The reason PG&E rates are skyrocketing in California

miguelazo | 31 points

> On March 27, an administrative law judge published a proposed decision that, if approved in May, will impose a new fixed $24.18 monthly charge on residential customers not eligible for low-income discounts.

To not only end solar net metering but then to have a significant charge even for low-import solar/battery sites... ugh. I hope this doesn't go through.

mcbishop | 11 days ago

> Californians should be outraged

Outraged about what? My bill has gone up a bit, but PG&E tells me it's because they are burying lines underground to prevent wildfires. It seems like Lydia Lunch hates PG&E, but they don't seem any better or worse than the average utility company.

labrador | 11 days ago

Ah yes, the good old "if it only wasn't for those evil profit gouging companies" excuse. It's literally a get out of jail free card for anything and everything related to the economy. It's such a political issue that the ideologues will just eat it up and spread it on and not ask a single question. Food prices too high? It's the evil profiteering companies. Car prices too high? It's the evil profiteering companies. Home prices too high? It's evil profiteering companies. Utility prices too high? It's the evil profiteering companies.

It's the vast conspiracy across millions of companies, across every city, state, and economic center in the country, that have all decided to go evil at the same point in time and just maliciously raise prices in an evil ploy to make more money. Surely it's that and not, you know, industrial and economic decisions that were made had consequences.

thegrim33 | 9 days ago

Fuck PG&E with three-phase 150kV. They were negligent when they burned down my mom's town with crumbling century-old bare transmission lines and then they were punitive with their extended PSPSes that caused weeks of outages. Still have that goddamn generator that had to be bought in Redding. You don't hear a peep from the media anymore because disaster capitalism and opportunism came and left.

Municipalities should endeavor with haste to form their own co-op utilities and break free from the greedy corporate dicks who occasionally blow up neighborhoods.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion

banish-m4 | 11 days ago

I found an effective way to reduce my PGE bill to $0....I left CA

House in TX is 3x the size of our former CA house, utility bills are 1/3

oldpersonintx | 11 days ago