With help from Blanca Begert
PROGRAMMING NOTE: We’ll be off for Thanksgiving this Thursday and Friday but back to our normal schedule on Monday, Nov. 27.
ALMS FOR THE CLIMATE: A proposal to make wealthier Californians pay higher electricity bills to fund the state’s climate change fight is careening into political and practical obstacles.
California loads climate costs like renewable energy subsidies and wildfire risk reduction onto utility bills, making them some of the country’s highest. The approach results in lower-income people paying a greater share of those costs than they would under the state’s progressive tax system.
Costs will keep growing as utilities build and upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate electric vehicles, homes, ports and railroads. How lawmakers parcel out the increase — by restructuring electricity bills, moving spending to the general fund or leaving things as they are — could affect Californians’ appetite for rapid climate action.
Sixty-eight percent of Californians said in the Public Policy Institute of California’s latest environment poll that they support the state’s goal of transitioning to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2045, but their feelings could change as costs mount.
In a 2021 paper, three University of California, Berkeley, economists pitched a reconfiguration of electricity bills as a solution: add a set monthly charge that varies with income to everyone’s bill and redesign rates so that everyone pays less for the volume of electricity they actually use. This would require wealthier people to pay a larger share for items on electricity bills that aren’t electricity.
The idea leapt from the report to AB 205 last year, with a mandate for the Public Utilities Commission to figure out how to do it by the middle of next year. Now legislators are hearing concerns from constituents.
Last month, 22 assembly members asked the CPUC to slow down, calling many variations of the proposal “unreasonable” in an Oct. 27 letter. Earlier this month, state Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park) joined in.
Becker said in an Op-Ed co-authored by fellow Menlo Park Democratic Assemblymember Marc Berman that the proposal would hit their constituents on the San Francisco Peninsula — where a family of four earning $149,000 meets a federal low-income threshold — particularly hard.
“This proposed change is at risk of being poorly implemented, with long-lasting affordability and climate impacts,” they wrote in the Op-Ed.
The utilities have pitched additional monthly charges of $51 (Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison) to $73 (San Diego Gas & Electric) for most ratepayers, and less — $10 to $24 — for customers in two income-based programs who already pay reduced electricity prices.
Other groups have suggested smaller charges. The CPUC’s Public Advocates Office has proposed a $32 fee for most. People with annual earnings of up to $75,000 for a family of four would pay $7 a month.
A major challenge is something seemingly simple: verifying customers’ incomes. Ideas to analyze electricity customers’ tax filings were rejected due to complications and privacy concerns. For now, the CPUC is sticking with preestablished income tiers through existing low-income programs.
Another objection lawmakers have raised is energy conservation. If everyone pays less for the volume of the electricity they use, they argue, there won’t be as much of an incentive to conserve.
Matt Baker, director of the Public Advocates Office, rejects that claim.
“Rates are so high right now any impact on conservation will be insignificant and will be swamped by the positive impact from increased use of electricity for transportation,” he said in a text, referring to more people switching to EVs if electricity costs less.
Even if the CPUC doesn’t slow down, it will be a while before anyone sees the charges on their bills. A proposal from the utilities estimates SCE and SDG&E customers would see the new charge starting in the third quarter of 2025, while PG&E wouldn’t implement it until 2028, after it updates its legacy billing system. —WV
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COUNT THEM IN: Three dozen auditors, software companies, consultancies and other certifiers of greenhouse gas emissions announced today the formation of the Carbon Accounting Alliance. The CAA, whose members collectively count the emissions of more than 23,000 organizations around the world, is the first such industry group. Its founders are two U.K.-based climate wonks,
The CAA’s launch comes amid a rapidly evolving global corporate climate disclosure landscape as regulators seek to bring standardization to these disclosures for comparability and reliability. California enacted landmark laws last month requiring large companies operating in the state to disclose their Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions starting in 2026 — fueling a boom for the carbon accounting industry. Nations in Europe and elsewhere around the world are also implementing their own climate disclosure rules, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been weighing a proposal of its own for nearly two years.
The market itself has been increasingly demanding this information as well.
So far, details on the group’s priorities are light. The CAA wants to “seek alignment” on international definitions and standards and gaps that exist on disclosures and quality assessments. It also calls on organizations worldwide to use carbon accounting “to drive transition plans and direct emission reductions” and wants to ensure carbon accounting is a “key feature of governments’ green skills and jobs policies,” according to a press release. —JW
CANAL CONSTRUCTION: An Arizona tribe is about to break ground on a first-in-the-nation project to cover canals with solar panels. California is close on their heels.
The Gila River Indian Community announced a partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this week to build solar panels over a 1,000 foot stretch of canal by 2025. The tribe eventually wants to cover 150 miles of waterways on its land, which lies just south of Phoenix.
California hopes to start construction this year on a similar pilot project that will cover 1.6 miles of canal in the Central Valley. Researchers say that if the concept proves successful, it could be a game changer for a state desperate to both conserve water and boost clean energy production.
A 2021 study from the UC Merced — one of the partners on the project in Turlock — estimated that covering California’s 4,000 miles of canals could save 63 billion gallons of water annually, or enough to supply two million residents. The panels would also generate 13 gigawatts of power — more than half the solar supply needed to meet the state’s 2030 emissions reduction goals. —AN
— Conservation groups, opposed to any human intervention in wilderness areas, are suing the National Park Service for replanting giant sequoia groves that burned in recent wildfires.
— The downfall of OpenAI may not look like a climate story, but it has a lot to teach about how board-only nonprofits, plentiful in the environmental space, can run roughshod over their organizations.
— The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is hurting for cash this year as a rainy winter means customers need to buy less water. It’s also planning for a long-term decline in water sales.
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November 22, 2023 at 09:05AM
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