Following up on February 17's "There Could Be an Energy Bill Debt Tsunami,Too".
From Utility Dive, February 18:
California moves to address 'extraordinarily frightening' energy debt amid COVID-19
Dive Brief:
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last week opened a new rulemaking to consider ways to deal with growing energy arrearages — the total amount of unpaid customer bills — in the state due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and extended a suite of utility customer protection measures through June 30.
CPUC President Marybel Batjer highlighted the need for regulators to address the growing energy arrrearages that have accrued during the pandemic during a Thursday meeting. "This rulemaking provides us with an avenue to brainstorm, develop and implement measures that will help ensure that once the moratorium on customer disconnections … ends, we can provide relief to the customers," Batjer said during a meeting on Thursday.
- Residential arrearages for Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas shot up by more than $650 million between February 2020 and the end of the year, surpassing $1 billion in December. Customers enrolled in low-income programs accounted for $324 million of that increase.
....MUCH MOREDive Insight:
Last March, when California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency over the pandemic, the state had 53 known COVID-19 cases and one confirmed death. This January, those numbers had shot up to more than 3 million cases and over 37,000 deaths.
The pandemic has also taken an economic toll — the statewide unemployment rate sat at 8.8% in January 2021, compared to 5.5% last March. During three quarters of the last year, the unemployment rate for households exceeding an annual income of $150,000 rose from 2.8% to an eventual 5.1%. For households earning less than $30,000 a year, however, unemployment rates increased from an average of 12.2% to a peak of 30.3%, before dropping to 25.8%.
The pandemic has also led to shifts in energy usage, with residential customers consuming more power as they work and study from home. And "despite the efforts to moderate customer energy use and bills during the pandemic, arrearages for residential customers have increased substantially," the CPUC's order instituting rulemaking notes — arrearages increased by 130% between February and December 2020. In 2019, by comparison, aggregate arrearages fell by more than $71 million....
