A Plan to Change Your Utility Rates is Dividing California Environmentalists. Here’s Why…
May 7, 2024
Faculty Director, Severin Borenstein, is quoted in Canary Media regarding his 2021 research conducted with Meredith Fowlie and James Sallee on the issues with California’s electricity prices and a proposed solution to address them.
“Severin Borenstein, one of the report’s authors, said that isn’t a populist argument; it’s an economic and environmental one. Providing energy through the state’s increasingly solar- and wind-saturated electric grid is not only cheaper, but vastly more environmentally friendly than getting an equivalent amount of energy by burning gasoline or methane…But because California has some of the highest retail electric rates in the country, ‘the cost of fueling my Prius at a gas station is about the cost of fueling a Tesla — and it shouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘We are sending entirely the wrong price signals and it’s undermining decarbonisation.’”
Read more about the utility fixed rate study on Jefferson Public Radio.
Photo: calmatters.org