The weather, the fresh produce ... the highest gasoline prices in the U.S.?

That’s a recent, dubious honor for California, which for the first time in about three years has dethroned Hawaii as the state with the highest average retail gasoline prices.

California has had the most expensive gas in the nation for 75 out of the previous 76 days starting in late February, travel and leisure group AAA said Tuesday.

Hawaii’s gasoline prices have been on average 33 cents a gallon higher than California’s for the past five years. Hawaii and Alaska usually take turns as home of the highest gasoline prices in the nation, said Michael Green, a spokesman for AAA.

Hawaii and Alaska are isolated from regions that refine most of the country’s oil: the Midwest and the Gulf of Mexico coast.

So what pushed California up toward $4-a-gallon territory?

“A lot of bad luck,” Green said, exacerbated by the fact that California, with its own stringent fuel emissions standards, is also isolated from other refining regions. And one of its key refineries is not running at full strength. “California is an island when it comes to fuel production.”

California and other western states lost some of the production from an Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM, -1.61% refinery in Torrance, in southern California, following an explosion and fire in February.

The refinery is expected to fully restore production capacity around July, which could make for a tough start to summer for California drivers, Green said.

Average retail prices for regular gasoline in California as a whole, and in Los Angeles specifically, have jumped 57 cents and 63 cents a gallon, respectively, in the past three weeks, while the average U.S. retail gasoline price has increased 20 cents a gallon, the EIA said.

The nationwide average retail price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $2.658 a gallon on Tuesday, according to AAA. That compares with $3.652 a gallon a year ago, but $2.390 a gallon a month ago.

Prices in California averaged $3.726 a gallon on Tuesday, up from $3.104 a month ago. That compares with an average of $3.230 a gallon in Hawaii on Tuesday and $3.093 a month ago.

That reflects the costs of adjusting supply sources, planned and unplanned refinery outages, and delayed resupply, the EIA said. In addition, California’s tough gasoline specifications limit the availability of supply from neighboring markets.

Los Angeles bore the brunt of the price increases because other refineries elsewhere on the West Coast are at the tail-end of their seasonal maintenance outages ahead of the peak-demand summer driving season, which in turn limited the availability of supplies that could be shipped to Southern California, the EIA said.

Similar problems at the Torrance refinery pushed California’s gas prices to a nationwide high in October, 2012. At that time, the state’s average gas price hit $4.67 a gallon, AAA said.