Source: Redheaded Blackbelt | By Staff Writers

“Revising the Cost of Capital decision in favor of utility shareholders is more than just buckling under pressure from PG&E and other major utilities. It is part of a disturbing pattern of Commissioners disregarding proposals to address the affordability crisis issued by their own judges and staff, based upon evidence presented by all parties in ratemaking cases. The legislature needs to take more action to address the affordability crisis, because the CPUC has failed to do so,” said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network (TURN).

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted (4-1) last week to approve profit margins for the state’s utilities that consumer, environmental, and community intervenors agree are unjustifiably high. The approved profit margins range from 9.78% to 10.03% across PG&E, SoCalGas, SCE, and SDG&E. 

Source: The San Francisco Chronicle | By Julie Johnson

Mark Toney, executive director of utility customer advocate group The Utility Reform Network, or TURN, told the Chronicle on Monday that his organization wanted the commission’s investigation to examine the connection between all three fires.  “The fact that it’s happened before in the same location — absolutely there are questions that ought to be answered,” Toney said. 

Widespread blackouts hit San Francisco at the worst time. Christmas shoppers crowded commercial districts. Restaurants were buzzing and the city’s concert venues were packed for holiday shows.  Suddenly, the lights went dark in about 120,000 businesses and homes. BART trains bypassed Powell and Civic Center stations. Food went bad in warm refrigerators. 

Source: KCBX | By Kendra Hanna

Mark Toney is the executive director of The Utility Reform Network. He said the new rate is only a little higher than what he had hoped, but that rate decrease is negligible next to the amount spent on expensive projects like PG&E burying their power lines. Toney still expects that customers’ monthly bills will continue to go up.

The commission that regulates California’s utilities just approved a lower investor return rate for the next two years. That can affect costs to customers, but it’s not clear if it will reduce their monthly bills. Pacific Gas and Electric, or PG&E, will have to compensate investors for infrastructure projects at this new, lower rate. It’s now set to just under 10% — lower than what PG&E requested, and the lowest rate since 2006.

Source: The Mercury News | By George Avalos

The Utility Reform Network also disagreed with the decision because the PUC didn’t sufficiently reduce PG&E’s rate of return.  “Revising the decision in favor of utility shareholders is more than just buckling under pressure from PG&E and other major utilities,” TURN Executive Director Mark Toney said. “It is part of a disturbing pattern of commissioners disregarding proposals to address the affordability crisis.” Toney urged state politicians to step in and help utility customers.  “This is a clear sign that the Legislature needs to take more action to address the affordability crisis, because the CPUC has failed to do so,” Toney said.

State regulators Thursday reined in the profit returns that shareholders of PG&E and other utility providers can harvest, a decision that failed to quell a debate over whether customers can easily afford to pay their monthly electric and gas bills.  The state Public Utilities Commission voted 4-1 to approve slightly lower rates of return for shareholders starting in 2026 compared to current levels.

Source: Politico | By Noah Baustin

Mark Toney, executive director of affordability group The Utility Reform Network, said in an interview that the small drop in the return on equity won’t make up for other major CPUC approvals of capital spending to reduce wildfire risk on the grid, which will have the overall effect of increasing ratepayer costs in the long run. “The CPUC giveth with one hand, they taketh away with another hand, and that’s what’s happening right now,” Toney said, expressing frustration with the agency’s utility-friendly decision on a recent major wildfire resilience investment decision.

THREADING THE NEEDLE: California energy regulators tried hard to capture the in-vogue affordability rhetoric as they marginally cut the profit rate that investor-owned utilities will be allowed to pass onto their shareholders in 2026. But they’re playing to a tough crowd: Everyone from investment bankers to affordability hawks ended up bashing their final decision.  

Source: The Orange County Register | By Teri Sforza

“What the CPUC giveth with one hand, they taketh away with the other,” said Mark Toney, executive director of the consumer advocacy group TURN, The Utility Reform Network.  People pay a lot of attention to the ROE percentages the utilities can collect — ooo! they’re going down! — but that misses the forest for the trees, TURN’s Toney suggested. “When you’re financing a home, you want to know, ‘What’s my monthly payment?’ ” he said. “The two things that impact that are — yes, the interest rate on your mortgage — but, much more importantly, the price of your house.”  In this analogy, the amount of money utilities borrow for capital projects equates to the price of the house. “It’s the same thing with people’s monthly bills. They’re more impacted by how much is being financed,” Toney said. “I get frustrated because there’s so much media on the percentage, while utilities are allowed to bloat their capital costs. So the reduction in the percentage — don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing — is going to be more than offset by how much is being financed.”

