San Diego Electric Bills Heat Up With Weather
The last few days of sweltering heat have put electricity users in San Diego and southern Orange County in the hot seat--paying sizzling prices.
The 1.2 million electricity customers of San Diego Gas & Electric have not faced the unprecedented rolling blackouts that hit 97,000 homes and businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday. And temperatures in the SDG&E; territory have hovered only in the low to mid-70s.
But because the utility, a unit of Sempra Energy, was California’s first to remove its state-mandated rate freeze back on July 1, 1999, the area has been something of a free-market laboratory. And searing temperatures around the state have translated into soaring electricity rates, which users are seeing on their bills.
Under the 1998 restructuring of the state’s electricity industry, electricity is bought and sold in a market managed by the Pasadena-based California Power Exchange. Prices have been setting records this week, nearing $500 a megawatt-hour, more than 10 times normal levels.
Electricity customers in most of the state are still shielded from power price volatility by a rate freeze that extends until 2002 or when utilities pay off their transition costs for investments that became unprofitable under deregulation.
SDG&E; and the other big investor-owned utilities--Southern California Edison, a division of Edison International of Rosemead; and Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a unit of San Francisco-based PG&E; Corp.--were required to sell their power plants and relinquish control of their long-distance transmission lines. But SDG&E;’s plant sales were so lucrative that it was able to pay off its transition costs early and regulators allowed the company to end its rate freeze.
SDG&E; customers will not pay those high peak hourly prices but rather a blended price for the entire month including off-peak hours and cooler days, SDG&E; spokesman Doug Kline said.
“Obviously, the bills will go up,” although the utility cannot predict by how much, Kline said. The typical residential bill in San Diego was $50.31 for the monthly billing period ended April 2; it was $64.99 for the billing period ended June 11, he said.
SDG&E; launched a $1.1-million advertising campaign in early May to prepare customers for the summer price jumps, which they first experienced last summer. Bills last July and August were about 10% higher for a relatively mild summer than under the rate freeze.
Angry electricity consumers have been flooding the telephone lines of the Utility Consumers’ Action Network, said Jodi Beebe, hotline director for the San Diego-based consumer group. One electricity user complained that her latest bill showed electricity costing 6.8 cents a kilowatt hour, up from 3.8 cents the month before.
“I’m calling it the ‘heat line’ today,” Beebe said. “This is going to spread like wildfire around the state once the other utilities catch up with SDG&E.;”
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* FOG ROLLS INTO S.F.: Three-day heat wave breaks in San Francisco. A3
