PG&E residential customers face higher monthly bills in October, an increase due to arrive just weeks after the utility’s bills jumped on Sept. 1, serving a fresh jolt to the company’s ratepayers.
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Customers will pay more for PG&E with the October billing cycle, primarily due to higher charges for electricity services. This unwelcome increase arrives on the heels of a September jump largely fueled by higher costs for the utility’s natural gas services.
Here are the details for the average monthly bill that a typical PG&E residential customer can expect to pay starting Oct. 1:
— PG&E residential customers with combined electricity and gas services will pay $287 a month, which would be $6 above the Sept. 1 average bill of $281.
— Electricity services are slated to average $212 a month, or $6 above the Sept. 1 cost of $206 for the electricity component of the average bill.
— Natural gas costs will remain at $75 a month. However, the monthly cost of the PG&E bill’s gas component rose $6 in September, up from $69 in August.
These figures represent the average monthly costs for a typical customer. The actual change in monthly bills will depend on an individual customer’s usage.
Oakland-based PG&E said it needed the increased revenue from higher bills to help the utility cover costs related to wildfires and winter storms.
Those costs prompted PG&E to seek approval from the Public Utilities Commission for the higher monthly bills starting in October. The PUC agreed to the increase on Sept. 12.
“The 2023 Wildfire Mitigation and Catastrophic Events application was submitted to recover a portion of the costs associated with wildfire safety work and response to the historic storms of the winter 2022-2023,” PG&E stated.
The utility stated that its responses to the winter storms were wide-ranging.
PG&E said it restored power to more than 7 million customers. The utility mobilized over 7,200 personnel to replace or repair more than 4,500 poles and 850 miles of wire, PG&E stated in the emailed comments.
Some of the sting of the back-to-back increases in PG&E bills was eased because starting on July 1, the utility temporarily cut rates during the summer by roughly $20 a month.
PG&E is facing criticism primarily because the utility’s residential service charges have climbed steadily in recent years.
in 2023, PG&E’s monthly bills for residential customers soared 22.3%. Over the same 12 months, the Bay Area inflation rate rose 2.6%.
Put another way, PG&E bills for combined electricity and gas services rose eight times faster than the overall rise in Bay Area consumer prices.
In April, PG&E Chief Executive Officer Patricia Poppe, during an impromptu interview with this news organization, said she believes PG&E customers can expect lower monthly bills on a sustained basis — which would be a dramatic turnaround from the recent pattern of steadily rising utility costs.
“We see a future where customers’ bills can start to come down,” Poppe said in the interview.
Poppe believes PG&E can find ways to accomplish intricate cost controls, widen technology deployment and improve safety measures, all of which could lead to lower bills.
Last year, PG&E reduced operating costs by $510 million. PG&E aims to reduce costs by up to $1 billion in 2024.
The utility behemoth hopes to rein in monthly bills so that the annual increase in customer charges closely matches the Bay Area’s typical yearly inflation rate.
“PG&E is working to stabilize bills and limit average annual combined gas and electric bill increases to no more than 3% through 2026,” PG&E stated.
