Opinion: California electricity bills are soaring. The Public Utility Commission must stop this. [Opinion]
The California Public Utilities Commission held a two-day workshop this week to directly address a problem the commission should have taken up long ago: theof electricity provided by the utilities it regulates. In January, the San Diego region had the nation’s highest average electricity price, at 41.9 cents per kilowatt-hour. Last year, the CPUC forecast that San Diego Gas & Electric customers will see theiran average of 4.7 percent per year through 2030.
Commission members heard testimony about options to slow the increases. Perhaps the most promising was having the state government pay for “public purpose programs” instead of ratepayers. Such programs include discounts on monthly bills to low-income consumers. It’s hard to see the logic of having other ratepayers funding what’s part of the state’s social safety net. An SDG&E official said such a change could yield a 6 percent rate reduction.
Also discussed: charging more to those who live in high fire-risk areas and reducing returns guaranteed to utility shareholders by adjusting formulas used to calculate them. These proposals are trickier because of questions about their fairness to homeowners and whether they would destabilize utilities. But it is time that they and other ideas are examined. The state with the
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