SDG&E Plans to Levy Additional Charges to Your Utility Bills


San Diego Gas & Electric

Here’s a letter that was sent to Todd Gloria after a meeting at the Uptown Democratic Club on June 25, 2013

Todd:

Thank you for speaking at, and taking questions at the Uptown Democratic Club last night. …and thank you for listening to my question about SDG&E and SCE passing the cost of their $4,000,000,000.00 mistakes on to the ratepayers instead of the shareholders as you would expect a corporation with a major loss to have to do.

I was perplexed about why I was the only one in the room that got the SDG&E “love letter” (attached) telling me about the pending San Onofre (SONGS) rate increase. A little research this morning revealed that it only went out to ratepayers who typically use more than 500 Kilowatt hours of electricity per month. I live inland from most of the people in the room and my typical monthly usage is 700-750 Kilowatt hours per month. For lower usage ratepayers the SONGS increase will be about $120 per year. SDG&E already has the highest rates in the country, but according to the arithmetic in the letter and their website, for those using more than 500 Kilowatt hours the SONGS rate increase will be about 33%. My SONGS rate increase will be about $600 per year. (Incidentally, SDG&E also got a rate increase for Gas!)

I assume that 33% increase includes all City and County governments along with the rate payers in the cities and counties that got power from SONGS. I don’t know what the City’s electric bill is, but the SONGS increase could easily run into the millions of unbudgeted dollars.

I would hope that every Southern California city and county government that uses electricity, or has citizens in the SONGS generating area appeal to the California Public Utilities Commission to put the burden of the mistakes made by SDG&E and SCE on the backs of the stockholders like any other corporation would have to do.

By sheer coincidence the U-T had an article about this in this morning’s news paper. I have no affiliation with the group fighting the SONGS increase, but am pleased to see that someone is putting up a fight, although they could certainly use the clout of a city government.

Thanks,

Mike Thaller

Related articles
%d bloggers like this: