Source: KCBX | By Kendra Hanna

Mark Toney is the executive director of The Utility Reform Network. He said the new rate is only a little higher than what he had hoped, but that rate decrease is negligible next to the amount spent on expensive projects like PG&E burying their power lines. Toney still expects that customers’ monthly bills will continue to go up.

The commission that regulates California’s utilities just approved a lower investor return rate for the next two years. That can affect costs to customers, but it’s not clear if it will reduce their monthly bills. Pacific Gas and Electric, or PG&E, will have to compensate investors for infrastructure projects at this new, lower rate. It’s now set to just under 10% — lower than what PG&E requested, and the lowest rate since 2006.

Source: The Mercury News | By George Avalos

The Utility Reform Network also disagreed with the decision because the PUC didn’t sufficiently reduce PG&E’s rate of return.  “Revising the decision in favor of utility shareholders is more than just buckling under pressure from PG&E and other major utilities,” TURN Executive Director Mark Toney said. “It is part of a disturbing pattern of commissioners disregarding proposals to address the affordability crisis.” Toney urged state politicians to step in and help utility customers.  “This is a clear sign that the Legislature needs to take more action to address the affordability crisis, because the CPUC has failed to do so,” Toney said.

State regulators Thursday reined in the profit returns that shareholders of PG&E and other utility providers can harvest, a decision that failed to quell a debate over whether customers can easily afford to pay their monthly electric and gas bills.  The state Public Utilities Commission voted 4-1 to approve slightly lower rates of return for shareholders starting in 2026 compared to current levels.

Source: The San Diego Union Tribune | By Rob Nikolewski

“Revising the cost of capital decision in favor of utility shareholders is more than just buckling under pressure from PG&E and other major utilities,” TURN executive director Mark Toney said.  “It is part of a disturbing pattern of commissioners disregarding proposals to address the affordability crisis issued by their own judges and staff, based upon evidence presented by all parties in ratemaking cases. This is a clear sign that the Legislature needs to take more action to address the affordability crisis, because the CPUC has failed to do so."

The California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday trimmed the rates of profit that investor-owned utilities such as San Diego Gas & Electric will make on their energy infrastructure projects — although consumer and environmental groups said the CPUC’s reductions should have cut deeper.  

Source: Politico | By Noah Baustin

Mark Toney, executive director of affordability group The Utility Reform Network, said in an interview that the small drop in the return on equity won’t make up for other major CPUC approvals of capital spending to reduce wildfire risk on the grid, which will have the overall effect of increasing ratepayer costs in the long run. “The CPUC giveth with one hand, they taketh away with another hand, and that’s what’s happening right now,” Toney said, expressing frustration with the agency’s utility-friendly decision on a recent major wildfire resilience investment decision.

THREADING THE NEEDLE: California energy regulators tried hard to capture the in-vogue affordability rhetoric as they marginally cut the profit rate that investor-owned utilities will be allowed to pass onto their shareholders in 2026. But they’re playing to a tough crowd: Everyone from investment bankers to affordability hawks ended up bashing their final decision.  

Source: The Orange County Register | By Teri Sforza

“What the CPUC giveth with one hand, they taketh away with the other,” said Mark Toney, executive director of the consumer advocacy group TURN, The Utility Reform Network.  People pay a lot of attention to the ROE percentages the utilities can collect — ooo! they’re going down! — but that misses the forest for the trees, TURN’s Toney suggested. “When you’re financing a home, you want to know, ‘What’s my monthly payment?’ ” he said. “The two things that impact that are — yes, the interest rate on your mortgage — but, much more importantly, the price of your house.”  In this analogy, the amount of money utilities borrow for capital projects equates to the price of the house. “It’s the same thing with people’s monthly bills. They’re more impacted by how much is being financed,” Toney said. “I get frustrated because there’s so much media on the percentage, while utilities are allowed to bloat their capital costs. So the reduction in the percentage — don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing — is going to be more than offset by how much is being financed.”

