Under the new policy, utilities will be required to reduce the price households pay for the electricity they use every time they charge a phone or run an air conditioner. That rate cut will vary from between 8% and 18%, depending on the utility, season and time of day, according to the commission’s analysis.

To make up for the lost revenue, regulators have introduced the concept of a “fixed charge,” a break from California electric billing tradition. For decades electric bills from Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric have been the “pay as you go” variety, with households only paying for the electricity they use. 

Starting in late 2025 for SCE and SDG&E customers and in early 2026 for those with PG&E, the state’s investor-owned utilities will be able to charge customers a monthly fee regardless of how much power the customer draws from the grid. So-called fixed charges are a mainstay of electric billing across most of the country, with an average fee of roughly $11.

The new California charge will be $24 for most customers, but lower income households, who already qualify for discounted electric rates, will see fees of either $6 or $12.

The unanimous vote by the California Public Utilities Commission comes after months of heated debate that pitted Assembly and Senate Democrats and Republicans against legislative leadership and the governor’s office, advocates of rooftop solar against labor unions representing utility workers and environmental advocates against one another.

Backers of the billing change say it’s a necessary step to bring down electricity rates in California, which are among the highest in the country. California regulators want all new cars sold to be electric by 2035 and are taking steps to discourage gas-powered indoor appliances. Those goals are hard to square with sky-high electric prices.

The state’s planned “transition to all electric homes, cars and trucks is truly transformative,” said CPUC President Alice Reynolds at today’s hearing. Under the proposed change all customers “will be better off financially if they electrify — whether that’s purchasing an electric vehicle or switching out a gas appliance with an electric one.”

Opponents argue that the change in billing policy won’t move the needle for most households considering dumping their gas-powered cars and appliances, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but will instead needlessly discourage energy conservation efforts while punishing rooftop solar customers.

The policy is a departure from 50 years of regulatory precedent in California, which is “if you use more you pay more and that encourages conservation,“ said Loretta Lynch, a former CPUC president and critic of what she sees as a “pro-utility” bias on the current body. Reducing the penalty on high energy use will also have “huge cost consequences down the road” for a grid that already struggles to keep up with summer-time demand, she said.

The ultimate impact of the policy change may be more muted than either side wants to admit, said Merideth Fowlie, a UC Berkeley economist and one of a handful of researchers to initially float the idea in 2021 of an income-graduated fixed charge as one way to pay for reduced electricity rates. 

The three-tiered CPUC-approved change doesn’t vary much by income and its promised rate reductions are relatively modest, said Fowlie.

“Clearly, I’m disappointed, because I don’t think it comes close to where I think we should be in terms of reductions,” she said. “If this forces another conversation — which is, ‘Why are we paying for wildfire risk mitigation, which is essentially climate change adaptation, or some of these major investments in decarbonisation, on bills?’ — I think that’s an important conversation to have.”

Winner and losers in new California utility fee

Though utilities won’t earn any more revenue or profit as a direct result of the change, there will be winners and losers under the new billing program.

The reduced price of electricity will likely save money for people who use a lot of electricity, such as a large household in an AC-dependent part of the state or the owner of an electric SUV, a heat pump and an induction stove. That reduction will be more than enough to offset the cost of the new fee. Many, if not most, low-income households who qualify for the discounted fixed charge will also emerge as financial winners.

But there are sure to be plenty of losers, too. Smaller households, Californians living along the temperate coast, energy conscious customers and people with solar panels on their rooftops are all more likely to see their total utility bills rise. 

That group makes for a powerful political bloc that has fiercely rallied against the regulatory change for months. Many showed up or called in at the commission hearing. 

“The big utility tax will increase monthly utility bills on four million households while doing nothing to encourage electrification,” said Yvette DeCarlo, speaking on behalf of a coalition of environmental nonprofits, tenant rights groups, liberal advocacy organizations and anti-tax activists. 

Severin Borenstein, another Berkeley economist who co-authored the 2021 study with Fowlie, said modeling suggests that the lower electricity rates under the policy will only increase electric vehicle purchases by roughly 5% above what they would otherwise be. 

“It’s in the right direction, though, and I think that we can’t get to where we need to go unless we start,” he said.

The fixed charge policy was included in a budget proposal by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration in 2022, but it wasn’t until last year that many state legislators woke up to it. Twenty-one coastal Democrats, led by Thousand Oaks Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, introduced a bill ordering the CPUC to reverse course. So too did Senate Republican leader Brian Jones. Both efforts were quietly put on ice at the behest of legislative leadership.  

In a letter Jones and the rest of the Senate GOP caucus sent to CPUC president Reynolds earlier this week, the San Diego Republican expressed some skepticism that the state regulatory body could be trusted to keep the fixed charge at its current level.

“We are particularly concerned that this will only be the beginning,” the letter said. “The CPUC has been granted unchecked power to increase this new charge at any time. If the $24.15 plan is approved, the next proposal may see the fixed charge hiked to $50, $100, or even higher!”

More shade directed at the rooftop solar industry

For California’s residential solar industry, the vote is just the latest regulatory broadside. 

Over the last two years, the CPUC has slashed the payments that utilities are required to give to single family homeowners, apartment buildings, schools and businesses that install solar panels. 

That’s based on the argument, advanced by the commission, the regulated utilities and many energy economists, that relatively well-to-do solar customers have been overcompensated in California since the early 2000s, which has had the effect of off-loading the costs of running the grid onto non-solar households.

Advocates for the fixed charge say assigning solar customers an unavoidable monthly charge is yet another way to balance out who pays for major utility line items like wildfire prevention, subsidies for low income households, EV charging networks and distribution system upkeep. 

