🏡💚 One step closer toward utility justice

Written By Zach Lou

I moved to California in 2018, driving from the Midwest with all of my belongings packed into my little hatchback. As I began winding up and through the Sierra Nevadas, the air became filled with smoke from a distant wildfire. That night I slept in a tent I had brought with me in a small pullout on the side of the road. I woke up with bleary eyes and a raspy throat, the smell of smoke still strong and now attached to me and my clothes. I distinctly remember wondering, is this normal here?

Three months later, the Camp Fire burned Paradise and surrounding communities to the ground, killing 85 people, displacing over 50,000, and destroying more than 18,000 homes and buildings. It was soon discovered that the fire was sparked by PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric Company), with conditions made worse by a warming climate that creates drier and more combustible fuel. This wasn’t the first time PG&E was found responsible for fires — in fact, just the previous year in October of 2017, PG&E was linked to multiple fires (Tubbs, Nuns, Adobe fires and more) in Northern California that scorched more than 245,000 acres, destroyed or damaged more than 8,900 homes, displaced 100,000 people, and killed at least 44.

In January 2019, PG&E filed for bankruptcy with more than $30 billion liabilities, the largest utility bankruptcy in U.S. history. This was a moment of reckoning — will we continue with the status quo that is prioritizing profits over safety? Or could we use this as an opportunity to transition to a different utility model, not owned by investors but by the public or a nonprofit?  

As we grappled with these questions, the Reclaim Our Power Utility Justice Campaign was born. Reclaim Our Power (ROP) is a grassroots-led coalition advocating for the full transition of PG&E from a private investor-owned utility model to a new democratized energy system (and most importantly, they are also a member of the California Green New Deal Coalition). ROP quickly took off, channeling and bringing coherence to the widespread outrage that ensued when PG&E proposed that we, the public, should bail out this corporation that has been lining the pockets of investors while their neglected infrastructure was destroying communities.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. Despite Governor Newsom threatening a public takeover, in March 2020 he approved the corporation’s reorganization plan that offered some concessions but left the business model fully intact.

While a public takeover may have still been one possible outcome, part of the challenge of that time was that there was no transition plan in place, and no clear understanding of the feasibility of how that switch could happen. That is exactly what ROP has been building in the last 5 years.

With surprisingly little fanfare (or maybe unsurprisingly since it happened a few months into the pandemic), in June of 2020 the Governor signed into law SB 350, the Golden State Energy Act. This bill created a nonprofit public benefit corporation called Golden State Energy for the purpose of owning, controlling, operating, or managing electrical and gas services for its ratepayers and for the benefit of all Californians. If importantly, the bill authorized Golden State Energy to commence an eminent domain action to acquire PG&E if PG&E’s license was ever revoked.

But since that time, Golden State Energy has mostly existed on a piece of paper. Despite skyrocketing utility bills, ongoing power shutoffs, continued fault for fires it has caused, and the inhumane utility disconnections to the millions of people in utility debt due to unaffordable bills, PG&E is still operating business as usual.

Reclaim Our Power has kept up the steady drumbeat to call out these flaws, and importantly, to show that a better system is possible. Last year, they released a report, The Case for Golden State Energy, laying out in detail the benefits of a nonprofit utility that could replace PG&E. And this year, they are co-sponsoring SB 332 (Wahab), the Investor-Owned Utilities Accountability Act. This is an ambitious bill that was trying to make a lot of changes to investor-owned utilities, including capping rate increases, prohibiting shutoffs for vulnerable customers, funding resilience hubs, and reforming executive compensation. And significantly, it also requires the state to conduct a feasibility study to transition the large gas and electric IOUs’ operations to a successor entity. In essence — a roadmap for the transition away from PG&E that Reclaim Our Power has been fighting for.

SB 332 has been amended quite a bit as it has made its way through the legislative process, but the feasibility study remains intact, as do reforms to require more oversight and accountability over PG&E’s equipment, executive compensation, and procurement (unfortunately, the cap on utility rate increases, prohibition on shutoffs for vulnerable people, and funding for resilience hubs have all been removed)

And this past Monday, SB 332 passed out of the Senate!! With a 25-10 vote in support, the bills moves on into the Assembly.

This is a big step forward, and gives more time for organizing and educating people about the vision for Golden State Energy. At this point, everyone in California knows about the dangers of wildfires, and that many of them are caused by failing utility infrastructure while those same utilities continue to rake in profits. The challenge is in believing that we can transition to something better. Reclaim Our Power is taking on that task, and SB 332 lives on to carry that vision forward.

Reclaim Our Power rally to call out PG&E. Source: Reclaim Our Power’s Facebook page

Today is the last day for bills to pass out of their house of origin (unless they have an urgency clause or some other legislative shenanigans that happen every year). To mark the occasion, it’s worth taking a look at the status of bills that are part of our coalition’s legislative slate:

Priority Slate

  • SB 684 / AB 1243 (Menjivar / Addis) Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act — on hold but can still move forward due to the urgency clause

  • SB 332 (Wahab) Investor-Owned Utility Accountability Act — PASSED the Senate

  • AB 1157 (Kalra) Affordable Rent Act — HELD in Committee, now a two-year bill

  • AB 670 (Quirk-Silva) Affordable Housing Preservation and Accountability Act — PASSED the Assembly

General Slate

  • AB 39 (Zbur) Local Electrification Planning Act — PASSED the Assembly

  • AB 801 (Bonta) CA Community Reinvestment Act — PASSED the Assembly

  • AB 832 (Muratsuchi) Climate Resilient Schools and Indoor Air Quality Act — HELD in Committee

  • SB 52 (PĂ©rez) End AI Rent Hikes Act — PASSED the Senate

  • SB 607 (Wiener) Exempting Infill Projects from CEQA (oppose) — INACTIVE file but still a lot going on here. Probably worth it’s own newsletter, but some version of this will almost definitely try to make it into the budget, as Newsom proposed during his May Revise.

  • SB 787 (McNerney) Task Force on Equitable Clean Energy Supply Chains & Industrial Policy — PASSED the Senate

We’ll revisit our coalition’s legislative slate now that things are through (or not through) the first house — a huge congratulations to all of you working on bills that made it through! And for those that didn’t, we know the fight goes on…

WHAT WE’RE READING

Feel free to reply any time! I always enjoy hearing from people and getting any feedback/questions/additional thoughts.

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Zach Lou
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