Facts

PG&E Rate Hikes Have Overwhelmed California Residents and Small Businesses.

• In the last thirty-one months, PG&E residential customers have seen their bills skyrocket 38%, or an average of 12.7% annually, a rate three times as high as inflation. 

• PG&E’s residential rates have more than doubled since 2006, and nearly tripled for low-income customers, according to The Utility Reform Network (TURN). 

• In November, PG&E seeks to have the California Public Utilities Commission grant a $39-per-month rate hike on the average customer, which would boost corporate revenues by 26% on the backs of hard-working ratepayers.

• Californians already pay the fifth-highest electricity rate in the nation. 

PG&E Has Wasted Ratepayer Money On Self-Serving Spending, Not Safety.

• Days after PG&E executives told a bankruptcy judge in 2020 that it was “not financially sustainable” to employ 5,500 tree trimmers to reduce vegetation-triggered wildfire risk, they authorized giving  themselves $188 million in bonuses.  

• In 2021, PG&E’s Patti Poppe garnered $51.2 million in compensation garnered making her the highest paid CEO of any for-profit utility in the United States.  The same year, the ratepayer-funded utility lost more than $88 million in net income.

• Within weeks of Poppe’s 2021 eye-popping payout, PG&E customers learned of double-digit rate increases

• PG&E has an extensive long history of lavishing money to influence policymakers in Sacramento, such as the $2.1 million it spent in 2021 on campaign contributions or the $4.9 million it spent in 2022 on lobbying. 

• PG&E might hold the unhappy distinction of being the only public company in history to emerge from bankruptcy with nearly twice as much debt as it carried into bankruptcy–burdening ratepayers with $40 billion in debt in 2020 while shareholders, bondholders, and executives emerged unscathed.  It didn’t help that ratepayers had to foot the bill for the company’s $140 million in attorney fees for the company’s high-priced bankruptcy lawyers. 

• In 2023, PG&E has spent millions each week on seemingly omnipresent feel-good cable and internet TV ads — a puzzlingly common expenditure for a utility with a government-sanctioned monopoly over its customer base.  

• In 2022, the company provided dividends to a limited group of its preferred shareholders–its most influential investors–well in excess of the average yield in the utility industry. 

PG&E Has Failed to Deliver on Promises of Safety. 

• Since 2017, PG&E has caused 31 wildfires that claimed 113 lives, scorched more than 1.5 million acres, and destroyed nearly 24,000 homes. 

• PG&E has been convicted of 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the deadly Camp Fire of 2018, which destroyed the town of Paradise.

• In 2021, CEO Patti Poppe accelerated PG&E’s  headline-grabbing announcement of a plan for undergrounding 10,000 miles of electric transmission and distribution lines because it “couldn’t wait,” in her words.  Two and one-half years later, the company will have accomplished only 6% of its goal.  

• The company has already reduced its three-year goal of undergrounding 3,600 miles of distribution and transmission lines, now proposing to bury 2,275 miles over the next three years.  It has buried only about 600 miles so far. 

• More than a decade after the cracking of PG&E’s defective plastic piping caused an explosion at a Cupertino apartment complex, the company has replaced only 21% of its 6,200-mile system of Aldyl-A pipes, which the company admits will crack over time. 

• Pacific Gas & Electric “fell 10 years behind” on wildfire safety compared to a sibling for-profit utility, San Diego Gas & Electric, by cutting corners on basic safety practices.  In contrast, SDG&E responded to wildfire risk by implementing a comprehensive fire-safety plan as early as 2007.

• After reviewing the evidence, Federal Judge William Alsup determined Californians have become “trapped in a tragic era of PG&E wildfires because, for decades, it neglected its duties.”