Here's a headline in the Los Angeles Times today:
Southern California electric bills are soaring. Here’s why, and how to save money
There have been anecdotal reports that, for some consumers, bills have skyrocketed, even by hundreds of dollars. And Californians are looking for answers.
....In California, the driving force behind rate hikes is utilities recovering the cost of wildfire mitigation, transmission and distribution upgrades and rooftop solar incentives, according to a recent quarterly report by the California Public Utilities Commission’s Public Advocates Office.
Remember our first rule of journalism? Before you write a story, make sure it's actually true. Here are average electric rates in July for Los Angeles:
The cost of electricity has gone up in recent years, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's gone up this year. And it hasn't. It's gone down.
Anyway, it turns out the reason electricity bills are up this year is that it's been really hot and people are running their air conditioners a lot. That may be boring, but it has the virtue of being actually true.
Modern media, very much including but definitely not limited to major-city newspapers, do not consider informing their customers nearly as important as entertaining them, the "news" media via "infotainment," a melange of factoids combined into a narrative that is easy to follow, is designed to excite many people but offend very few if any, and often supports an agenda. They're not enhancing understanding; they're telling stories.
In this case, for whatever reason(s), the LATimes has decided to run yet another in the endless series of Inflation Is Killing Us. That it happens to run almost entirely counter to the, ahem, truth is of little import to them.
It doesn't help that a lot of journalists are innumerate. I don't know many people who went to journalism school, but know three who have said that one of the main reasons they did so was because there was no math requirement. The same problem plagues law schools.
One of the reasons why I have a Washington Post subscription, and will keep it no matter what happens to the rest of the paper, is the operation that Philip Bump and Aaron Blake run, which is extremely numerate. Bump is an interesting case. He was a philosophy major who later taught himself math and statistics after he went into journalism.
The article makes it pretty clear that they are talking about increases over the last few years. They also make it clear that higher temps and increased power usage play a big role in the increase over the last few years.
Pretending that they are only talking about one year is odd. Ignoring that they did mention weather and increased usage is.....intentionally misleading.
Poor look, reflects badly.
I mean, since the entire city of Los Angeles is DWP electricity, the actual price of electricity requires like ten seconds of research. Yes, it goes up. Every year like with every other utility.
I guess having the LA times read someone's bill isn't much of a story. Sheesh
Both San Diego and Los Angeles are covered by electric utilities that charge their residential customers under a Time Of Use plan. It means that electric rates might be cheap or expensive, depending entirely on what time of day you use it. The most common plans charge the highest rates from 4-9PM, which is the same hours that most people run their AC.
The BLS chart that Kevin links to doesn't get into this, it just shows what I presume is an average rate, total dollars on people's bills divided by total kW-hrs consumed. There are many factors that could make this average rate go up or down, including the utilities simply tweaking the different TOU rates. But I agree that the likeliest culprit is hotter weather and more AC use.
Yeah, I was wondering how TOU might figure into this.
Hmmm, maybe Kevin made a rare mistake?
"Los Angeles" is not "Southern California".
Residents of Los Angeles are served by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. LADWP's electricity rates are not skyrocketing. I suspect that the data in Kevin's chart are for LADWP.
Residents of the LA area, but not in the City itself, are served mostly by Southern California Edison, whose rates are increasing much faster than inflation.
Why the difference? It's partly luck. SCE has high costs for wildfire mitigation because some of its customers live in the urban/wild-land interface around LA. And SCE has several transmission and distribution lines through high-fire areas north of LA, which need upgrades. LADWP has fewer customers in the urban/wild-land interface. Most of its transmission lines cross areas of desert from Nevada and Arizona, not high-fire areas.
(To add to the complexity: Customers of SCE pay a rate/kWh for use of SCE's wires, and an additional rate/kWh to an electricity wholesaler, which could be SCE but frequently is another entity (a "Community Choice Aggregator", in the industry jargon).. To get an average TOTAL rate/kWh, e.g., to see if it is rising faster than inflation, it's necessary to add the SCE rate and the rate charged by the wholesaler.)
Cost per kWh
My bill has the charge for electricity USED - and a "Line Charge" - which is intended to cover the cost of the network
I wonder if the "Line Charges" have gone up rather than the cost per kWh
In the Bay Area we are “served” by PG&E. I don’t have a bill now to confirm this, but on the last bill I saw we paid a charge per kWH for the electricity and we were charged a “delivery” fee. So even though I selected to have our electricity sourced from somewhere else and pay them something like 25 cents per kWH we are also charged a delivery fee of something like 35 cents per kWH. It may be that in LA they are paying new or increased delivery rates that aren’t reflected in the base energy cost.
In other words, both things could be true; the electric rate itself hasn’t gone up but the bills charged to end users have gone up a lot.
(After rebuilding out home I installed ~9kW of solar so we no longer get a PG&E bill.)
In South Carolina we occasionally see articles or hear some politician spout off about how we have the highest electric bills in the country. That could be true, but it doesn't consider that the summers are very hot and the winters will be chilly at times. It doesn't consider that relatively few people use anything other than electricity for heating, cooling, cooking, and hot water. Nor does it consider the very large percentage of people in poorly insulated homes. Many of them are in house trailers.
But God we'd be in trouble if the cost of electricity was 28 cent/kw-hr. I recently paid my July bill and it works out to 11.73 cents/kw-hr. I'm on a co-op so every fall I get a check that represents a refund of capital credits. (That's what it says. I've no idea what it means.) It's about half a typical monthly bill and a rough calculation indicates it drops my effective rate to a bit over 11 cents/kw-hr.
The state's politicians are mostly useless shit-heads, but the vast majority of them were leery of electric utility deregulation and it never happened here. How much does that figure into California's rates?
I'm in LA County but not LA and I have SCE as my electricity provider. I have seen my bill double over the past year, and I do not have air conditioning!!
Kevin is here to assure you that you are wrong. He even drew a chart that represents the TRUTH. If you think your bill has soared over the last few years, be assured that it has not. We have seen the simple TRUTH.
It would be usefully informative if you could show one of your electric bills from a year ago, and another one more recent so everyone could see why your bill doubled. SCE has certainly not doubled their rates, not even close to that. Are you using more energy overall? Our has your energy use shifted from cheap to expensive times under the TOU plan? I'm really asking.
You know, adjusted for inflation means nominally, those increases in 2023 were huge.
But you should be cautious about your point. BLS' data is from July, right after a temporary decrease went into effect. And if you look at the PUC's own report, it's nothing like what you're representing. In the last 3 years, rates have increased 51% in SCE and PG&E areas, and 100% over the decade.
You're too quick to find the answer that confirms your bias rather than to keep looking.
Kevins own carefully selected chart also shows large increases. He simply insists that these large increases are not actually large increases if you only focus on the last 12 months and forget that his point is that power costs per KWH have not increased because other costs have also increased.
This is bizarre misinformation. FoxNews level stuff.
It would be interesting to try to track "peak to article" time for various things like this - what the time spread is between hitting max(something) and when the first article about it drops.
I'm not sure exactly what it would tell us, but it would be a new variable to talk about, and (among other things) tracking the on-the-ground behavior of the media is both getting easier and more important as the shape of the industry changes.
I rather suspect there are a lot of ProPublica-type articles to be written on the line between paid PR and "news".
Meanwhile, because of obscure regulatory practices, my SoCalGas account has had a negative balance for the last year or two (meaning I haven't paid them a bill in about a year or two).