WILL CONSUMERS PAY UTILITY’S BIG FIRE FINE?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WILL CONSUMERS PAY UTILITY’S BIG FIRE FINE?”

 

When California’s second-largest electric utility settled a U.S. Forest Service claim for starting a huge fire that covered 114,577 acres in 2020, officials of that power company could not or would not say whether they will try to get their customers to pay the freight.

 

At stake here is $82.5 million which Southern California Edison Co. agreed to pay the Forest Service, which is supposed to use the money to restore or replace more than 100 buildings, many trails and at least 178 vehicles, among other items destroyed in the Bobcat Fire that started Sept. 6, 2020 in the Angeles National Forest northeast of Los Angeles.

 

But the answer to the question of whether consumers will be dunned is already known, even if Edison officials had no immediate response: Of course, the customers will pay. The problem is that the payment, probably averaging more than $5 for each of Edison’s 15 million customers, will never officially be called a reimbursement for the settlement, even though that’s what it will be.

 

This is common practice with the California Public Utilities Commission, which has a long record of restoring fines it charges big utilities like Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric for their many misdeeds via their next routine rate increase request.

 

Edison, like its fellow privately owned utilities, almost always has a rate increase case going before the CPUC. One is happening right now.

 

This rate case sees Edison asking a 23 percent increase in its rates over the years 2026 to 2028, with a decision in that case possible as early as this summer. If it got the full requested increase, customers’ monthly bills would rise by about $17.49 in the first year, adding to California’s status as having the second-highest electricity bills in the USA, trailing only isolated Hawaii.

 

Edison says it needs the extra money for wildfire mitigation, which was found deficient when its equipment helped start the Bobcat fire. Edison equipment also is suspected to have caused the far more destructive Eaton fire that destroyed much of Altadena last January, with executives not even denying those accusations.

 

The new Donald Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Los Angeles area, former Republican state Assemblyman Bill Essayli of Corona, said the “record settlement against…Edison provides meaningful compensation to taxpayers for the extensive costs of fighting the Bobcat fire and for the widespread damage to public lands.”

 

It may, but the effect on Edison, which continued handing out executive bonuses over the last several years while its equipment helped cause many fires, will be nil.

 

While Edison won’t get the full amount its rate case requests, history suggests it will get most. The more than $80 million in this settlement will be dwarfed by the rate increase and consumers will be lucky if Edison’s bosses so much as blink when they pay up on the settlement.

 

It's all part of the PUC’s decades-long “kabuki dance” with the companies it regulates, where the firms ask for significantly higher rate increases than they know they will get, realizing all along they will get more than they really need and knowing that all fines will essentially be repaid by consumers via the new and higher prices. (In Japanese kabuki dances, elaborate plots often play out, with everyone knowing all along how they will turn out, exactly what happens in rate cases before the CPUC.)

 

So, no, don’t feel the slightest bit sorry for Edison or PG&E the next time you hear they are being fined many millions of dollars for their equipment failures and poor vegetation clearance, even as customers pay them huge sums to maintain and improve that very equipment and vegetation control.

 

Instead, understand this is what happened when utility customers were assessed $13 billion to create the state Wildfire Fund, used to pay for damages caused by utility equipment in fires since the fund was created in 2019 after PG&E suffered a fire-related bankruptcy.

 

Customers will keep paying so long as California governors appoint PUC members willing to let the big utilities off the hook for their misdeeds or negligence. Sadly, there is no end in sight for this.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net