Source: Bay Area News Group (San Jose Mercury) | By George Avalos

“Gov. Newsom’s executive order is an important first step to solving the affordability crisis facing California families, small businesses, steel and glass makers, manufacturers, and agriculture producers,” said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, or TURN, a consumer group. Both PG&E and TURN said they looked forward to cooperating with the governor’s office to help tackle the utility bill woes that confront millions of California electricity and gas customers.

While it’s unclear if the executive order will have any immediate effect, it does come at a time when PG&E bills have zoomed at a pace that’s eight times faster than the Bay Area inflation rate. In 2023, PG&E’s monthly bills for residential customers soared 22.3%. Over the same 12 months, the Bay Area inflation rate rose 2.6%

Source: San Diego Union Tribune | By Rob Nikolewski

Mark Toney, executive director at The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a consumer advocacy group that testified during the proceeding, says SDG&E ratepayers are already getting socked financially. “The bottom line is that this is the worst time for San Diego and Southern California customers to be hit with major increases to both utilities.” TURN criticized the commission for issuing the proposed decision so late. “What that means is the increase is going to be magnified because they have to catch up,” Toney said. “The delay magnifies the rate shock.”

San Diego Gas & Electric customers would pay 2.7% more on their electric bills starting next year while customers with natural gas hookups may pay almost 9% more, according to a proposed decision released Friday afternoon by the California Public Utilities Commission. According to the proposed decision, typical SDG&E residential customers using 400 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month would pay $170.87, which represents a $4.46, or 2.7%, increase compared to what they currently pay. The percentage increase would be the same for customers enrolled in the California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE) financial assistance program.

Source: NBC Bay Area | By Ian Cull and Kris Sanchez

Mark Toney with The Utility Reform Network, or TURN, disputes that claim. "PG&E is half true by saying that some of the money increases are due to storms, but much more of the money is due to overspending on the vegetation management," Toney said. PG&E said its investments are delivering results and officials point to some relief coming in October in the form of a $55 one-time climate credit. Meanwhile, ratepayer advocates continue their push to put a limit on rate hikes. "TURN has been fighting for a cap on utility bill increases to be no more than the cost of living adjustment provided by social security," Toney said.

PG&E customers will soon see their bills go up again. The California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday approved another PG&E rate increase, which would bring bills up about $6 a month on average. The decision marks the fourth time PG&E was granted a rate increase this year. PG&E said it needs to bump up bills in order to make back what it lost during last winter’s major storms.

Source: Canary Media | By Jeff St. John

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. In a Sunday statement, Toney accused the utilities of using their lobbying might to prevent securitization from making its way into law. 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

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.

Source: NBC Bay Area | By Velena Jones

The Utility Reform Network (TURN) opposes PG&E's rate hike request, arguing that it places an increased burden on ratepayers. The watchdog group noted this is the fourth rate hike this year. "PG&E customers were hit with a $34 increase at the beginning of the year," TURN Executive Director Mark Toney said. "Customers were hit with another $4 increase in March. Customers were hit with another increase of at least $6, and there is going to be more before the end of the year.” "As soon as it goes down, they come in with another request so that the bill goes back up," Toney said. "The fact is even with the decrease they are talking about, temporary decrease, customers are still paying far more today and later in the year than before the beginning of the year."

PG&E officials also noted that a temporary 9% rate decrease that began in July means that ultimately more customers should still be paying less even if the new hike is approved. Utility critics said all those reductions and credits are only temporary relief to what feels like an ongoing problem of repeated rate hikes.

Source: Los Angeles Times | By Hayley Smith & Melody Petersen

Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network (TURN) — a consumer advocacy group — said the governor’s original electricity affordability plan included a measure that would have lowered the interest rates that utilities earn on capital investments such as transmission lines and power plants. Current policy encourages utilities to build expensive infrastructure because they get to recover the cost — plus annual interest that is typically 10.5% — through rates billed to customers. The original plan was aimed at reducing that rate through a financing technique called securitization. “It would create significant savings,” Toney said of the original proposal.

Amid tense, closed-door negotiations, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic lawmakers have released a suite of seven bills that aim to reduce Californians’ soaring energy costs — including a controversial electricity affordability plan that critics say was substantially weakened by lobbying from utilities and will offer little real relief.