As our electric bills continue their skyward ascent, a question crackles like lightning over regulators’ heads: how much profit should the big utilities be allowed to make? The California Public Utilities Commission wrestled with that lightning on Thursday. In the end, commissioners gave the utilities less than they asked for, and less than they got the year before, but way more than what consumer advocates believe they should get.

Source: KQED | By Laura Klivans

There are real barriers to seeking help for high utility bills, said Constance Slider Pierre, who oversees The Utility Reform Network’s consumer hotline. Barriers include speaking limited English, confusion over how to read bills, and difficulty reaching customer service representatives, Slider Pierre said.  

For three days last December, when Kenya Brown’s youngest four kids weren’t in school, they spent their time at her oldest son’s apartment. They did their homework, charged their phones, showered and had dinner.  The children returned to the family home only to sleep;the house was dark and cold. Their utilities had been shut off — no heat, no lights, no hot water, no gas for cooking; Brown hadn’t paid the bill in months.  Brown’s bills are like many others in California: high, especially in recent years. 

Source: Broadband Breakfast | By Jericho Casper

In a statement issued Thursday, telecom and regulatory attorney for TURN Alexandra Green said the FCC’s decision will force low-income Californians to go through two separate eligibility checks, one for the state program and one for the federal, a change the group argues will add bureaucracy and ultimately raise the cost of phone service for hundreds of thousands of households. “The FCC’s decision to no longer trust California to do its own eligibility verification means that customers will have to be separately reviewed by each program,” Green said.  “The federal government's political disdain for California seems to be the driving force behind this order, which will only result in increasing the cost of phone service in both rural and urban areas,” she added.

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday revoked California’s authority to run its own eligibility and verification system for the federal Lifeline program.  In an order issued by Wireline Competition Bureau chief Joseph Calascione, the FCC said California law AB 1303 has made it “effectively impossible” for the program’s administrator to comply with federal Lifeline operations and integrity obligations.

Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune | By Rob Nikolewski

“We do think (reducing the return from 10.23% to 9.88% is) a step in the right direction, but so much more needs to be done in terms of affordability,” said Mark Toney, executive director at The Utility Reform Network (TURN),  the Oakland-based organization that frequently weighs in on CPUC matters. TURN called for a return on equity of 9.5% for SDG&E. Toney emphasized that while the percentages that utilities earn are important, another crucial factor is the accumulated costs that power companies spend on expensive projects that get passed to ratepayers. And the the CPUC has final approval on whether those projects get the green light. 

Investor-owned utilities in California — including San Diego Gas & Electric — will earn smaller rates of profit on their infrastructure projects next year under a proposed decision that will soon go before the five voting members of the California Public Utilities Commission.  

In SDG&E’s case, what’s called the utility’s “return on equity” would drop from 10.23% in 2026 to 9.88% under the figures released late last week. It’s difficult to say what the lower rate would mean for the monthly bills that SDG&E customers pay, but the pending vote comes at a time when high rates have become a major concern across California and in the San Diego area in particular.

Source: Lake County News | By Little Hoover

Witnesses will include Elise Torres, energy team assistant managing attorney, The Utility Reform Network, or TURN; Liang Min, managing director of Bits & Watts Initiative, Precourt Institute for Energy [Stanford University]; Linda Taub Gordon, climate researcher and supervising attorney, UC Berkeley Human Rights Center; Masheika Allgood, founder, AllAI Consulting LLC; and Natalie Mims Frick, department leader and energy policy researcher, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Members of the public will have the opportunity to make comment at the end of the hearing. If you would like to make a public comment please use the "raise hand" feature in Zoom or email LittleHoover@lhc.ca.gov with your question and the phone number from which you joined the hearing.

