PG&E customers pay 80% more than national average. Author: Laurence Du Sault, CALmatters Published: 8:05 PM PDT March 15, 2021 Updated: 8:05 PM PDT March 15, 2021
CALIFORNIA, USA California’s electricity prices are among the highest in the country, new research says, and those costs are falling disproportionately on a customer base that’s already struggling to pay their bills.
PG&E customers pay about 80% more per kilowatt-hour than the national average, according to a study by the energy institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School with the nonprofit think tank Next 10. The study analyzed the rates of the state’s three largest investor-owned utilities and found that Southern California Edison charged 45% more than the national average, while San Diego Gas & Electric charged double. Even low-income residents enrolled in the California Alternate Rates for Energy program paid more than the average American.
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As the financial effects of the pandemic persist, more Californians are falling behind on paying their utility bills.
Looking across the customer base of the state’s major investor-owned utilities, the California Public Utilities Commission says 3.3 million residential customers have past-due bills and taken together, the amount eclipses the $1 billion mark.
Here are the figures in dollar amounts from data as of January for residential customers, compiled by the commission:
Pacific Gas & Electric: $605.6 million
Southern California Edison: $338.1 million
Southern California Gas: $161.7 million
San Diego Gas & Electric: $145.3 million
Total: $1.25 billion
“Those numbers are extraordinarily frightening,” said Commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen after the CPUC’s energy division delivered a PowerPoint presentation Feb. 11. “The extent of the debt owed and the amount of the debt, they’re really, really jarring.”