Source: Cal Matters | By Alejandro Lazo, Julie Cart, and Alejandra Reyes-Velarde

But Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, supported the measures, saying they are “an important first step towards affordable energy for all California residents.” He has called lowering ratepayers’ costs an urgent priority because the state could lose public support for clean energy.

Two other major bills died: SB 1272, which would have fast-tracked renewable energy projects, and SB 1003, which would have increased oversight of utilities’ wildfire costs. Only three of the six energy bills were sent to the governor:  AB 3264, which which will study transmission capacity costs, SB 1420, which streamlines hydrogen facilities, and SB 1142, which prevents power shutoffs for ratepayers with payment plans. 

Source: ABC 7 News | By Dustin Dorsey

Mark Toney is the executive director for the Utility Reform Network and says bills have skyrocketed more than 100% in the past four years. With this latest fire data, Toney says it's fair for customers to question if the increases are worth it. "The customers are paying the price of more expensive and much slower wildfire safety," Toney said. Toney would prefer to see cheaper, faster ways of wildfire mitigation -- like insulated lines -- over seemingly constant increases with little results.

As the peak of the wildfire season quickly approaches, PG&E is working just as fast to put a stop to fires caused by its own equipment. The utility is reporting 62 fires caused by power lines this year, nearly equally the total from all of last year. To make the electric system safer, and reduce wildfire risk, sometimes exceptional costs have to be incurred. That's been PG&E's message as to why rates have increased so much in the last few years. But wildfires have not decreased.

Source: Orange County Register/ SoCal News Group | By Teri Sfora

Edison, to its credit, decided to go the insulated overhead route as much as possible, costing some $800,000 a mile. PG&E, however, decided to bury many lines — slower and not measurably safer — costing some $4 million a mile, The Utility Reform Network’s Mark Toney recently told us. The fault lies squarely with the CPUC, Toney said — the “overly generous” regulator responsible for reviewing and approving increases. TURN’s Toney would agree. He’d love to see utilities face a cap in how much they can seek in increases, and new rules that would require utilities to use the least expensive solution when possible. He’d also like to see shareholders pay half of the cost of overruns when utilities overspend. That way it wouldn’t all fall on ratepayers. “That would reduce costs immediately!” Toney told us. “The sad truth is, companies are more accountable to their shareholders than they are to their ratepayers.”

It’s important to point out here that electric companies don’t make money by selling electricity. Instead, they make money from the CPUC-set rate of the return on their capital investments; that’s their profit. So there’s a built-in incentive for utilities to spend more money on capital investments than they might need to. The quicker and less expensive way for an electric company to harden its system is to use above-ground, insulated poles and wires rather than digging down in the dirt and burying lines. The safety profile is essentially the same, experts say.

Source: NBC Bay Area | By Jaxon Van Derbeken

“A significant portion of that loan is going to be turned into a gift to PG&E, funded by the taxpayers,” said Matt Freedman, an attorney with the ratepayer group TURN that has been critical of the deal. Freeman noted that even lawmakers who initially signed off on the loan have recently soured on the deal. Next year, ratepayers will start feeling the pinch of the deal – with a proposed $400 million rate hike. But the hike will not be spent on fixing the aging plant. Instead, Freedman says, the money will begin to pay the utility $2 billion worth of promised profits and other incentives over five years. “We don't understand why you need to bribe PG&E to keep this plant operating,” Freedman said, adding all the money the state is throwing into the plant would be better spent on bringing far cheaper clean energy alternatives on-line.

The cost of keeping the aging Diablo Canyon nuclear plant open five more years could be as much as double what PG&E had first estimated back when a deal was struck two years ago to run it longer to help assure grid reliability, experts say. The deal involved lending the utility $1.4 billion, which the state hoped to get back with a newly available federal grant. But when the grant was issued in January of this year, critics discovered that the amount available could be as little as half the sum originally advertised.

