Edison Rates to Rise 5% in April

Average rates charged to Southern California Edison Co.’s 4.6 million electricity customers will jump about 5% next month, with the biggest share of the increase falling on residential customers, according to a pair of decisions issued by the state Public Utilities Commission on Thursday.

Beginning April 14, residential ratepayers who use more than 350 kilowatt hours per month -- about 60% of the total -- should see their bills go up by 7% to 8%, adding about $5 to their monthly bill, Edison said.

Small and large commercial users should get hit with only a 1.5% increase, while rates for industrial customers are scheduled to rise by 4%, Edison said.

The estimated 40% of residential users who keep consumption below 350 kilowatts per month will see no increase in their electric bills, said John Fielder, Edison’s senior vice president for regulatory affairs.

Ratepayer advocates said they understood why Edison, the state’s second-largest investor-owned utility, asked for the higher prices. However, they were miffed that the increase primarily would hit residential users.

“This sounds like it will pretty much wipe out the one reduction we’ve gotten” since the energy crisis, said Mike Florio, an attorney for the Utility Reform Network, a San Francisco-based ratepayers’ advocacy group. He noted that residential customers got a 7.5% rate reduction in 2003.

Edison, a unit of Rosemead-based Edison International that serves much of Southern California outside the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego, blamed the increase on a combination of factors. These include higher natural gas costs and contracts with independent power generators to ensure that the lights will stay on during summertime surges in demand.

Prices for natural gas, the fuel of choice for most California electricity generating plants, are expected to continue trending upward. Natural gas, mainly imported from Texas and the Rocky Mountain region, has more than doubled in price since January 2002.

Edison said it also pegged about half of the projected price hike to a new requirement from the PUC and the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that utilities make sure they have enough reserve capacity to meet 115% of peak demand. The company already has begun to sign contracts for the extra power capacity, even though the deadline for securing the higher reserves doesn’t hit until 2006.