The Little Hoover Commission invites the public to join them on Thursday, Nov. 20, at 2 p.m. for a hearing on data centers and California electricity policy.  This hearing will focus on framing the landscape around data centers and California's electricity system, and will feature expert testimony from academic, technological, ratepayer, energy and environmental perspectives.

Source: Politico | By Noah Baustin

Undergrounding-happy utilities aren’t happy with the math.  “That method of calculating the [benefit cost ratio] is very disadvantageous to undergrounding,” said Matt Pender, Pacific Gas & Electric’s vice president of undergrounding and system hardening.  It wouldn’t be able to do that under the California Public Utilities Commission’s proposed ratio, which would pencil out for only about a third of those miles, he said.

GROUND RULES: Just about everyone agrees that burying power lines underground would be the best way for utilities to reduce wildfire risk. The only problem: It’s too expensive. California regulators are set to vote Thursday on a new rule to govern how utilities reduce the risk of their equipment sparking wildfires. It would set a cost-benefit ratio for utilities to calculate when it makes sense to spend money on undergrounding versus cheaper methods like tree-trimming and insulating above-ground lines.  

Source: CalMatters | By Alejandro Lazo

Mark Toney, who leads The Utility Reform Network and supported the transparency measure, has questioned whether data centers justify the costs they’re pushing onto ratepayers.  He warned of the centers’ “voracious consumption of energy and water, increased carbon emissions, and jacking up ratepayer bills.” 

California is a major hub for data centers — the facilities that store and transmit much of the internet. But just how much these power-hungry operations affect the state’s energy use, climate and public health remains an open question for researchers.  A new report released this week by the environmental think tank Next 10 and a UC Riverside researcher attempts to quantify that impact — but its authors say the report is only an estimate without harder data from the centers themselves.

Source: Fox26 News | By Mayra Franco

Not everyone agrees with PG&E’s optimistic outlook.  Consumer advocates say the rate increase could still hit families hard over time.  Mark Toney, with The Utility Reform Network said, "In the past six or seven years, PG&E bills have already doubled. They've already gone up 100%.” He adds," This rate case is not just about 2027. It's about 27, 28, 29, and 30. At the end of 2030, if this is approved, the bills will be $42 a month higher or $500 a year higher.”  Toney urges residents to attend the hearings saying, "It is incredibly important for you to show up and say, no on this rate increase."

PG&E is giving customers a chance to weigh in on its latest proposal to raise electricity rates by 3.6%, but the company says you might not even notice the change.  State rules require PG&E to file a General Rate Case every four years. This process determines how much customers will pay on their bills over the next several years. The company submitted it to CPUC back in May.  For the first time in a while, customers can speak directly to PG&E about the proposed changes. 

Source: Canary Media Live Berkeley | By Julian Spector

Mark: I really appreciate being invited by Canary Media and being part of this conversation.  TURN fights for the cleanest energy at the lowest prices.  I like to say we want the most green for the least green and this is important because affordability and clean energy  need to go hand in hand.  We have to resist the people that want to split them apart and say “you either have to choose affordable and dirty or clean and expensive" and at TURN we reject that.  We fight for clean and affordable together!  These are absolutely some of the most trying times that many of us have seen in our lifetimes when it comes to all the attacks on clean energy policies.  When it comes to utility bills skyrocketing, and yet there is and are many glimmers of hope.

Canary Media is a nonprofit news organization focusing on the transition to clean energy and climate challenges.  On November 6th 2025 the Canary Media Live event in Berkeley was streamed live and Executive Director of TURN Mark Toney was interviewed by host Julian Spector.

Source: RTO Insider | By David Krause

In comments noted in the decision, The Utility Reform Network (TURN) said SDG&E has not demonstrated any need for additional funds over the amounts it received in its GRC to meet customer energization demands. TURN said that in March, “SDG&E stated that it considered it an ‘unlikely event’ that the utility would be ‘unable to accommodate the full load amount requested by the customer because of an upstream capacity constraint.’”

In a rare split decision, the California Public Utilities Commission has approved $51.2 million in additional funds for electrification projects for San Diego Gas & Electric customers to help the state reach its carbon neutrality goal.  Under the decision (25-04-015), SDG&E will create a new electric energization memorandum account (EEMA) for energization projects that will be completed outside the utility’s approved 2024 general rate case (GRC).