Source: Sacramento Bee | By Ari Plachta

Matt Freedman, staff attorney at The Utility Reform Network, said it’s unclear that the plant is needed to keep the lights on especially as more clean energy sources come online. Yet the state’s bill to keep it open is growing. “Legislators were told that the $1.4 billion would be completely repaid by the federal government. That turned out not to be true, and the delta between the promise and reality is getting larger as time goes on,” he said. He called Newsom’s arrangement with PG&E back in 2022 a “last-second, stinky political deal that provided a series of benefits and protections to PG&E shareholders,” he said, including performance-based disbursements for investors. “Every dollar that goes to Diablo Canyon is a dollar that doesn’t go to some other essential government service.”

California lawmakers rejected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s bid to include another $400 million for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in the state budget, in a political standoff that began in 2022 with a bargain to keep the Diablo Canyon Power Plant open. The budget process was a far more unworried affair in 2022, when, at Newsom’s urging, the Legislature approved $1.4 billion in loans to keep the Diablo Canyon plant open to help maintain reliability of the state’s power grid. PG&E had been preparing to shutter it in 2025.

Source: Politico | By Alex Nieves

It wasn’t a surprise, since the CPUC published its preferred plan in March. But developers — backed by some environmental groups including Environment California and consumer group The Utility Reform Network — had held out hope for a change.

COMMUNITY SOLAR: The California Public Utilities Commission today stamped out the hopes of energy developers who had been pushing for the regulator to change its mind about community solar. In a 3-1 vote, the CPUC adopted a plan developed by one of its agency judges to try to spur development of small-scale solar projects that renters and other electricity customers can subscribe to, buying credits that reduce their electricity bills.

Source: Los Angeles Times | By Sammy Roth

Matt Freedman, an attorney for TURN, said he was “bummed” to see the utilities commission “doubling down” on a bad outcome for community solar, after several weeks during which it looked like Newsom might be hammering out a compromise. Freedman told me he attended several meetings with staffers from the governor’s office, who were “very locked in” on drafting a community solar plan. Unfortunately, he said, the revised incentive program released by the commission two days before the vote included mostly minor changes — nothing that will help community solar gain much of a foothold in California, even as it plays an increasingly important role in helping other states chase their climate and renewable energy targets. The biggest change, Freedman said, involved a provision that would have rejected the incentive program pitched by community solar advocates as illegal under federal law — a bizarre claim that could have been used to undermine existing community solar programs in other states. Under pressure from bipartisan critics — including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Neil Chatterjee, a top energy official in the Trump administration — Newsom’s utilities commission struck that provision.

After months of outcry, the California Public Utilities Commission voted Thursday to approve a solar energy program that critics are sure will fail spectacularly, making it impossible for many people to access an innovative global warming solution. The 3-1 vote by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s appointees was the latest stain on the governor’s climate record — and a reminder, as Earth shatters temperature records, that it’s easier to talk about the urgency of the climate crisis than it is to act with urgency.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle | By Julie Johnson

“Customers have hit the breaking point and have passed it,” said Matthew Freedman, an attorney for ratepayer advocate group The Utility Reform Network, which supports the fixed charge plan. “People who live in the Central Valley have taken it on the chin as rates have gone up.” “You have to start somewhere,” Freedman said. “Doing nothing is a bad choice.”

California regulators are set to vote Thursday on a major change to utility bills that could raise costs for some residents already burned with soaring rates, while lowering costs for others. The California Public Utilities Commission will decide whether to approve a $24.15 fixed charge on utility bills in exchange for lowering the per-unit price of electricity. The rule would apply to customers of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison.

Source: NBC Bay Area | By Jaxon Van Derbeken

PG&E rates are clearly insane right now,” says Matt Freedman, an attorney with the ratepayer advocacy group TURN. He says one reason is our rates pay for things other than the cost of producing power. His breakdown indicates ratepayers pay six cents per kilowatt hour for wildfire efforts – including undergrounding power lines -- six cents more to subsidize solar and two cents on top of that for low-income subsidies. “Low-income customers in PG&E service territory are really facing a crisis of affordability,” Freedman says. “We saw 180,000 customers disconnected for nonpayment last year, and about a third of PG&E low-income customers are late in paying their bills right now.”

