The California Public Utilities Commission voted on the increase during its meeting Thursday. The approval means Edison customers who use about 500 kilowatt hours each month would see a 9.1% increase in their bill.

The California Public Utilities Commission voted on the increase during its meeting Thursday. The approval means Edison customers who use about 500 kilowatt hours each month — the average customer — would see a 9.1% increase in their bill.

The monthly bill for a customer using 500 kilowatt hours would increase from $171 to about $186.56 starting on Oct. 1.

That increase is only slightly lower than the 10% increase that Edison was requesting.

The increase comes as SoCal Edison continues to face lawsuits from victims of the Los Angeles fires earlier this year. SoCal Edison is also facing a lawsuit from the federal government, which has said the utility company’s negligence is to blame for the Eaton and Fairview fires.

The funds from the increase, according to the California Public Utilities Commission, are expected to go toward investing in infrastructure that is expected to reduce wildfire reductions, including undergrounding power lines in high-risk areas.

But customers believed the increase should be denied, saying that the utility company has failed to adequately prevent wildfires despite already charging more for tree trimming and equipment upgrades, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Southern California Edison reported record profits of $1.69 billion in 2024, a 9.8% increase from 2023, Fox26 reported.

“This is the very definition of unreliable service,” one customer wrote, according to the Los Angeles Times. ”We are now being asked to pay more per unit for a lower quality good.”

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Satyasai’s Pacific Gas and Electric bill jumped by about $100 compared to the same month last year. Like many of PG&E’s 5.5 million customers, she’s having to rescript her monthly budget around these rising costs. 

“Everyone is getting squeezed,” Satyasai said. 

Propelled in large part by PG&E, which hiked residential electricity rates by 20% for about 16 million Californians in January, the state high electricity prices are second only to Hawaii, which is always an expensive outlier because of the costs of shipping oil to the far-flung archipelago.

A pack of New England states have historically had some of the nation’s highest electricity prices (the federal government doesn’t track rates but rather calculates prices using customer counts, sales and revenue data) due to factors like a shortage in natural gas pipeline capacity plus the region’s reliance on costly fossil fuels to generate electricity. 

But California has joined them in the last ten years, leapfrogging with Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to periodically hold the title as the most expensive state for electricity usage in the lower 48. (Even though Californians pay a high amount for each unit of electricity, their total bills tend to be lower than other states in the Northeast and South due to the West Coast’s relatively temperate climate.)

East Coast residents are paying higher prices during cold winter months with Californians paying higher electricity prices for a brief period nearly every summer since 2014, likely when people must cool their homes during heatwaves. 

It is unusual for Californians to pay higher prices than the East Coast in the depth of winter. This year alone, typical Northern and Central California households (which use about 500 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month) will pay over $400 more annually on their PG&E bill.  

PG&E currently charges the most for electricity among California’s three investor-owned utilities with an average residential rate of $0.397 per kilowatt hour. The company’s residential electricity rates have risen more dramatically than the other utilities, jumping 128% over the last decade. 

San Diego Gas and Electric’s average residential electricity rate is $0.383 per kilowatt hour and Southern California Edison’s rate is $0.338. 

PG&E has vowed to keep future rate increases between 2% and 4% annually, and said January’s dramatic hike was partly due to the slow pace of state approvals that compressed two years of rate hikes into one. 

PG&E chief executive officer Patti Poppe last week told investors during a quarterly earnings call that the company is taking dramatic steps to increase efficiency and lower costs. In an interview with the Chronicle, Poppe said the focus on lowering operational costs is new for the company and one that she hopes will show up in lower bills in the future. 

“The work we’re doing is really necessary,” Poppe said. 

Robert McCullough, an Oregon-based energy consultant who has studied California’s utility markets, said California’s historically high electricity prices can in part be tied to complicated factors like the state’s deregulation of the energy industry in the 1990s. 

But McCullough blamed January’s sticker shock hitting PG&E customers this year on the company’s deferred maintenance of its aging electric grid.

The company attributes about 85% of January’s rate increase to covering the costs to modernize, upgrade and strengthen its aging electric and natural gas infrastructure at a time when climate change has made the state increasingly vulnerable to storms and wildfires. 

“Pacific Gas and Electric fell behind on its maintenance and even without global warming that would have been a big bill,” McCullough said. 

And PG&E’s rates are set to be eclipsed by San Diego Gas and Electric before the end of 2024. The San Diego utility has temporarily dropped rates to compensate customers after previously  charging too much, according to the Public Advocate’s Office of the California Public Utilities Commission. 

Californians’ utility bills could also be impacted by a controversial proposed monthly fixed charge of about $24. 

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But that’s what concerns many Pacific Gas & Electric Co. customers who cannot afford to pay their soaring utility bills. As of February, more than 1 million of them were behind on payments.

