Historic PG&E Rate Increases Will Hit Hard in 2024

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before you open your next electricity bill, you might want to brace yourself. PG&E is hiking their rates starting this month, and this one is historic. Bills for the average household are expected to jump $34.50 a month and there could be more rate hikes on the horizon. The increase will fund projects addressing wildfire mitigation, especially an unprecedented attempt to bury power lines in high-risk areas. After the new rate hike, PG&E rates will have doubled over the last 10 years. Is all the new work necessary? Is sticking ratepayers with the bill the only option? We’ll talk with energy and utility experts about what this move means for PG&E and for the rest of us. Guests: Katherine Blunt, energy reporter, Wall Street Journal. Her recent book is "California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—And What It Means for America’s Power Grid." Meredith Fowlie, professor, UC Berkeley Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics; faculty director at the Energy Institute at Haas Mark Toney, executive director, The Utility Reform Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for Key QBD Podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport. At SFO, you can shop,
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0:56.6	From KQED.
1:13.0	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:17.1	Before you open your next electricity bill, you might want to brace yourself.
1:21.1	PG&E is hiking their rates, and this one is historic.
1:27.2	Bills for the average household are expected to jump 3450 a month, and there could be more rate hikes on the horizon.
1:29.2	The increase will fund projects addressing wildfire mitigation, especially an unprecedented
1:33.9	attempt to bury power lines in high-risk areas.
1:38.4	After the new rate hike, PG&E rates will have doubled over the last 10 years.
1:43.1	Is the new work necessary? Is sticking rate payers
1:45.7	with the bill the only option? We'll talk with energy and utility experts about what this move
1:50.2	means for PG&E and the rest of us. So coming up next after this news.
2:00.6	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. There's a lot to your PG&E bill. I don't just mean the
2:07.1	account summary or the details of the electric charges. With an investor-owned utility operating under a
2:13.8	regulated monopoly model under the California Public Utilities Commission, the whole history
	...

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