AB 1167 (Berman & Addis) – Advances to the Governor’s Desk

Source: Communications Daily |

In a letter Tuesday in docket 26-120, the Rural County Representatives of California, the Utility Reform Network and Communications Workers of America repeated their arguments that AT&T’s wireless service for those customers isn't as reliable as their current service. The groups also said AT&T’s reliance on the national broadband map to prove the reliability of its service ignores flaws in the map.

A coalition of consumer advocacy organizations said this week that the FCC should review its prior automatic decision to approve AT&T’s request to discontinue copper wire service to 184,000 California customers. 

Source: Broadband Breakfast | By Kate Keith

The Utility Reform Network (TURN), joined by telecommunications experts and consumer advocacy groups,said Oct. 21 that California should not accept $1.42 billion in federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding without removing Condition 50.

Consumer advocates say a federal grant requirement could limit California’s oversight of broadband providers. California consumer advocates are urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to reject a federal broadband funding condition they say could limit the state’s ability to enforce consumer protections for internet and phone service.

Source: PIRG | By Jenn Engstrom

At the very least, the CPUC should reduce PG&E’s gas pipeline replacement spending proposal by 60% as suggested by The Utility Reform Network.

Utility companies should provide us with energy that is clean, safe, and reasonably priced.  Yet instead of making it easier for customers to choose safer, cleaner energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s biggest power company, is proposing to spend more than $3.8 billion on gas pipeline replacement over the next four years—the kind of infrastructure that, if we’re smart, California won’t need for much longer.

Source: KUCOIN |

The Utility Reform Network Executive Director Mark Toney expressed concern that remaining PG&E customers would absorb more grid maintenance costs, particularly wildfire expenses. PG&E distributes wildfire costs, including underground power lines, across the utility's entire customer base regardless of where the work occurs. 

San Francisco wants to acquire Pacific Gas & Electric's electricity grid within the city and supply residents directly. PG&E provided the utility's first valuation on Tuesday, seven years after San Francisco initially offered to buy the grid. PG&E valued the assets at $13.9 billion, roughly quadruple the city's $3.4 billion estimate from April. PG&E says San Francisco should pay an additional $8.6 billion for separating the grid and preventing rate increases for customers outside the city. Those estimates would put the total expense of establishing public power above San Francisco's entire annual budget.

Source: Politico | By Noah Baustin

“What I worry about is that the cost of maintaining the grid, particularly the wildfire costs, will be spread to the remaining customers [of PG&E],” said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a ratepayer advocacy group.  That’s why Toney wants the CPUC, while it’s developing its estimate for San Francisco, to avoid any potential shift of costs onto remaining customers. 

San Francisco wants to take control of Pacific Gas & Electric’s power grid in the city. The utility says that’ll cost residents an arm and a leg, and maybe their whole pocketbook too. Seven years after San Francisco first made an offer to PG&E to purchase its electricity grid so it could provide power to residents itself, the utility on Tuesday, for the first time, put a price tag on its electricity equipment and property.

Source: Mercury News | By George Avalos

Mark Toney is on a mission to keep electric and gas bills down. That decades-long goal has made the consumer advocate one of PG&E’s toughest critics and that of its utility siblings.  Since 2008, Toney has served as executive director of TURN,The Utility Reform Network. The post has put Toney in a unique position to challenge California’s biggest electric, gas and telephone companies.

 Overall, customers are worse off since the bankruptcy. There are upsides and downsides. One upside was AB 1054, which ensured that ratepayers could not be charged for damage from the 2017 and 2018 wildfires. (PG&E caused fatal wildfires in 2017 that destroyed large sections of the California Wine Country and also caused a deadly fire in 2018 known as the Camp Fire in Butte County that destroyed the town of Paradise.)

Source: Spectrum News | By Jamie Kennedy

The power needed for the center, sizeable to say the least, said assistant attorney at The Utility Reform Network, a utility watchdog organization, Elise Torres. “At 250 megawatts, it’s approximately the entire load of Marin County,” Torres said. “So that gives you a sense of the scale of just this one facility.”

The potential impact on electricity rates and who should pay for major grid upgrades are at the center of a California Public Utilities Commission review of an agreement between utility company PG&E and Google to connect a massive 250-megawatt data center in San Jose. 

Source: The Cool Down | By Leslie Satler

To consumer advocates, the change appears tied to mounting frustration over utility prices. Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, said, "I'd say we saw today a lot of evidence that Gov. Newsom has really prioritized affordability and accountability to an increased extent.”  

California's soaring electricity bills have made affordability a driving force in energy policy.  Gov. Gavin Newsom's latest move is a package of electricity-affordability bills built around home batteries and other smart devices that could help lower and reduce the need for gas-fired backup plants.

Source: Capitol Weekly | By Opinion by Mark Toney, Executive Director of TURN

SB 905 would help ensure utilities don’t get overpaid for work that already benefits the company by requiring the California Public Utilities Commission to examine whether the profit margins utilities earn on wildfire-related spending — like undergrounding power lines — are justified. This work already protects utilities from costly wildfire lawsuits, and that protection shouldn’t come with an extra reward: outsized profit margins billed to customers who are struggling to keep the lights on.

Electricity bills have skyrocketed over the past few years for residential and business customers of Pacific Gas & Electric, SoCal Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric — in large part because of the $40 billion customers have paid to cover California’s wildfire costs.  

Source: Canary Media | By Jeff St. John

Google and PG&E have been tussling with the Sierra Club, The Utility Reform Network, and others over how to allocate the cost of connecting that 250-MW ​“large load” to the utility transmission grid. The big issue? How much of that cost should be borne by PG&E customers at large versus by Google itself.

California has yet to take full advantage of rooftop solar, backup batteries, and other home devices to create virtual power plants (VPPs) that can help its stressed-out grid — even though it has more of those distributed energy resources than any other state.  Earlier this month, utility Pacific Gas & Electric launched its latest effort to improve on that poor record via an ambitious partnership with friendly neighborhood tech giant Google and pro-electrification nonprofit Rewiring America.