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Title: California electric bill shock: Private firms charge way more than public utilities
Source:
LA Times
URL Source: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/ ... -utilities-20150614-story.html
Published: Jun 15, 2015
Author: Jeff McDonald
Post Date: 2015-06-15 08:16:08 by Willie Green
Keywords: None
Views: 846
Comments: 8
In Sacramento, a family using 500 kilowatt hours of electricity last October was charged $58. Customers in Los Angeles, also served by a public utility district, paid $79. Pacific Gas & Electric charged $93 for the same amount of power. Southern California Edison billed customers $97. And San Diego Gas & Electric topped the Southern California Public Power Authority survey at $116 for 500 kilowatt hours. The comparison of rates charged by public and private electricity providers in California shows a notable discrepancy in the amounts customers pay for power, depending on where they live and which provider serves them. Especially for heavy users, bills are higher at the investor-owned utilities SDG&E, Edison and PG&E, overseen by the California Public Utilities Commission. The commission is required to make sure the rates are just and reasonable at the private utilities, and doesn’t oversee the municipal districts. The utilities commission, which is the subject of separate state and federal investigations into possible favoritism and back-channel communications with utility executives, says costs are higher at private companies, in part, because they operate under different rules. “There are federal and state regulatory requirements that apply to investor-owned utilities that do not apply to publicly owned utilities,” said Terrie Prosper, a commission spokeswoman. “Publicly owned utilities have access to very-low-cost federal preference power from federally operated dams that the investor-owned utilities do not have access to, and many publicly owned utilities have access to low-cost financing that makes their capital investments much less expensive.” Municipal utilities say their rates are lower because there is no profit margin and their revenue is reinvested into the public service.
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#1. To: Willie Green (#0)
The main and only purpose of the private enterprises is to squeeze as much money from the others as they can get away with.
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