Meters or rate hike? PG&E explains soaring energy bills
| Saturday, Oct 03 2009 12:00 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Oct 03 2009 12:00 PM
PG&E's "answer centers" are to be open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday at the Marriott, 801 Truxtun Ave.
A hearing called by state Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, to look at the causes of recent high power bills is set to begin at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Kern County Board of Supervisors' chambers on the first floor of the Kern County Administrative Center, 1115 Truxtun Ave.
PG&E's 24-hour customer service number is 800-PGE-5000. People can also log onto pge.com and click on Contact Us at the top right of the page, which will take them to a form that allows e-mail communication. PG&E also offers customer support lines in languages other than English.
Spanish: http://pge.com/espanol 800-660-6789
TDD/TTY (speech/hearing-impaired) 800-652-4712
Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf and Other Language Services: http://pge.com/myhome/customerservice/other/languageservices/index.shtml
TURN (The Utility Reform Network) is a consumer group that advocates on behalf of the state's utility ratepayers. It has a Web site at http://www.turn.org. Its main phone number is 415-929-8876
The California Public Utilities Commission regulates PG&E and other utilities in the state. Its Web site is www.cpuc.ca.gov/puc. Its main phone number is 415-703-2782.
Images
Henry A. Barrios / The Californian PG&E customer relations consultant explains the tier system of billing to Gil Lalonde, left, and Earlene Naylor who went to the Marriot at the Convention Center in Bakersfield where PG&E booked space to inform the public on billing and the SMART Meter. "They misspelled the word "tier" it should have been "tears" Lelonde later teased. The couple acknowledged they had learned a lot at the meeting.
Henry A. Barrios / The Californian "I'm not as pissed off as I was when I came in here because I've been educated," said Gil Lalonde, right, who along with Earlene Naylor, left, went to the Marriott at the Convention Center in Bakersfield where PG&E booked space to inform the public on billing and the SMART Meter. "I don't like what they are doing" he continued. The couple agreed that they were leaving better informed. At center is Lena Lopez, customer relations manager for PG&E.
Agueda Serrano still doesn't buy it.
The 71-year-old Bakersfield resident showed up early to the "answer centers" that Pacific Gas and Electric Co. set up at a downtown hotel Friday to help people understand why their electricity bills shot up this summer.
Serrano listened to a PG&E representative explain that her July bill of $222.20 (it was only $55.52 in April) was the result of a rate increase earlier this year -- not the fault of an upgraded SmartMeter the company recently had installed at her house.
"The answer's not satisfactory," said Serrano, who lives on a fixed income and tried everything she could to save power this summer.
"It had to be the meter. It had to be. What else could it be?" she asked.
Serrano's disbelief is fairly widespread in Bakersfield these days. And that presents a tricky challenge for PG&E, one that the company now wishes it had done more to head off before it became the subject of what promises to be a heated senate hearing in town Monday night.
The company's explanation actually makes a lot of sense: Many local customers' reported power usage, including Serrano's, hasn't increased by much; it's their bills that have soared over the last three months. That would suggest an increase in price, not necessarily faulty meters.
But timing appears to have weighed against PG&E's battle for public opinion, as have technological missteps.
In many cases, upgraded meters were installed across Bakersfield at about the same time as temperatures rose in July. That meant customers were turning on their air-conditioning units and getting hit with the effects of the rate increase right as they were asking themselves why they needed a new meter.
Even the politician who called Monday's hearing, state Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, concedes that he does not know whether the high bills can be blamed on PG&E and its SmartMeters, or on rate increases approved by the state Public Utilities Commission.
In January and then again in March, the commission consented to PG&E's requests to raise rates by a total of about 8 percent. The increases were to cover costs associated with system maintenance and the replacement of electricity purchasing contracts made by another agency during the energy crisis of 2000-01.
The way the rate increases were structured, PG&E customers who use 130 percent or less of the area's "baseline" usage level saw a slight decrease in the price of the power they use.
But customers who use more than that -- for example, people with large homes or second refrigerators or big families -- in many cases experienced noticeable price increases.
Those customers who used 131 percent to 200 percent of the baseline over the course of a 30-day billing period saw their per-kilowatt-hour rate jump by about 15 percent. Customers using 201 percent to 300 percent of baseline had to pay about 21 percent more. Those using more than three times the baseline amount were hit with a 23 percent increase.
According to this formula, customers' summer bills could be expected to rise significantly over their level in the spring when it was cooler. They probably paid more than they did the year before, as well.
Also, PG&E points out, Bakersfield had 17 days that peaked above 100 degrees in July. In July of last year, it says, there were only six days above 100 degrees.
And so the question arises: How were Bakersfield-area customers warned of the expected increases so that they could adjust their use of electricity and also save money for the likelihood of higher bills?
Apparently, local ratepayers got a single note in their electric bill back in March, company representatives said. They acknowledge that may have been too little.
"Probably not enough" was done to prepare people, Bakersfield-based PG&E spokesman Denny Boyles said.
More should have been done, said Mindy Spatt, spokeswoman for The Utility Reform Network, a San Francisco-based organization that advocates on behalf of California's utility customers.
"I don't think that consumers necessarily read inserts," she said, adding that the company should have spent more time and money helping customers understand the rate change.
Another local PG&E representative, service and sales manager Terry Scott, suggested that recent high bills could have been avoided if the Bakersfield area had a higher, more reasonable baseline.
Baselines are determined to be 50 percent to 60 percent of the region's average residential usage, although the utilities commission has the authority to make adjustments.
Scott said that because of local disparities in power use, it may be time to change the baseline of the region that covers Bakersfield, western Kern and reaches into Tulare and Kings counties. Specifically, he said, many people in the area live in condos or other relatively small homes, or they use evaporative coolers (also called swamp coolers), which drag down the average usage and makes power expensive for people with air conditioning.
The baseline is "way too low," Scott said. "We need a larger baseline amount."
But some customers are more worried about the SmartMeters than they are about baselines and rate increases. They see no evidence that the meters are helping them save money, as PG&E assures them is the reason for a system estimated to cost customers $2.2 billion statewide.
SmartMeters are designed to help customers monitor their use of electricity. The devices also can be used in conjunction with a billing program that allows people to save money if they reduce their use of power during peak consumption.
Flaws within the SmartMeter system and suspicions of technical glitches such as ceiling fans going off and on for no apparent reason add to customers' skepticism.
A SmartMeter problem that PG&E acknowledged earlier this year related to misleading information sometimes showing up online. After the power went out in one part of town, some customers checked to see what their SmartMeters were reporting, and were surprised to see online that their use of electricity had supposedly increased during the outage.
PG&E officials said the problem had to do with estimated use: The original SmartMeters installed in Bakersfield starting in 2006 had limited signal capacity. When no signal was sent, such as during a power outage, the system provided an estimate based on the customer's past use or that of neighbors. The company emphasized that the problem had no effect on customers' bills, and that the upgraded devices installed earlier this year have greater signal capacity that reduces the chance of estimated use.
Bakersfield resident Gil Lalonde was among the meter skeptics until Friday. That's when he went to PG&E's answer centers looking for an explanation as to why his bill doubled from July 2008 to July 2009.
The answer he got satisfied him: Electricity rates increased, and Bakersfield had a spate of hot days.
"I'm not as pissed off as I was when I came in here," Lalonde said as he exited the building. "Because I've been educated."
