May 25, 2021
Oct 26, 2019 San Francisco / CA / USA - Close up of PG&E ( Pacific Gas and Electric Company) sign at their historical headquarters in downtown San Francisco. (Shutterstock Image)
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Pacific Gas & Electric has agreed to sell its San Francisco headquarters building for $800-million. The giant utility is seeking approval to return half of the sale proceeds back to customers. If approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, PG&E plans to distribute up to $420-million to customers over the next five years to offset future customer rates. PG&E plans to move into a new headquarters in Oakland.
April 16, 2021
Pacific Gas and Electric has been put on probation over wildfire safety concerns. The California Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously to put PG&E on probation yesterday. By next month, the utility company must outline a plan showing how it will prioritize cutting trees near powerlines that they ranked as the greatest risk of starting a wildfire. Regulators are accusing PG&E of failing to address the issue earlier, citing numbers showing that only a fraction of the highest fire risk areas had been cleared from power lines.
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California already has some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Those costs could rise even faster over the next decade, as utilities harden their grids against wildfires, grow their share of net-metered rooftop solar and add other costs that will be passed through to utility customers.
But recovering those costs by charging customers by the kilowatt-hour pushes too much of the burden on those least able to pay, according to a new report from the University of California at Berkeley. That’s not just unfair to the state’s most vulnerable residents, the report argues it could also make it more expensive to electrify transportation and building heating with carbon-free power.
Cathy Zoi, CEO of EVgo, pays a lot of attention to the economics of public electric vehicle charging, both in terms of the widely varying upfront costs from location to location, and the long-term calculations that go into making sure their revenue exceeds their costs over their lifetime.
“We have a first-mover advantage, but we also have a first-learner advantage,” she said, with data collected from about 1,500 fast chargers across 800 locations to date. That s allowed the decade-old EV charging provider to develop “proprietary utilization forecasting tools” aimed at ensuring that the early years of a fast-charging site, when relatively few EVs are on the roads to use it, can eventually be made up by the end of its life as EVs proliferate in its region. “That’s some of our secret sauce.”
Community choice aggregators (CCAs) have become a formidable player in California’s electricity markets,
taking over the role of supplying electricity to millions of customers from the state s investor-owned utilities, announcing big-time clean energy contracts and pushing regulators to add flexibility to state rules that stymie the growth of CCAs.
A Monday announcement again underlines that expanding influence: eight CCAs have teamed up on a joint powers authority, an entity joining public agencies in service of a common goal. In this case, the goal is buying larger amounts of clean energy; many of California’s CCAs have renewables targets more aggressive than those of the state at large.