Source: Bay City News| By Ruth Desseault

“You have to remember that only 50% of the bills are decided in a general rate case,” said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. Toney said the original purpose of having the general rate case was to have all the revenue requirements, all of the money that the company would collect, decided in one big case. “But now there are so many other rate cases. Energy efficiency is separate. Wildfire spending is separate. Diablo Canyon is separate. And there’s a big, long list of things that are completely separate from the general rate case,” he said. “Electric vehicle charging stations. I mean, I can go on and on. This is what they’ve been approved. There were five other non-general rate case increases approved in 2024.” Toney said that part of the reason the rates are so high is because there are no limits to how much they can request; no limit to how many times a year they can ask for an increase; and there are no limits to how much of a rate increase the CPUC can grant. Whether the rates will decrease in 2026, he said, is a question of what the rate is compared to. “That’s part of what we’re fighting for over with the Legislature. It may be a decrease from 2025, but it’s certainly an increase from where it started before the 12% increase in 2024,” he said.

In 2023, PG&E announced a 2023-2026 General Rate Case, which explained their planned rates for the near future. The California Public Utilities Commission approved the rates that same year. It specified a 12.8% increase in 2024, a 1.6% increase in 2025 and a decrease by 2.8% in 2026.  Have they stuck to the rate hike schedule?

Source: Mercury News/Bay Area News Group | By George Avalos

“This is the second year in a row of record-breaking profits for PG&E,” said Mark Toney, executive director of consumer group The Utility Reform Network. “The shareholders are getting a lot of love. But while PG&E investors are feeling the love, the customers are only feeling the pain.” “When you keep adding to the rate base with higher bills, you keep adding to earnings,” Toney said. “The record-setting profits will give the legislature the incentive to pass bills to control shareholder profits and protect customers.”

PG&E noted multiple benchmarks in its earnings report and in additional information sent to this news organization.

— The utility completed 366 miles of system hardening, consisting of 258 miles of underground power lines and 108 miles of stronger poles and overhead components.

— PG&E connected nearly 14,000 new customers to the electric system, approximately 30% more than the company had expected.

Source: Grist| By Akielly Hu

But in the absence of laws like the ones in Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine, it’s impossible to know exactly how much utilities are improperly charging customers, said Adria Tinnin, director of race equity and legislative policy at The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group in California. Under existing California rules, utilities can classify spending in even prohibited categories like promotional advertising or lobbying in vague or misleading ways, Tinnin said. Meanwhile, during rate cases, utility regulators and advocates are often working with limited information, because “utilities do not provide any information that they’re not legally required to,” said Tinnin. “If we don’t have transparency, we can’t know to what extent ratepayers are being ripped off.”

People across the U.S. receiving rising utility bills aren’t just paying for the costs of gas and electricity: They could also be paying for corporate lobbying and advertising.  Such expenses add up to millions of dollars paid by customers toward utilities’ efforts to raise prices and stall climate progress. In some states, that’s starting to change. In 2023, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed the first comprehensive laws to prevent utilities from charging customers for lobbying, advertising, and other political influence activities.  The three states’ laws also introduced limits or bans on invoicing customers for fees for consultants or lawyers hired to argue for rate increases, and required utilities to provide detailed annual reports on political spending to ensure that shareholders — rather than consumers — foot the bill. 

Source: KQED | By Laura Klivans

But the turn came as a “complete surprise,” said Hayley Goodson, a managing attorney at The Utility Reform Network, one of the project stakeholders. “PG&E has been saying for years that it costs less for gas ratepayers to do the electrification project.” Goodson said the reasons PG&E cited for dropping the project have all been known for months and argued it came down to financials. “It’s hard not to think that PG&E just doesn’t want to do the right thing for its ratepayers if they can’t earn a profit from it,” Goodson said.

The lines sprawl below ground unnoticed, starting out large, then branching like limbs of a tree, reaching nearly every home. We pay for them, and we probably never think about them. For most Californians, the maze of gas pipelines beneath our feet allows us to heat our homes and water, dry our clothes and cook our food. But all these functions can be done another way, too: with electricity. And maintaining two systems — gas and electric — is costly and incompatible with California’s climate goals.

