PG&E wants ratepayers to pay for propaganda that would garner trust it doesn’t deserve | Opinion

The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board
·3 min read
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Pacific Gas & Electric, California’s main utility provider and a near monopoly, just keeps finding ways to fleece its customers.

The company’s latest gambit is to pass on the cost of a commercial advertisement for its undergrounding activities under the guise of “safety communications” rather than “promotional advertising.” The former can legally be paid for by customers, while the latter must be paid for by shareholders.

But PG&E so rarely acts in good faith toward its customers that Californians can hardly be surprised at such creative bookkeeping.

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PG&E spokesperson Jennifer Robison said in an emailed statement to The Bee that this ad and similar television spots have cost the company as much as $6 million over the past year. Records in the company’s mandated accounting process with the California Public Utilities Commission show that PG&E requested those costs be covered by a ratepayer-funded fire risk mitigation account.

Don’t let PG&E’s glossy, highly-produced advertisements (that you’re paying for) fool you. Once stingy about these investments, the criminally negligent utility company is going the most expensive route possible and now they are using ratepayers to pay for the very propaganda intended to make us feel good about it.

Despite PG&E CEO Patti Poppe’s attempt to spin undergrounding the company’s faulty overhead lines as purely altruistic, it remains a project that the company refused to fund until forced to. A 2019 audit by the CPUC found that between 2007 and 2016, PG&E diverted more than $120 million from a program intended to help underground its overhead electric lines; not because the company had found a cheaper method but because it decided to spend the money on other programs.

So now, after not adequately funding line safety programs for years, PG&E is making lemonade out of lemons: It is gladly spending billions more to harden the state’s electrical grid, and it is using ratepayer dollars to promote the most expensive means possible — miles and miles of cable undergrounding. PG&E gets a guaranteed rate of return on these expenses, while utility experts say there are cheaper ways.

Had PG&E used that program money to replace a 100-year-old electrical tower in Butte County’s Jarbo Gap before November 2018, 83 residents of Paradise, Magalia and Yankee Hill may still be alive today.

Moreover, PG&E could have opted instead for above-ground, bare wire insulation and an infrastructure update at a lower cost to ratepayers, rather than opting for undergrounding, which ranges anywhere from $350 per foot to $1,150 per foot (roughly $1.85 million to $6.072 million per mile, according to the CPUC). Installing new overhead distribution infrastructure is much less expensive: On average, it costs between just $120-$144 per foot, or $634,000 to $760,000 per mile.

Such insult is only added to injury in a year where the utility giant has announced multiple rate hikes. The average PG&E household will pay an additional $34.50 on its monthly bill this year, and the company has requested an additional $14 per month stemming from its request to the CPUC to retroactively approve $2 billion in expenditures, dating back mostly to 2022 and 2023. For customers who get both their electricity and natural gas from PG&E, that will bring the average bill to more than $300 a month.

PG&E’s audacity clearly knows no bounds.

Pushing the cost of this advertisement — and it is clearly an advertisement, no matter how PG&E’s unscrupulous bookkeepers would seek to classify it — onto its captive customers is just another affront in a long line of PG&E’s poor decisions.