DEAN FLOREZ: Valley pays for utility's greed

Published online on Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009

Up and down the San Joaquin Valley this summer, amid some of the worst hard times in American history, residents opened their Pacific Gas & Electric bills to discover a shocking new reality: $800-a-month electricity charges -- double what they paid last summer.

We now find ourselves saddled with the equivalent of two house payments. One goes to the mortgage company and the other to the behemoth utility, stashing away billions of dollars in profits.

Captive to an ever-hungry monopoly, we set the air conditioner at 82 degrees. We change windows from single pane to dual pane. We make sure every light bulb is energy efficient. Still, our August bill tips the scales at $750.

After hearing from angry citizens in Kern County, I decided to look deeper. What I've discovered is a tale of greed and gouging, a so-called SmartMeter program riddled with problems and public watchdogs so cozy with PG&E that they've surrendered all teeth.

This is not 2001. The energy crisis is over. We've bailed PG&E out of bankruptcy. By charging higher and higher rates, the utility's net profits rose 17% -- $1.2 billion -- in 2008. The balance sheet for the first half of this year looks even more lusty.

And yet PG&E, already pocketing one rate hike in October 2008, returned to the California Public Utilities Commission in March seeking a second rate hike. Our beknighted watchdogs on the commission hardly muttered a protest.

PG&E's new rate hike was granted just in time for summer's brutal heat. Valley residents confronted a wicked choice: turn on the air and pay record prices or turn it off and risk heat stroke.

PG&E is now apologizing for keeping the public in the dark about the steep rate hikes. But what makes these hikes even more outrageous is that PG&E is asking customers to pay for $2 billion in new technology, specifically a SmartMeter program hyped as a way to lower our bills.

Millions of these meters have been installed throughout the state, but the only winner so far is the utility. PG&E has been able to idle countless meter readers.

As for residents, it will be years before the meters can be equipped (at our expense) with software that will spit out real time information that might help us cut back further on our energy use.

Adding salt to the wound is the very real possibility that the SmartMeters themselves are malfunctioning, causing residents to pay even higher bills. At a State Senate hearing I chaired last week in Bakersfield, more than 200 angry citizens provided strong anecdotal evidence that the SmartMeters are indeed smart -- cunning little thieves.

One farmer was charged $11,857 for running a piece of equipment that was never turned on. A local attorney was clutching a $500 bill from July, a month in which she was visiting family out of state and most every appliance in her house was turned off.

"My SmartMeter kept reading these spikes in usage at noon. But no one was in the house," she said. "It's obvious to me that this technology is not ready for prime time."

For their part, PG&E officials put on a dismal performance, insisting that the new meters were fail-safe, even as they conceded that they had tested only 50 out of 250,000 meters in Kern County.

More than once, outraged residents booed PG&E and the public utilities commission, which had sent two representatives who responded to each question with, "Sorry I can't answer that. I wasn't here when that happened."

What's becoming increasingly clear is that our valley is paying a disproportionately high rate for its energy use. That's because PG&E's rate structure charges far more for the tiers we happen to fall into because of our severe climate.

We want to give Fresno residents the same opportunity to raise concerns and ask questions about high energy bills and SmartMeter problems during a Senate hearing. It will be held at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 21, in the Hugh Burns State Building, across from Fresno City Hall, Assembly Room 1036. I look forward to seeing you there.