Chich Picolo

A “freeze” is not a serious policy answer. Also why would you freeze high rates? Don’t we want to bring them down? A serious answer is to look into why they are high in the first place and implement reforms that eliminate or reduce the cost drivers. I’ll give it a shot. On the electricity side, you have to reform and repeal the mandates that are making the cost of electricity go up. There are many. Here’s a simple one. Allow large hydro-power to count toward a utilities’ Renewable Portfolio Standard. PG&E for instance has a large amount of hydro-power (dams and water turbine power). It’s totally renewable and zero-emission, but large hydro-power doesn’t count. If it did, utilities wouldn’t have to buy more expensive power from somewhere else. Costs would go down. When it comes to utility liability, there can be thoughtful policy discussion about changing liability from strict liability to more of a negligence standard (with caveats and conditions). But you don’t get rid of or limit subrogation because that would make the current insurance crisis even worse. And the more fundamental issue is how we mitigate the risk, which is the cause of high insurance premiums and undermines utility’s credit and investment financing. The risk of catastrophic wildfire in California is (obviously) very high. That impacts both homeowners insurance and electrical utility bills. Lower the risk and you can lower the rate. On the macro scale, you do that by ramping up big fuel reduction projects on public land for the long term. That means making wildfire prevention #1 priority of Cap & Invest funds, instead of last place where it currently sits. On the micro, you can implement cluster mitigation for neighborhoods and enforce vegetation management to reduce risk and work to ensure these risk reduction measures are taken into account with premiums. Also you can remove the barriers on federal and state land so utilities can do the vegetation removal and tree trimming needed to make the grid safer from wildfire. Fix Our Forests Act does this. Under-grounding is expensive and is not always the best answer. Insulating lines and repairing/modernizing towers is more cost effective. Currently we seem to be incentivizing the most expensive alternative to wildfire mitigation. And all of that cost is paid by us the ratepayer. Instead of freezing rates and leaving the costs in place, let’s look to actually lower them.