- It’s strange that in 2025 we still don’t have even a minimal, per-capita baseline tier for electricity.
If a household uses less than the monthly per-capita average, why not cap that baseline at something like $10?
Yes — that gap would need to be subsidized, probably through taxes.
But that’s already how grid maintenance works: we socialize the fixed costs while pretending rates are purely volumetric.(and I might be overstating this slightly).
Right now we punish low-usage consumers and reward structural inefficiency.
A baseline tier would at least make the incentives coherent.
- California's average residential electricity rate is almost twice the US average (32 cents vs 18 cents) despite being in a state with abundant energy resources.
Even if advocates got everything they wanted here (6% margin vs 10% margin), that would lower rates by... 1.2 cents. PG&E desperately needs to be reformed into a competent organization, something that nobody in (Newsom) or adjacent to (these advocates) power in California seems to want to do.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
- So they are limited in their RoR on capital expenditures. Are they limited in their capital expenditures in the first place? That is, if they overspend on everything they build, do they make more profit than if they engineered things more carefully? I assume there must be some limitation here or they would use gold instead of copper in their MV transmission lines...
- difficult to find the reasoning behind the 10% being considered "reasonable" from the article. It sounds like Edison has a lot of risk mitigation of wildfires, and is dealing wit a lot of litigation.
Is part of the 10% profit going to these costs? Or since they're an expense it's not apart of the 10% profit?
by RheingoldRiver
0 subcomment
- Archive link: https://archive.is/LkHqZ
by frugalmail
1 subcomments
- Just purchased a replacement gas stove/oven because electricity prices in LA are INSANE.
- I logged into my PGE and saw this
https://www.pge.com/en/newsroom/currents/energy-savings/pg-e...
shrug they claim prices re going down?
by doctorpangloss
1 subcomments
- california has its minuses - wildfires, nimbys - but also its plusses: solar makes sense for the SFH community people want.
the best escape valve against PG&E and Edison is installing solar panels and a battery.
- People are mad about this but, in the end, not really mad enough to do anything. California has high volumetric, margin rates for electricity but the typical monthly electric bill just isn't that high, because we don't need that much of it. The median bill is estimated to be $135 – $165/month, that's in the middle of the pack for the 50 states. Moreover, the people who can effectively get mad about this — rich people and retirees — don't suffer from it because they are protected by rooftop solar, special rates for seniors, etc. The people most exposed to the marginal prices are the ones renting old, inefficient dwellings, and they don't get a voice.
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