As our electric bills continue their skyward ascent, a question crackles like lightning over regulators’ heads: how much profit should the big utilities be allowed to make? The California Public Utilities Commission wrestled with that lightning on Thursday. In the end, commissioners gave the utilities less than they asked for, and less than they got the year before, but way more than what consumer advocates believe they should get.

Source: Politico | By Noah Austin

That frustrated affordability advocates at The Utility Reform Network. “This is the CPUC caving to the utilities,” said TURN Executive Director Mark Toney in an interview.

California utilities scored a major victory Wednesday to the dismay of affordability advocates, with regulators stripping a key element energy companies disliked from a proposed power line undergrounding program.  

Source: NRDC | By Jordan Brinn

NRDC and The Utility Reform Network submitted an electric rate design proposal to the California Public Utilities Commission to promote equity and encourage beneficial electrification. This is the first stage in a regulatory process to implement income-based fixed charges.  This proposal helped California regulators figure out how to confidently plan and pay for grid upgrades when the future is inherently uncertain, providing other states with a road map. Although the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) gets some things right with this decision, the ways in which it deviates from the NRDC proposal increases the risk of imprudent utility spending.

Planning the electric grid used to be much easier because utilities had a reasonable idea of where electricity demand would grow, when it would grow, and by how much. Electrification, a key strategy to decarbonizing California’s economy, has made distribution grid planning much more complicated because it is now harder to accurately predict how electricity demand will grow and what investments are necessary to support a reliable grid. 

Source: KQED | By Laura Klivans

There are real barriers to seeking help for high utility bills, said Constance Slider Pierre, who oversees The Utility Reform Network’s consumer hotline. Barriers include speaking limited English, confusion over how to read bills, and difficulty reaching customer service representatives, Slider Pierre said.  

For three days last December, when Kenya Brown’s youngest four kids weren’t in school, they spent their time at her oldest son’s apartment. They did their homework, charged their phones, showered and had dinner.  The children returned to the family home only to sleep;the house was dark and cold. Their utilities had been shut off — no heat, no lights, no hot water, no gas for cooking; Brown hadn’t paid the bill in months.  Brown’s bills are like many others in California: high, especially in recent years. 

Source: CalMatters Live | By Alejandro Lazo

Mark: “TURN is a consumer advocacy organization that fights for the customers of the investor-owned utilities.  We believe in the cleanest, safest energy at the most affordable price so we say we want the most green for the least green.  One of our major concerns is the affordability crisis and PG&E’s residential bills have doubled in five years.  We want to make sure that with this affordability crisis that the growth of data centers doesn’t end up with even more skyrocketing bills.  There certainly needs to be more transparency when it comes to data center energy usage.

As California races to break its dependence on fossil fuels and expand clean energy, a new power player is emerging: data centers. Driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, these energy-hungry facilities are reshaping the state’s electricity landscape. 

Source: Communications Daily | By Matt Daneman

The FCC order will increase phone service costs for hundreds of thousands of low-income Californians, the Utility Reform Network (TURN) emailed us. It noted that since the 1980s, the state has operated its own Lifeline program, which is exclusively funded by California customers and provides discounts on the monthly phone bills of low-income households. AB-1303 gives the CPUC "the flexibility to ensure that all eligible households can apply for California Lifeline," TURN said. It also gives consumers "more control over who their data is shared with.”

A state law barring the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) from sharing information about Lifeline program subscribers with other government agencies, including immigration authorities, means the state can no longer do its own Lifeline subscriber verifications, according to the FCC. The Wireline Bureau ordered Thursday that the state could no longer opt out of using the National Lifeline Accountability Database (NLAD) federal verification system. "Going forward, federal processes will be used to conduct eligibility verifications and perform duplicate checks for federal Lifeline program applicants in California.”

Source: ABC7 KGO-TV | By Dustn Dorsey

But Lee Trotman, Community Director at The Utility Reform Network (TURN) says that burying the lines is the most expensive option, and that other less expensive options such as covered conductors and insulating wires is more cost-effective and also reduces wildfire risk.  Raising rates by using the most expensive option to mitigate wildfire risk is another cost that ratepayers will bear if PG&E has their way.  

