Electricity rates are on the rise every single year. Even if you have solar power – depending on when you installed it – your rates for buybacks have decreased as well, meaning that if you are on the grid and pay Southern California Edison for power, it probably has been costing you more no matter what type of setup you have.
Jeffrey Monford from SCE joined Gary Daigneault on the “Up Close Show” on Friday to field some questions from customers – including what’s causing those rate increases. Here’s Jeffrey Monford:
Jeffrey Monford: “Rates have definitely gone up. Believe it or not, SCE does many, many thing from keeping rates going up anymore than they have. For example, we have setup a self-funded wildfire insurance program. Instead of buying wildfire insurance in the marketplace and paying someone else’s profit, we financed that ourselves. Basically we’re saving 160 million dollars a year by not paying retail insurance on some things.”
When it comes down to a reason for the rate increase, Jeffrey Monford pointed at a few different factors.
Monford: “One of the reasons rates have gone up is that SCE has been making the grid more resilient to stand up to extreme weather, which has become much more frequent. We’ve broken heat records every summer since 2020 so all of that calls for more robust grid equipment to be replaced more frequently… so that’s one reason we have seen rates go up.”
Jeffrey says that cybersecurity and the costly infrastructure needed to prevent attacks to the grid is another reason that rates are rising.
Monford: “The grid – our portion of it – gets thousands of of cybersecurity attacks each day and so far we have been able to fend them off and all of that requires expensive equipment at every level.”
Southern California Edison has had a number of lawsuits brought against it in relation to wildfires in Southern California, with one of the latest settlements seeing SCE pay the United States $80 million dollars over the 2017 Thomas wildfire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that was sparked by their equipment. Other settlements include 63 million to LA County for the Woolsey fire which scorched more than 96,000 acres, destroyed 1,500 buildings and killed 3 people. Southern California Edison publicly acknowledged that its equipment was likely associated with the ignition of the fire, spurring the lawsuits.
A resident asked if SCE customers are shouldering the burden of paying for those wildfire settlements in the form of increased rates…
Jeffrey says those settlements are being paid in increments over a long period of time, and some of that is covered in the electricity rates. However, if you see a “Wildfire” line item on your bill…
Monford: “… which has to do with Wildfire Mitigation not lawsuits so it’s the investment in the grid that you’re seeing as a line item: the new covered conductors, the fire resistant poles, the rapid switches, these are all upgrades.
You can listen to the full interview below:
