California's Crushing Power Bills Challenge Its Climate Goals
The state must overhaul how it pays for the mounting costs of climate change. Adding to the utility charges of PG&E customers is regressive and counterproductive.
Costs mount to bury powerlines.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
California is incredible, but making it livable, what with its droughts, floods, fault-lines and wildfires, has never been cheap. Climate change only adds to the cost, as anyone paying spiraling utility bills there knows. Those same bills will thwart California’s green, progressive aspirations. Making them digestible means going back to the basics of what a bill pays for.
Meredith Fowlie, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, just published an important cost-benefit analysis of PG&E Corp.’s massive project to bury 10,000 miles of powerlines in northern California. You may recall the utility went bankrupt in 2019, swamped by liabilities arising from several deadly wildfires attributed to its overhead wires (see this). The wildfires aren’t letting up and PG&E’s undergrounding project has contributed to a roughly $380, or 16.5%, increase in average bills this year. Fowlie finds diminishing returns for each incremental mile of wire buried, in the form of rising implied costs per avoided ignition, suggesting other strategies may be more cost effective.