With the hefty increase so far this year, PG&E’s rates are now approaching those of Hawaii, a state with the unfortunate distinction of having the most expensive power in the nation. Hawaii has long paid the highest of any state for power – in part because as an island nation, oil must be shipped in from as far as Libya and Argentina. The cost to generate power accounts for about half the average 41 cents per kilowatt hour price Hawaiian customers pay, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Source: Associated Press | By Adam Beam

“Only at PG&E would (Poppe’s) attempts at brand rehabilitation be considered a ‘safety message,’” said Mark Toney, executive director of the Utility Reform Network. “This blatant misuse of ratepayer funds is exactly why we need SB 938 and its clear rules and required disclosures for advertising costs.”

California lawmakers on Monday rejected a proposal aimed at cracking down on how some of the nation’s largest utilities spend customers’ money. California’s investor-owned utilities can’t use money from customers to pay for things like advertising their brand or lobbying for legislation. Instead, they’re supposed to use money from private investors to pay for those things.

Source: Los Angeles Daily News | By Brooke Staggs

Ever-increasing rates are why Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, or TURN, said most people likely haven’t even noticed the climate credits they’ve received on their gas and electric bills over the past decade. The utility reform group TURN is backing a bill from Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, that would use revenue from cap-and-trade to create a Climate Equity Trust Fund. The idea, Toney said, is to have utilities use money from that fund to help, say, build out electric charging stations for trucks in Ontario rather than having Edison pass those costs along to all ratepayers on their monthly bills. Something’s gotta give when it comes to utility prices. So Toney said building on the successes of the cap-and-trade program just makes sense.

In April, Southern California Edison customers will see an $86 credit automatically appear on their monthly bill, while Southern California Gas customers will get a credit of $73. Then, in October, Edison customers will see their bills drop by another $86. Similar rebates are being doled out this year to customers of investor-owned utilities throughout California, with more than $1.6 billion due back to electric customers, $1 billion to natural gas customers and $160 million to small businesses.

Source: KPBS San Diego | By Erik Anderson

“A lot of people are questioning why is it, that SDG&E needs more money,” said Mark Toney, the executive director of The Utility Reform Network (TURN). “Their shareholders seem to be just fine. It’s the customers that are hurting. It’s the customers that are feeling the pain. But it’s the shareholders that are reaping the gains.” TURN said regulators should not have approved the increase, asking the CPUC to disallow more than one rate hike a year. “We can’t simply have unlimited amounts of money spent on wildfire safety,” Toney said. “We want the most cost-effective measures to be spent on wildfire safety because these bills are going sky high.”

San Diego Gas & Electric is going up in March, just a month after the utility reported record profits for 2023. The rate hike eliminates some savings from an unexpected 11% cut in delivery charges in January. The delivery charges jump 8.7% in the March billing cycle and the average customer bill will increase about $8 a month. The move comes after the investor-owned utility posted record profits during the last calendar year. Company profits in 2023 hit a new record of $936 million, $21 million more than the previous year.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle | By Julie Johnson

Mark Toney, executive director of ratepayer advocate nonprofit The Utility Reform Network, criticized commissioners for voting on the rate hike without discussion. “The commission owes an explanation to customers whenever they adopt a rate increase but now more than ever,” he said.

The $4.68 per month estimated increase for average households will last for a period of 12 months starting in April. But bills could climb even higher this year if the commission takes up another proposal from PG&E that would add $14 to $15 per month for average residential customers to recoup costs incurred during last year’s winter storms. Combining that with the January hike and Thursday’s decision, typical residential bills could become at least $53 higher per month than prices last year.

Source: CBS News | By Kristine Lazar

Mark Toney with The Utility Reform Network or TURN, a consumer advocacy group, says its problematic that utilities get to decide if they are liable for damage. "The challenge is, they get to decide whether they're at fault or whether you're at fault, or whether a third party or the weather, or things out of their control," Toney said. "So what that means is, they decide whether they're at fault. I will tell you most of the time they do not find themselves at fault, not surprisingly." Toney explained small claims court is an option, with the limit for individuals at $12,500 and for businesses, it's half of that at $6,250. "It's almost not worth the effort," Toney said.

Some Long Beach small businesses are blaming SoCal Edison after a power outage and subsequent surge fried their pricey equipment, begging the question of who is responsible for it all. A dental office and veterinary clinic both lost equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars following an October 2023 power surge.