California utilities are investing heavily to keep power lines from sparking devastating wildfires that can turn blue skies orange and burn holes in pocketbooks.
Source: russaquarius/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images.Soaring electricity rates in California are putting millions of households in a pinch, fueling concerns that a mounting energy affordability crisis could undermine the Golden State's ambitious efforts to transition the largest US state economy off fossil fuels and keep climate change in check.
"I don't think it's going to be easy," said Justin Ong, chief policy adviser at the California Public Utilities Commission's Public Advocates Office. "A lot of the investments that are baked into our electricity goals are like a mortgage; they're spread out over decades."
As California strives to simultaneously decarbonize, expand and refortify its power system, retail electricity prices have roughly doubled over the past decade for the state's 39 million residents. Fears of unabated breakneck inflation are forcing difficult — and sometimes controversial — decisions on how to minimize the impact of planned multibillion-dollar annual utility expenditures to prevent power lines from igniting disastrous wildfires, as well as generational investments in transmission and distribution grid upgrades to accommodate vast new volumes of renewable energy resources, electric vehicles and gasless homes.
In addition, ratepayers without rooftop solar face an estimated $6.8 billion in costs in 2024 alone to effectively subsidize some 1.5 million solar-powered customers of California's big three investor-owned electric utilities, the Public Advocates Office said in a Feb. 8 analysis.
Addressing perceived inequities in that cost shift was one of the primary reasons the PUC in December 2022 decided to slash payments for solar generation under the state's net energy metering program. The solar industry and some independent analysts have criticized the framing of the rooftop solar cross-subsidy conversation, arguing that cost shifts are an implicit feature of rate design and that net metering is being unfairly singled out.
