Category: Energy

By Erik Anderson / KPBS / March 18, 2024

San Diego Gas & Electric is going up in March, just a month after the utility reported record profits for 2023. The rate hike eliminates some savings from an unexpected 11% cut in delivery charges in January. The delivery charges jump 8.7% in the March billing cycle and the average customer bill will increase about $8 a month.

“Customers are still benefiting in March 2024, about a 6% savings than what they were spending in March of 2023,” SDG&E’s Anthony Wagner said. The move comes after the investor-owned utility posted record profits during the last calendar year. Company profits in 2023 hit a new record of $936 million, $21

Please take a moment to reflect on Japan’s Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima 13 years later, billions spent, unchecked meltdowns persist while contamination abounds with no end in sight.

Please watch this 12 minute video made especially for this somber occasion, and remember that it could still happen here too, with 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste 100 feet from the ocean at sea level, in a tsunami zone.

Should San Diegans have our own municipal utility that would replace SDG&E?

The Power San Diego Campaign believes so.  They’ve launched a signature drive to get the question on the November ballot. On their website, the group claims SDG&E has the highest rates in the nation (although just recently, this has changed), that SDG&E profits are $1 million dollars a day from San Diego City alone, and that 25% of SDGE’s customer are behind on their bills.

From San Clemente Green

This is truly a race against time, but many potential victims remain unaware of the threat. In approving the coastal permit, the California Coastal Commission (CCC) put in a condition that requires Edison to evaluate sea level rise in 2035. We are asking the CCC to take the initiative and request an analysis for conditions that may require moving Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) to higher ground. The time has come, sooner than expected and we can’t afford to wait for another decade or more to pass. The planning must begin now. You can help by signing our petition here, which is already well underway. We can’t wait until 2035 to re-evaluate sea level rise, as the permit currently is written.

More than a thousand residents in San Diego County were without power Monday afternoon amid a powerful storm system that is moving through the county.

At least more than 5,000 residents were impacted by the outages in the following areas:

Ocean Beach
San Diego Airport
Paradise Hills
Skyline … and more

..

Fox5SanDiego – AP / Dec. 14, 2023

California energy regulators voted Thursday to allow the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant to operate for an additional five years, despite calls from environmental groups to shut it down. The California Public Utilities Commission agreed to extend the shutdown date for the state’s last functioning nuclear power facility through 2030 instead of closing it in 2025 as previously agreed.

On Sunday’s Union-Tribune front page, reporter Rob Nikolewski wrote how and why SDG&E is making more money than ever. But it’s a “subscriber only” piece, and we’re only providing the first few paragraphs of the report here:

San Diego Gas & Electric is a very different company than it was just a few years ago. Rates charged to the 3.7 million people the utility serves continue to rise in large part because California utilities — not just SDG&E — have additional responsibilities to shoulder.

But SDG&E is also making more money than ever.

The Power San Diego Campaign today published its initiative to replace SDGE in the City with a not-for-profit, publicly-owned electric utility. Signature gathering to qualify the initiative for the City’s November 2024 ballot will begin in December.

“This is a campaign for those tired of paying the nation’s highest electric rates, for those tired of paying to provide more than $1 million of profits every day pocketed by SDGE,” said Bill Powers, chairman of the ballot campaign. “It’s a campaign to cut utility bills and tap the enormous rooftop solar potential in our community. ”

By Rob Nikolewski / San Diego Union-Tribune / Nov. 16, 2023

While it may be difficult to see as drivers zoom past the two distinctive domes on the west side of Interstate 5, the dismantlement of the San Onofre nuclear power plant is more than 60 percent complete. “We’re just under two-thirds of the way through,” said Vince Bilovsky, director of the decommissioning project at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, known as SONGS for short. “We’re where we need to be.”

Demolition work on the eight-year, $4.7 billion project started in October 2020 and is scheduled to finish by the end of 2028.

By Leorah Gavidor / San Diego Reader / Nov. 7, 2023

Many San Diegans already know: we pay the highest electricity rates of any metro area in the nation. That’s an average of 47.5 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to the national average of 17 cents. One in four San Diego residents is behind on their energy bill. Meanwhile, SDG&E paid its top executive $10 million in 2020, and its parent company Sempra Energy paid its CEO $23 million. Rates are set to rise again in 2024.

Non-profit Power San Diego wants the city to fire SDG&E. “

There are certainly plenty of problems with a recent proposal by California electric companies to break up monthly charges by the amount of energy used and the income of the household.

SDG&E and other giant utility companies have submitted a joint proposal to the California Public Utilities Commission which outlined a fixed-rate restructuring based on household income. In short, higher income earners would be charged more than those who make less than them.

Yet, San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond — a conservative Republican who often appears on San Diego’s most right-wing  TV station – has called the proposal “socialism in its finest.”

From Press Statement:

The Public Power San Diego coalition will hold a mass FIRE SDGE! rally on April 1st, Noon, in Civic Center Plaza, downtown San Diego.

The event will be the first mass protest advocating a divorce from San Diego Gas & Electric, which charges the nation’s highest electric rates. “This rally signals a turning point.” said Craig Rose, a member of Public Power San Diego’s steering committee.