More PG&E rate hikes are coming, thanks to Dem – Latest News
PG&E continues its sacred obligation of protecting the lights on (and the payments skyrocketing) for roughly 16 million hapless souls throughout 70,000 sq. miles of northern and central California.
From foggy northern-most sleepy city Eureka down to Bakersfield, and from the Pacific ocean to the Sierra peaks, this utility behemoth serves the San Francisco Bay Area, Fresno, Sacramento and a patchwork of farms, suburbs and mountain cities.
With about 5.5 million electric accounts and 4.5 million gasoline ones, PG&E serves houses, companies, factories and orchards alike. Because who doesn’t love a monopoly that touches each half of every day life?
PG&E continues its sacred obligation of protecting the lights on (and the payments skyrocketing) for roughly 16 million hapless souls throughout 70,000 sq. miles of northern and central California. AFP through Getty Images
The company’s new 2027–2030 General Rate Case is a masterpiece of understatement: an 8% income grab in 2027 alone ($1.24 billion additional), adopted by 6.1% annual hikes.
PG&E, ever the optimist, guarantees your mixed gas-and-electric invoice will keep principally flat in 2027 thanks to some expiring non permanent expenses.
The California Public Utility Commission’s Public Advocates Office, nonetheless, isn’t shopping for the company fairy story.
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It tasks average payments leaping 16% in 2027 and a wallet-crushing 30% by 2030.
Translation: The typical family will get slapped with one other $444 a 12 months beginning in 2027, climbing towards $840 additional yearly by 2030.
Ouch. This on high of month-to-month power payments that already may be a number of hundred {dollars} –– and for some, considerably north of that? Because nothing says “customer-focused” like steadily climbing payments in a single of the world’s most costly states.
Because nothing says “customer-focused” like steadily climbing payments in a single of the world’s most costly states. Bloomberg through Getty Images
Enter California’s sensible answer: Force everybody onto all-electric every part.
Cities and the state are head over heels in love with heat pumps, induction stoves, and EV chargers, shoving them down throats through building codes, subsidies and pious ordinances.
Natural gasoline, you see, is so final century.
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As clients obediently swap, gasoline volumes drop, and PG&E’s fixed pipeline prices get unfold throughout fewer clients –– howdy, traditional “death spiral” of ever-higher per-therm charges.
PG&E itself cheerfully advertises that heat pumps may prevent ~$714 a 12 months.
Reality, as ordinary, is much less shiny.
Retrofitting a home for full electrification can simply run $10,000 to $30,000+ –– new heat pumps, larger electrical panels, wiring upgrades, the works, even after rebates that by no means cowl every part.
PG&E itself cheerfully advertises that heat pumps may prevent ~$714 a 12 months. Chris Behroozian for CA Post
Renters? Low-income households? Owners of Fifties homes with sketchy wiring? They usually get hammered hardest.
Then there are the charming electric-rate realities: sky-high baseline costs and time-of-use pricing that punishes you for cooking dinner or charging your car when the solar’s down.
Those promised financial savings? They have a humorous manner of evaporating when your precise electric invoice is already among the many nation’s highest.
Meanwhile, the grid wants billions in upgrades partly as a result of of all this wonderful electrification.
Customers finish up subsidizing their own costly conversion whereas natural-gas holdouts foot the invoice for an more and more empty pipeline community. Truly a coverage triumph. MediaNews Group through Getty Images
Customers finish up subsidizing their own costly conversion whereas natural-gas holdouts foot the invoice for an more and more empty pipeline community. Truly a coverage triumph.
No surprise San Francisco –– ever the trendsetter –– is throwing a tantrum and demanding a divorce from PG&E.
After a century of flirtation, town dusted off its municipalization goals.
Because clearly, the identical metropolis authorities that struggles with homelessness and crime will nail electrical energy pricing and wildfire hardening.
Of course, wildfire security and grid modernization are actual wants, not company greed. But California’s regulatory kabuki and breakneck decarbonization timeline have produced precisely the mess you’d anticipate: hovering month-to-month payments, painful upfront conversion prices that hammer common households and escapist fantasies about municipal takeovers that might doubtless make issues worse.
The state’s electrification campaign may sound noble till you’re observing a five-figure bill and a summer time invoice spike.
California desperately wants grownup supervision and a pivot to sane power coverage.
Until then, PG&E ratepayers will keep having fun with the privilege of funding Democrats’ inexperienced goals, one painful month-to-month invoice at a time.
Richie Greenberg is a political commentator primarily based in San Francisco.