Source: Bay Area News Group | By George Avalos

PG&E’s electricity and data center plans have been met with skepticism by The Utility Reform Network, a consumer group also known as TURN.  “TURN is very concerned about data centers driving up electric rates for Californians,” said Mark Toney, TURN’s executive director. “It’s essential that those costs are recovered fairly and don’t cause electric rates to increase for households who are already struggling to pay their utility bills.”

PG&E is focusing expansion and upgrade plans in the San Jose area as officials predict the South Bay’s need for electricity will far outstrip a projected jump in demand within its service territory, the investor-owned utility’s chief executive said in a wide-ranging interview.  For PG&E, San Jose offers a confluence of land and demand. The city has plenty of available open space for a tech industry whose thirst for energy has soared.

Source: Fox26 News | By Dania Romero

Mark Toney with TURN, a utility reform network, says that policy makers waited until the 11th hour to release bill language. "No one got a chance to weigh in because it came out at the last minute. And that's the responsibility of all the policy leadership in California. This is not just a governor thing. This is a collective that policy leaders in California have a habit of releasing big bills at the last second," said Toney.  Toney says it was so last-minute, lawmakers had to extend their session to Saturday to get it passed.  

If you get your power from Southern California Edison, your bill could go up to pay for the Eaton fire damages.  The Eaton fire could end up costing more than what's in the wildfire fund, which could make ratepayers cover part of the difference.  

Source: Lifeline with Craig Roberts | By Craig Roberts, iHeart Radio Network

"PG&E is not even feigning embarrassment and coming straight for a 24.5% rate increase over the next five years.  Add that to what we went through over the last 21 months and it becomes a big ouch for every ratepayer’s pocketbook.  Joining me today in the studio is our friend, Executive Director of The Utility Reform Network or TURN, Mark Toney.” “What PG&E is asking for over the next four years is for your annual gas and electric bill to go up by $500 a year, $42 a month is what they’re requesting.   After all these rate increases we have had over the past few years, that is going to hurt a LOT of people” Mark Toney said. “Mark, when we include the price we pay at the pump, the price we pay at the grocery store, if you’re a homeowner did you just receive your tax bill, funny how Prop 13 limits property tax increases but at the end of the day, these customers for these rate increases might have to say ‘I don’t have it.'  Now what you’re asking me to do is to decide if I stop eating meat altogether, or choose which medications I need to have.” “I have more unwelcome news—only 50% of PG&E’s increases are within this general rate case request.  PG&# has another 10 rate increase proposals right now pending with the  Public Utilities Commission,  so each one of those is going to get stacked on top of this.  So we’re not just looking at $500 a year, we could be looking at closer to $1000 a year by the time we get to 2030.  Everybody, Craig, is looking at huge rate increases."

Source: GV Wire | By Bill McEwen

A nonprofit watchdog, The Utility Reform Network, said the new law is a win for consumers.  “California residents are facing an unprecedented affordability crisis, and AB 1167 goes a long way to holding for-profit utility companies accountable to spending ratepayer money to benefit customers, not to fill shareholder pockets. We thank Governor Newsom for his leadership and look forward to continuing to work with him to achieve utility affordability and accountability,” said Mark Toney, executive director of TURN.

After decades of taking it on the chin from public utility companies like PG&E and Southern California Edison, ratepayers scored a victory this legislative season.  On Saturday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1167, which ends using ratepayer funds for political lobbying, promotion, and other shareholder expenses. The new law also beefs up enforcement against investor-owned utilities that illegally spend ratepayer monies. The California Ratepayer Protection Act goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2026.  Media investigations into California’s monopoly utilities have revealed use of ratepayer funds to cover millions of dollars in inappropriate expenses.

Source: Politico | By Noah Baustin

“So much more still needs to be done,” said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a customer advocacy group. “There are contributions that are on [the governor’s] desk now and there is more to be done next year.”

NOBODY’S SINGING YET: You’d be excused for thinking that the energy affordability lawmaking was done for the year after Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leadership celebrated the signing of their landmark energy affordability package in high style last week. You’d also be wrong.