California’s Public Utility Commission President Talks Affordability With Heatmap

Blessed with ample sun and wind for renewables but bedeviled by high electricity prices and natural disasters, California encapsulates the promise and peril of the United States’ energy transition.

So it was fitting that Heatmap House, a day of conversations and roundtables with leading policymakers, executives, and investors at San Francisco Climate Week, kicked off with John Reynolds, president of the California Public Utilities Commission.

The CPUC oversees the most-populous state’s utilities and has the power to approve or veto electricity and natural gas rate increases. At Heatmap House, Reynolds — “one of California’'s most important climate policymakers,” as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer called him — affirmed that affordability has been top of mind as power bills have risen to become a mainstream political issue across the country. California’s electricity prices are the second-highest in the nation, behind only Hawaii, according to the Electricity Price Hub.

“I’d really like to see us drive down the portion of household income that is consumed by energy prices,” Reynolds said in a one-on-one interview with Rob. “That’s a really important metric for making sure that we’re doing our job to deliver a system that’s efficient at meeting customer needs and is able to support the growth of our economy.”

The Golden State’s power premium has been exacerbated by the fallout from multiple wildfires that have devastated various parts of the state in recent years, which have necessitated costly grid upgrades such as undergrounding power lines. California-based utility PG&E has also invested in more futuristic fire solutions such as “vegetation management robots, power pole sensors, advanced fire detection cameras, and autonomous drones, with much of this enhanced by an artificial intelligence-powered analytics platforms,” as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote shortly after last year’s fires in Los Angeles.

Affordability affects not just Californians’ financial wellbeing, but also the state’s ability to decarbonize quickly. “The affordability challenge that we’re seeing in electric and gas service is one that is going to make it more difficult to meet our climate goals as a state,” Reynolds said.

One contentious — and somewhat byzantine — aspect of California’s energy transition is how much of a financial incentive the CPUC should offer for residents to install rooftop solar. Net metering is a billing system that rewards households with solar panels for sending excess generation back to the grid. Three years ago, the CPUC adopted a new standard that substantially lowered the rate at which solar panel users were compensated.

“We had to slow the bleeding,” Reynolds said, referring to the greater financial burden paid by utility customers without solar panels. “The net billing tariff did slow the bleeding, but it didn’t stop it.”

Asked whether he is focused more on electricity rates (the amount a customer pays per kilowatt-hour) or bills (the amount a utility charges a ratepayer), Reynolds said both are important.

“If we can drive down electric rates, we’re going to enable more electrification of transportation and of buildings,” Reynolds said. “It’s really important to look at bills, because that is fundamentally what hits households. People’s wallets are limited by their bills, not by their rates.”