The California Public Utilities Commission, tasked with regulating private utilities, just approved another rate hike last month, on top of a previous increase that took effect in January, amounting to a roughly $400 annual bump for the average household. The staggering energy costs have rocked residents and business owners, who are exasperated by the inability of state leaders and commissioners to ease their financial pain.

With rates becoming increasingly unsustainable, the long-term repercussions for those already living paycheck to paycheck seem dire. More broadly, could these elevated costs serve as an impediment to wider adoption of all-electric vehicles and appliances? Will PG&E or the CPUC commissioners who approve these outrageous increases face any consequences? 

The utility’s negligence and aging infrastructure has led to loss of life, property and – in the case of Paradise – an entire California town. Nevertheless, consumers are paying the price for the consequences of their mistakes and the cost of preventing future ones. 

“They’re outraged and they’re frustrated,” Assemblyman James Gallagher, a Chico Republican and Minority Leader, said of his constituents. Over the years, Gallagher has authored multiple laws to compensate wildfire survivors and help communities recover. 

“The cost of living is already so high, and to add another rate increase, people are very angry about it,” he continued. “They don’t understand it. Why is it that rates keep going up, when you have a company that made (more than) $2 billion in profit last year?”

So far, answers to such pressing questions remain elusive, and potential solutions far from assured. 

In February, Gallagher, along with Republican Assemblymember Joe Patterson, introduced legislation that would order the CPUC to cut electricity rates by 30%. If Assembly Bill 2205 is pushed through, Gallagher hopes it will ease the burden on families and businesses. 

“We’re putting the PUC in a position where they’re proactively looking out for consumers and not looking out for utility companies,” he said.

In response to public outcry, the state’s utility regulators proposed a new, tiered billing structure designed to make the price of electricity less expensive for residential customers. Under the proposal, customers of PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric would pay an income-based rate, helping reduce bills for lower-income customers.

According to the CPUC, the billing structure would include a flat rate of $24.15 per month for most households, which would reduce the price of electricity by 5-7 cents per kilowatt hour. If approved, it would go into effect late 2025 and early 2026.

This proposal, however, has already sparked fierce debate, and comes on the heels of a prior recommendation for a fixed rate. That proposal also received pushback from lawmakers who argued that the pricing structure might do more harm than good for low-income households.

Some legislators, including Jacqui Irwin, a Thousand Oaks Democrat who recently called the CPUC “completely out of touch,” want to repeal the proposal establishing an income-graduated fee and replace it with Assembly Bill 1999, capping the fixed charge at $10 ($5 for low-income customers).

Legislative maneuvering aside, affordable energy and climate advocates like Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, believe that placing a cap on utility rate hikes is just one part of the solution. Regulators should also require utilities to exercise fiscal discipline on spending, he said. Utilities, Toney explained, should not be given a “credit card with no limit and a guarantee that someone else is going to pay.” 

TURN is backing the Utility Accountability Act, a sensible bill that would prohibit utilities from using funds collected from ratepayers to pay for advertisements, political activities or membership dues of trade associations engaged in lobbying. It would also require utilities to document and disclose their spending.

Another sticking point is charging utility customers for climate initiatives that reduce wildfire risk or expand clean energy. With its ambitious climate goals, California can ill afford to discourage people from helping reduce the impacts of a warming planet.

By increasing the cost for using electricity, “that’s not rewarding people for good behavior,” Toney said. 

Gallagher contends that climate mandates can be costly requirements passed onto consumers, and routinely hears from constituents exhausted by the rate spikes and sometimes one paycheck from losing everything. PG&E failed to modernize and keep up with vegetation management, but now wants to place more underground utility wires and send consumers the bill. 

Undergrounding, he added, doesn’t have to be done everywhere just yet.

“There needs to be a greater focus on modernizing this infrastructure, but how do we go about that without putting all the burden on consumers?” Gallagher said. “A shareholder fund could be part of that, or maybe some state interest in modernizing the grid. All these things should be brought to the table.”

For Ahmad Faruqui, an energy economist based in Danville, a remedy cannot come soon enough. The No. 1 concern of friends and neighbors remains the exorbitant cost of electricity, which has been rising faster than the rate of inflation. People are just “doing their best to pay the mortgage, car payments and their children’s education,” he said. 

At some point, though, customers will grow too weary of the financial strain. Faruqui predicts there could be a “huge backlash” for the governor and legislators if it’s not brought under control.

“We are paying for their blunders,” Faruqui said of PG&E.

Californians deserve better than what they’re getting from the state’s largest and most expensive utility company – and the commission charged with regulating it. With no relief in immediate sight, more people will be faced with impossible choices, contemplating which necessities should be sacrificed just to light up their homes at night. 

Those are choices no utility customer should ever have to make. 

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