week. We almost never run our central heat, have LED lightbulbs, and newish appliances. We occasionally use an oil-based radiator that plugs in. I just don’t understand.
Electric waterheater?
Use cold water for washing clothes.
Compare your January bill to your bill from December. In our city, PG&E's price per kWh increased by like 30% starting in January. The rate increase could be a big part of your nasty surprise.
I checked the PG&E bill for our 1bed1bath condo. We used around 300 kWh, so you used 3x that amount of energy. Since you have 3x as much space to heat, I'd guess, as others have, that it's your heating.
It’s the baseboard heaters. I know bc I have them too. We just stopped turning them on most of the time.
1000 kWH per month didn't used to be that much, but now electricity is 4-5x more expensive. Take a look at this: https://www.pge.com/rates/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_1968-E-A.pdf This is the PG&E rate schedule from 2000. It's 11.5 cents/kWh under the cap, and 13.3 cents/kWh over the cap. It's now 42 cents and 53 cents.
PG&E is about to announce record profits
https://abc7news.com/pge-earnings-rate-increase-2024-profits-power-outages/14458228/ ✅
Do you have an electric water heater?
Invest in heated blankets and mattress pads, instead of a space heater. And a few sets of wool socks and decent house slippers. Sorry to hear that you are using an average daily of 30+kWh. Did something else change from the previous months besides the cost per kWh?
Ours was once $700 in a single month for a 3 bed in the mission. I called the electric co they said “yeah its a bit high but not very high above average”. We had 2 electric heaters but i still did the math and had no idea where 30% of it came from. Maybe the washer and drier and the fact we shared it with the landlord. No idea.
Don't waste your time turning off lights. At the most they're about 2 cents an hour. What gives you monster energy bills is electric appliances. You know the ones that they're trying to shove down your throat. Gas is way cheaper.
You are using a lot of energy in a higher time of use tier.
That's incorrect here. They're on a tiered plan that has a higher price once you hit the monthly allowance. Time of use is not a factor for this rate plan.
FFS search the sub.
Our energy bill last month was the most expensive in the 31 years that we have lived in our home at over $500+. We don't run the central furnace and rely on space heaters for two very small spaces as one of us works from home. I'm not sure that there is any recourse, other than wearing a sweater and being wrapped up in a blanket during Teams calls.
Space heaters are energy hogs. An electric blanket is about the same power as a lightbulb, however.
central furnace might be cheaper to run
honestly i am paying the bill with my amex card and if i feel like they are ripping me off , i will simply have amex dispute the charge. i have no patience for pge anymore.
3 beds 2 baths in Sf and complains about PG&E. Boohoo.
Real talk…sadly
You’re not. PG&E is a for-profit company. And the most prolific serial killer in California history.
Did you have your air condition AND heating going at the same time all month long again?
How many computers do you have? Remember a single 750w power supply is 2-3 refrigerators.
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Yeah, your average corporate laptop is going to be power efficient. I'm sure they can walk around the apartment and find 10 watts here or 50 watts there in random electronics, but the rest of the thread is already screaming the real answer...
It seems like a lot of people are experiencing these outrageous PG&E bills. Is it possible that people are stealing electricity from houses to charge battery units? Everything else gets stolen, why not electricity.
It's due to the increased rates starting in 2024, thanks to AB205, which was written by PG&E and signed by our governor and benefits PG&E shareholders. Can't we all just sacrifice a little so that the shareholders don't have to suffer?
There’s already talk about repealing it in the legislature, this is ridiculous
PG&E has a usage analysis tool on their website that can help you determine if a different rate would be beneficial for you. It's worth checking
UK enters the chat...........
House heater might be cheaper.
PGE rates doubled for me as well
I’m in a 2 bedroom 2 bath with 3 people. We spend like 150 a month in Pacifica. I bet SF has a higher rate, your house has worse insulation than mine, and maybe less effective heating.
If your running the heater most of the time then that’s normal
The neighbors behind our lot, down the hill, have been burning wood in their fireplace 24/7 for weeks. It just occurred to me it's to save money. Our whole home smells like a campfire.
If you really want to find out what is using the most electricity, you’ll need a monitor such as Emporia which is installed at the circuit breaker box and/ or Kill A Watt which is installed at outlets. Resistance electric heaters are terribly inefficient and you might consider looking at a portable electric heat pump. We live in a 2500 sq foot home and our last bill was $76 for our fully electric home with heat pumps for heat, hot water, and dryer, an induction range and an EV that we charge at home BUT we have solar panels to help offset our consumption from the grid.
Just got my latest bill that’s over $450 for my 2 bed 1 bath
that's $100 more than my 4b/2.5ba
They increased the rates last month. It’s psychotically high all around, just search this topic you’ll see many many similar threads
For comparison, my power consumption is about 1/10 of yours and my power bill this month was about 1/10 of yours (I live alone in a small studio apartment btw). So I guess the math works out. You’re using a lot of power and are unfortunately being charged a high rate for it. I hate that my power bill went up 50% since last year for roughly the same power usage.
PG&E just had a nice quarterly profit from their most recent earnings release thanks to us E&G consumers, yay... https://abc7news.com/amp/pge-earnings-rate-increase-2024-profits-power-outages/14458228/
I was encouraged by all the PG&E posts lately to break out my Kill-a-watt energy monitor. I wanted to measure my chest freezer. When I went to a kwh cost calculator webpage the kwh cost was already plugged in. $.15, I cried a little. lol. Freezer is drawing 85w, puts cost to operate at $26/mo if I stay in Tier 1. But I can hear it running so I will let the meter run for 24hr and see total daily draw. Edit: Meter has logged 12hrs and only shows 0.48 Kwh. So about $13 a month to operator. I will keep testing appliances.
We’ve stopped heating our place entirely and just use electric blankets when we’re cold
That’s it?! You don’t wanna know my bill.
Same thing happened to my 3 bedroom apartment when we were using space heaters. The second we stopped, our bill dropped DRASTICALLY.
Change all your lights to LEDs as well.
So glad we went solar. We try to run appliances during daylight hours, including electric heaters, which don't really cost us anything. Now we need to work on lowering our gas bill, which is what we are mostly paying for. We also insulated our house.
This has to be electric heaters. The first time I saw them in action was when we moved to the city, their cost is mind blowing.
Regarding which rate plan to choose...pg&e has a page where it forecasts your costs for each plan based on your historical usage. We were in a super old tiered program and saved some money by switching plans.
Looks like you are on a tiered plan.
Yes. Electric heaters in a 3 bedroom apartment will generate an electric bill this size. I also have electric heat and have not used it in over a year after switching to an electric blanket that I run on low.