According to PG&E, it has buried over 1,000 miles of lines in high risk areas and the plan is to bury 3,000 more.  Claiming that burying the lines almost eliminates the risk of wildfire at a cost of $3 million per mile, PG&E is expected to raise rates to cover these costs.  

Source: Broadband Breakfast | By Jericho Casper

In a statement issued Thursday, telecom and regulatory attorney for TURN Alexandra Green said the FCC’s decision will force low-income Californians to go through two separate eligibility checks, one for the state program and one for the federal, a change the group argues will add bureaucracy and ultimately raise the cost of phone service for hundreds of thousands of households. “The FCC’s decision to no longer trust California to do its own eligibility verification means that customers will have to be separately reviewed by each program,” Green said.  “The federal government's political disdain for California seems to be the driving force behind this order, which will only result in increasing the cost of phone service in both rural and urban areas,” she added.

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday revoked California’s authority to run its own eligibility and verification system for the federal Lifeline program.  In an order issued by Wireline Competition Bureau chief Joseph Calascione, the FCC said California law AB 1303 has made it “effectively impossible” for the program’s administrator to comply with federal Lifeline operations and integrity obligations.

Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune | By Rob Nikolewski

“We do think (reducing the return from 10.23% to 9.88% is) a step in the right direction, but so much more needs to be done in terms of affordability,” said Mark Toney, executive director at The Utility Reform Network (TURN),  the Oakland-based organization that frequently weighs in on CPUC matters. TURN called for a return on equity of 9.5% for SDG&E. Toney emphasized that while the percentages that utilities earn are important, another crucial factor is the accumulated costs that power companies spend on expensive projects that get passed to ratepayers. And the the CPUC has final approval on whether those projects get the green light. 

Investor-owned utilities in California — including San Diego Gas & Electric — will earn smaller rates of profit on their infrastructure projects next year under a proposed decision that will soon go before the five voting members of the California Public Utilities Commission.  

In SDG&E’s case, what’s called the utility’s “return on equity” would drop from 10.23% in 2026 to 9.88% under the figures released late last week. It’s difficult to say what the lower rate would mean for the monthly bills that SDG&E customers pay, but the pending vote comes at a time when high rates have become a major concern across California and in the San Diego area in particular.

Source: Lake County News | By Little Hoover

Witnesses will include Elise Torres, energy team assistant managing attorney, The Utility Reform Network, or TURN; Liang Min, managing director of Bits & Watts Initiative, Precourt Institute for Energy [Stanford University]; Linda Taub Gordon, climate researcher and supervising attorney, UC Berkeley Human Rights Center; Masheika Allgood, founder, AllAI Consulting LLC; and Natalie Mims Frick, department leader and energy policy researcher, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Members of the public will have the opportunity to make comment at the end of the hearing. If you would like to make a public comment please use the "raise hand" feature in Zoom or email LittleHoover@lhc.ca.gov with your question and the phone number from which you joined the hearing.

The Little Hoover Commission invites the public to join them on Thursday, Nov. 20, at 2 p.m. for a hearing on data centers and California electricity policy.  This hearing will focus on framing the landscape around data centers and California's electricity system, and will feature expert testimony from academic, technological, ratepayer, energy and environmental perspectives.

Source: Legal Planet | By Elias Van Emmerick

Emmett Institute's Denise Grab, a clean energy expert, wrote at the time that “when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.” Grab, who heads UCLA Law’s E-CELL project, was not alone in this assessment: NRDC, Sierra Club, The Utility Reform Network (TURN), and Cal Advocates all pushed for a discrete cohort of priority decarbonization zones.  

Here’s something to celebrate: the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) released its proposed decision designating initial priority neighborhood decarbonization zones.  SB 1221 is a law passed last fall that allows the CPUC to support “neighborhood decarbonization zones” to transition away from natural gas toward zero-emissions alternatives. Phasing out natural gas in favor of electrified alternatives is a vital step toward California’s ambitious decarbonization goals.

