RICHMOND – PG&E's top boss suggested Monday that the utility's struggling ratepayers' monthly electricity bills could flatten and at some point even fall below their current levels.
In recent years, PG&E customers have seen their monthly bills rise dramatically. But the utility is on the lookout for ways to curb the surge, in accordance with PG&E Chief Executive Officer Patricia Poppe.
“We see a future where customers’ bills could go down,” Poppe said in response to questions from this news organization about rapidly rising tariff costs after an event PG&E hosted in Richmond.
The surprising comment seemed too good to be true to some reform advocates.
Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a consumer group, was skeptical that PG&E will rein within the pace of monthly bill increases.
“I'll believe it when I see it,” Toney said of Poppe's comments in an interview. “Prices are so damn high now that they would have to come down significantly to make a difference and make them affordable.”
Oakland-based PG&E hopes to bring prices closer to inflation, or not less than within the 4 to five percent range. But for greater than a 12 months, PG&E's monthly bills have risen greater than 20% annually, well above the corporate's self-imposed goals, due to a series of approvals by the state Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the utility's rate hikes.
“I have a very hard time believing PG&E, considering the company currently has a dozen rate increases before the PUC,” Toney said. “There are a variety of proposals, all of which have an impact on customers.”
Poppe appeared Monday at an Earth Day CEO summit next to the headquarters of Moxion Power, a green technology company based in Ford Point on the windswept coast south of Richmond.
“We are working very hard to modernize our methods for customers and make (monthly bills) more affordable,” Poppe said in the course of the interview.
Some changes have already come into force, said Poppe.
“We implemented a lean operating system to reduce the cost of our system and improve the customer experience,” Poppe said.
For the 12 months ending January 2024, total bills for a typical residential customer receiving electric and gas services from PG&E averaged about $294.50 per 30 days.
That was a 22.3% increase over the typical monthly bill in January 2023. In stark contrast, the Bay Area's inflation rate rose 2.6% in 2023.
“We are reconsidering some mandates that are driving up costs,” Poppe said.
Poppe pointed to safety regulations that she said may be costly, comparable to the heavy reliance on vegetation management to stop wildfires.
“We believe technologies have replaced vegetation management as the primary wildfire risk reduction in our system,” Poppe said. “We believe we can do less vegetation management. We will always have some. But we believe we can do less. We can replace this with more cost-effective technologies to keep people safe and then build infrastructure that can withstand our customers’ extreme weather conditions.”
PG&E stays under scrutiny after a decade of PG&E-related disasters, including a deadly gas explosion that destroyed a neighborhood in San Bruno and a series of infernos that torched vast swaths of land in wine country and other parts of Northern California.
While implementing the ambitious changes could appear difficult at first, Poppe believes PG&E can find ways to implement complex cost controls, expand its use of technology while improving safety measures.
“All of these things can happen,” Poppe said. “We see prices going down in the future and we are working every day to make sure that happens.”
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