Historic PG&E Rate Increases Will Hit Hard in 2024 – January 4, 2024
Energy Institute Faculty Director Meredith Fowlie discusses cost containment on KQED, following PG&E’s recent rate increase to fund wildfire mitigation projects in high-risk areas.
“There’s a big capital investment cost associated with generating and delivering electricity. You have to build power plants, you have to build transmission lines, you have to build distribution systems, now we need to make sure that infrastructure is wildfire safe…so all those costs add up and the way we pay for those costs right now (which is something I think we should be thinking hard about), is to increase the price per unit of electricity that consumers charge. We not only put it in a rate base which means it shows up on your bill, but we put it in the price per kilowatt-hour. So the price you see per kilowatt-hour is higher than the costs you are actually imposing. So you could imagine (and we’ve been sort of proposing), that you could break that up into a fixed charge on your bill and a per unit of electricity charge on your bill.”
Learn more about PG&E’s utility bill hike on CapRadio and The Daily Californian
Photo: kqed.org