Columnist Teri Sforza writes that legislators are waking up to the ramifications of a budget trailer bill they passed without spending much time on it.
Electric power transmission lines loom over Edison Avenue in Chino as cars travel below on Friday, Jan. 5, 2024. The push to maker higher-income Californians pay higher fixed charges for electricity has sparked class warfare — and a confounding round of ducking, glancing, blaming and finger-pointing.
So before we explain the whys here, and the flurry of activity that erupted this week, let’s be clear that the CPUC was just following orders from lawmakers when it tasked the utilities and other “stakeholders” to propose income-based fixed charges. Right now, the cost of delivering electricity is largely baked into the rates we pay for electricity itself. But it’s as expensive to bring energy to homes that consume gob-loads of power as it is to bring energy to homes that consume very little — like, say, rooftop solar households with no battery storage, who pump energy into the grid by day and pull it down at night. Those folks have largely escaped escalating infrastructure costs, even though they use the infrastructure, too.
A dozen “stakeholders” have submitted nine different proposals “that all strive in different ways to balance the flat rate and usage rate elements of a residential customer’s bill,” a CPUC spokeswoman said in a statement. “We will carefully consider each of these proposals before adopting a billing adjustment.
Matthew Freedman, staff attorney at TURN, agrees. “If the Legislature repeals current law, bills for low-income Californians, especially those living in hotter regions of the state, will skyrocket, in particular during the hottest months,” he said in a prepared statement. “New income-based fixed charges will reduce usage charges and require every customer, solar homeowner and non-solar renters pay their fair share for wildfire safety and climate investments.”She knows the CPUC.
A Southern California Edison worker helps a skydiver who got caught up in a power line in Lake Elsinore last March.
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