Source: Politico | By Noah Baustin

Undergrounding-happy utilities aren’t happy with the math.  “That method of calculating the [benefit cost ratio] is very disadvantageous to undergrounding,” said Matt Pender, Pacific Gas & Electric’s vice president of undergrounding and system hardening.  It wouldn’t be able to do that under the California Public Utilities Commission’s proposed ratio, which would pencil out for only about a third of those miles, he said.

GROUND RULES: Just about everyone agrees that burying power lines underground would be the best way for utilities to reduce wildfire risk. The only problem: It’s too expensive. California regulators are set to vote Thursday on a new rule to govern how utilities reduce the risk of their equipment sparking wildfires. It would set a cost-benefit ratio for utilities to calculate when it makes sense to spend money on undergrounding versus cheaper methods like tree-trimming and insulating above-ground lines.  

Source: CalMatters | By Alejandro Lazo

Mark Toney, who leads The Utility Reform Network and supported the transparency measure, has questioned whether data centers justify the costs they’re pushing onto ratepayers.  He warned of the centers’ “voracious consumption of energy and water, increased carbon emissions, and jacking up ratepayer bills.” 

California is a major hub for data centers — the facilities that store and transmit much of the internet. But just how much these power-hungry operations affect the state’s energy use, climate and public health remains an open question for researchers.  A new report released this week by the environmental think tank Next 10 and a UC Riverside researcher attempts to quantify that impact — but its authors say the report is only an estimate without harder data from the centers themselves.

Source: CalMatters | By Yue Stella Yu and Malena Carollo

AT&T’s real goal is to boost its bottom line, said Regina Costa, a Hacienda resident and telecom policy director for The Utility Reform Network, which led opposition to the bill.

Upon hearing her husband’s call for help, Cynthia Halliday came flying upstairs. He was rushing toward the outdoor deck, gasping for air. He was having a heart attack. Halliday held him and dialed 911 with her cellphone. The dispatcher answered, but within seconds, she said, the call disconnected due to poor reception. Halliday screamed for help, loud enough for her next-door neighbor Larry Williams to hear and dial from his copper landline. This time, it got through.

Source: Fox26 News | By Mayra Franco

Not everyone agrees with PG&E’s optimistic outlook.  Consumer advocates say the rate increase could still hit families hard over time.  Mark Toney, with The Utility Reform Network said, "In the past six or seven years, PG&E bills have already doubled. They've already gone up 100%.” He adds," This rate case is not just about 2027. It's about 27, 28, 29, and 30. At the end of 2030, if this is approved, the bills will be $42 a month higher or $500 a year higher.”  Toney urges residents to attend the hearings saying, "It is incredibly important for you to show up and say, no on this rate increase."

PG&E is giving customers a chance to weigh in on its latest proposal to raise electricity rates by 3.6%, but the company says you might not even notice the change.  State rules require PG&E to file a General Rate Case every four years. This process determines how much customers will pay on their bills over the next several years. The company submitted it to CPUC back in May.  For the first time in a while, customers can speak directly to PG&E about the proposed changes. 

Source: Canary Media Live Berkeley | By Julian Spector

Mark: I really appreciate being invited by Canary Media and being part of this conversation.  TURN fights for the cleanest energy at the lowest prices.  I like to say we want the most green for the least green and this is important because affordability and clean energy  need to go hand in hand.  We have to resist the people that want to split them apart and say “you either have to choose affordable and dirty or clean and expensive" and at TURN we reject that.  We fight for clean and affordable together!  These are absolutely some of the most trying times that many of us have seen in our lifetimes when it comes to all the attacks on clean energy policies.  When it comes to utility bills skyrocketing, and yet there is and are many glimmers of hope.

Canary Media is a nonprofit news organization focusing on the transition to clean energy and climate challenges.  On November 6th 2025 the Canary Media Live event in Berkeley was streamed live and Executive Director of TURN Mark Toney was interviewed by host Julian Spector.