California Lawmakers Punt on Chances to Deal with Utility Bill Crisis

Source: Canary Media  |  By Jeff St. John

The state’s utilities have to expand their power grids to support the shift to carbon-free electricity, and they must harden those grids to reduce the risk that they’ll cause deadly wildfires. But these costly projects are the main driver of California’s sky-high and still-rising electricity rates, which have sparked an affordability crisis that threatens to derail the state’s energy transition.

“We’re concerned that time is running out for the policymakers to do something,” said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a ratepayer advocacy group. There is ​“overwhelming public support for reducing customer bills, holding utilities accountable for getting the most wildfire safety at the least cost to ratepayers, and making utility investors pay for overspending,” Toney told Canary Media, citing polling conducted by TURN. TURN’s polling indicates that 86 percent of Californians want policymakers to ​“require utilities to pursue the safest and most cost-effective wildfire mitigation strategies, instead of those that earn the most profit.” But for utilities and regulators, balancing the risk of not spending enough to prevent wildfires against the risk of spending money inefficiently is a devilishly difficult — and fraught — calculus.