Source: LA Times| By Jenny Jarvie

Mark Toney, executive director of TURN, The Utility Reform Network, said the massive scope of the L.A. County fires raised significant questions about the fund’s ability to cover insurance liability. Even if the fund is able to bail out utility companies for the fires, it’s uncertain whether it could then cover fires that may crop up in the future. “Will the fund work right?” Toney said. “Who ends up paying?”

“This is the most profound test case that the fund [$21-billion wildfire fund, split equally between shareholders and utility customers] will potentially be up against,” said Christopher Holden, a former Democratic legislator who sponsored the bill that created the fund. “This is a new frontier,” said Holden, who lives in Pasadena and had to evacuate during the Eaton fire.

Source: Politico| By Will McCarthy and Emily Schultheis

 PG&E OVERSIGHT (2026?): After legislative efforts to supervise PG&E’s spending on wildfire mitigation failed last spring, Utility Reform Network director Mark Toney said he was “stunned by the power and influence that PG&E has regained in the state legislature.” Toney says an effort to deliver oversight via initiative is possible, a cause that could get a boost from speculation that power lines may have sparked some of L.A.’s blazes, although he noted his consumer advocacy organization would be unlikely to take a campaign leadership role.

Last November, dozens of fire-fighting measures — from wildfire prevention bonds to stopgap special taxes — appeared on ballots around the state, part of local governments’ response to the previous decade’s large wildfires that leveled entire towns and burned a quarter of the state’s forestland. Many passed, in both rural communities typically skeptical of new taxes and spending and dense urban areas where wildfire has not always been a leading public-safety concern. In Los Angeles County, voters approved Measure E, which by generating $150 million per year to raise equipment and staffing levels for county firefighters, now “couldn’t be more relevant,” as County Supervisor Kathryn Barger put it last week.

Source: Politico | By Camille Von Kaenel, Blanca Begert, Alex Nieves, and Zack Colman

Utility watchdog types are holding back for now. “We’re taking a wait-and-see position,” said Mark Toney, executive director of ratepayer advocacy group The Utility Reform Network. “There are certain questions we’re concerned about, like did they shut off the right power at the right time. … We don’t know, so we hate to jump to a conclusion, because too much is at stake.” 

Southern California Edison filed an incident report with the Public Utilities Commission last night “out of an abundance of caution,” noting that they’d received “preservation notices from counsel representing insurance companies in connection with the fires.” The filing said a preliminary analysis showed no interruptions or anomalies on their energized transmission lines in the area until an hour after the Eaton Fire that burned through Altadena and Pasadena started. The Wall Street Journal also reported today that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power didn’t proactively shut off lines in the area burned by the Palisades Fire as windstorms swept the area, a safety protocol that every other major California power provider has in place. LADWP didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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

Mark Toney, executive director of consumer group The Utility Reform Network, or TURN, said “there is a lot to like in this report” for consumers, “particularly in terms of identifying wildfire mitigation as being a major expense.” “The report also talks about the profit motives that the corporate-owned utilities such as PG&E vs. the motives of publicly owned utilities” such as the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District, Toney said. “The publicly owned utilities have an incentive to save money. The corporate utilities have an incentive to maximize profits,” he said. “The state legislature is going to have to develop a spine to say no to Wall Street and big investors and to say yes to safety and defending the ratepayers.”

Soaring monthly electricity bills from the likes of PG&E and its utility siblings could hobble California’s quest for an aspiring green energy future, a disquieting new state report shows.

Source:Bloomberg Law | By Titus Wu

Consumer advocate Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a nonprofit based in Oakland, is skeptical that lawmakers can tackle the issue properly. “The legislative process is immune to data and evidence,” said Toney. “That’s just not how they operate. They operate throughpolitical pressure. They operate through campaign contributions. They operate through a lot of other factors.”

“Containing costs in the energy sector has been the number one priority for me since I was appointed to chair this committee,”Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D), who runs the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee, said.