“What the fixed charge does is ensure that we’re no longer going to have freeloaders,” Scott Wetch, a lobbyist who represents many unionized workers employed by California’s for-profit utility companies, told CalMatters earlier this month.

Outraged homeowners with solar panels were well represented among those who called in to give public comment.

“I have solar panels on the home, which we got right away to cooperate with California’s move to have 100% renewable energy. But yet we’re getting hit with this unfair tax,” Joy Frew, a self-described senior citizen from San Diego County, told the commission over the phone.

“People that really invested in solar trying to do the right thing for the planet — all of a sudden we’re being slapped in the face for doing it,” said a caller named Steve Randall from San Clemente.

Not that every Californian with a solar panel above their head is opposed to the fixed charge. Fowlie, one of architects behind the idea, said her family hopped on the solar bandwagon as a way to bring down their monthly utility bill. 

“I’m gonna be the biggest loser under this proposal,” she said, prior to today’s vote. “I would be in that higher income bracket and I have solar, so my bills would go up. But I think it’s a win for California, so I’m a big supporter.”

The post Californians will see lower electricity rates and a new fee that won’t vary with power use appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Biden on Wednesday will visit a General Motors plant in Detroit that manufactures electric vehicles. He’ll use the occasion to make the case that the $7.5 billion in the new infrastructure law for electric vehicle chargers will help America get “off the sidelines” on green-energy manufacturing. Currently, the U.S. market share of plug-in electric vehicle sales is one-third the size of the Chinese EV market.

“It’s a big deal,” Biden declared as he signed the bill into law at a White House ceremony earlier this week.

Republicans — even some of those who voted in favor of the infrastructure package — are criticizing Biden for being preoccupied with electric vehicle technology at a time when Americans are contending with a spike in gasoline and natural gas prices.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell took the Senate floor Tuesday to make the case that “the Biden administration doesn’t have any strategic plan to snap its fingers and turn our massive country into some green utopia overnight.”

“They just want to throw boatloads of government money at things like solar panels and electric vehicles and hope it all works out,” said McConnell, one of 19 GOP senators who voted in favor of the infrastructure bill. He added, “American families are staring down the barrel of skyrocketing heating bills, and the Democrats’ response is to go to war against affordable American energy.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki has stressed that the administration is looking at “every tool in our arsenal” to combat high gasoline prices, saying that Biden and his economic team are “quite focused” on the issue.

Psaki said the administration has asked the Federal Trade Commission “to crack down on illegal pricing” and is engaging with countries and entities abroad like OPEC on increasing supply.

The GM plant that Biden will visit was slated to be closed in 2018 as the automaker tried to shed excess factory capacity to build sedans as buyers shifted toward SUVs and trucks. But the plant, which built cars with internal combustion engines since it opened in 1985, was rescued a year later and designated “Factory Zero” to build zero-emissions electric vehicles.

Currently, the 4.1-million-square-foot plant, which straddles the border between Detroit and the enclave of Hamtramck, is making pre-production versions of the electric GMC Hummer pickup truck.

Next year it will start making a Hummer electric SUV. The plant will start cranking out the Origin, an electric vehicle for GM’s Cruise autonomous vehicle subsidiary, in 2023, and an electric Chevrolet Silverado pickup at an unspecified date.

The plant won’t see much direct impact from the infrastructure spending, but it will benefit from $7.5 billion designated to help build an electric vehicle charging network.

Biden wanted $15 billion to build 500,000 chargers, and hasn’t given a number for how many could be constructed for half that amount.

It’s likely $7.5 billion won’t be enough. The International Council on Clean Transportation says the U.S. will need 2.4 million charging stations by 2030 if 36% of new vehicle sales are electric. Currently there are about 45,500 charging stations nationwide with about 112,000 plugs.

Biden is hoping to do even more to promote electric vehicles, including a provision for a $7,500 tax credit for consumers who buy electric vehicles through 2026 that’s been floated as part of his proposed $1.85 trillion social services and climate bill.

The following year, only purchases of electric vehicles made in the U.S. would qualify for the credit. The base credit would go up by $4,500 if the vehicle is made at a U.S. plant that operates under a union-negotiated collective bargaining agreement. Only auto plants owned by GM, Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis NV qualify.

The tax break favoring American-made vehicles could be a point of tension when Biden hosts Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the White House on Thursday for the first North American Leaders Summit since 2016.

Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly said she raised concerns with Secretary of State Antony Blinken when the two met in Washington last week that the proposed tax credit would have an adverse impact on North America’s integrated auto industry and put thousands of jobs in Canada at risk.

AAMER MADHANI and TOM KRISHER | AP News

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Biden pushes electric vehicle chargers as energy costs spike appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The CNG Dump Truck, assigned to the Street Division, has significantly contributed to efficiency due to its larger capacity for loads, allowing the Hemet Streets team to make fewer trips back and forth to the Riverside County dump site. Additionally, two new Nissan Leaf electric vehicles were assigned to the Police Records Division and the Public Works Administration. The Police Department uses their vehicle for the daily transport of documents for criminal cases that will be filed with the DA and the Public Works Department utilizes their vehicle to visit job sites, meet contractors, and perform inspections. Each electric vehicle can travel up to 226 miles on a full charge and has a lower cost of maintenance compared to the vehicles they replaced.

The grant funds also allowed the City to install four new electric vehicle charging stations, two for public use and two for City use. The public charging stations are located in the parking lot on the north side of the City of Hemet Library. The City of Hemet is amidst a comprehensive effort toward improving energy and more consciously using our resources and encourage our community to consider adopting energy efficient practices.

City of Hemet • Contributed

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post The City of Hemet adds to its alternative fuel fleet and electric vehicle charging stations appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.