What Does PG&E; Want?

This took place about a month or so ago. An elderly man in a snappy cap parked a faded blue pickup in front of the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. “customer center” in downtown Oakland. He scurried inside as fast as his frail legs could carry him, a man on a mission. He shouted over his shoulder that he couldn’t stop to talk just now. He needed to settle his monthly power bill before “they cut me off.”

A few minutes later, his business done, a decidedly more relaxed James Snowden returned to the sidewalk and told his story. He said he was 70 years old, a widower and retired auto parts salesman with a serious asthma condition. He described how the gas portion of his PG&E; bill had kept climbing higher and higher all through the winter.

“Now I am paying $124 this month, just for gas,” Snowden said, his voice rising, “for a one-bedroom apartment, and I’m the only one there, and I’m on a fixed income, with a full-time disability.”

He calmed himself down, shrugged.

“You just have to roll with the punches,” he said. “What else can you do? If you don’t pay it, they’ll cut you off. There ain’t no wait until next week with these people.”

On Friday, the ever helpful PG&E; showed the James Snowdens of California another way to deal with overdue power bills.

*

There were guards posted outside PG&E; headquarters, keeping out reporters and camera crews who had come to take a measure of the utility giant on the morning of its bankruptcy filing. Utility workers who ventured out to smoke a cigarette or run an errand were peppered with questions about the mood inside. Most answered with shrugs or shy, self-conscious smiles. The few who did talk stuck to the company line.

“This is the best thing for the company,” said Brenda Fisher, a 30-year employee in the payroll department. “The company is still going to go on.”

Yes, indeed. Those sensitive souls who might be inclined to lament the fall of a California giant--a power company with roots going back to the gas lights that brightened San Francisco’s mud streets in the Gold Rush days--would be well advised to save their teeth-gnashing and tears for the time being. The B-word does have an ominous ring to it, yet from a PG&E; perspective it simply boils down to this: The utility has benched its Sacramento lobbyists and replaced them with bankruptcy lawyers.

“The regulatory and political processes have failed us,” is how Robert D. Glynn Jr., the utility’s chairman, explained it, “and now we are turning to the court.”

The venue changes, but the game goes on. And for PG&E;, the object remains unaltered: Find a way to pass on to its customers, to the James Snowdens of California, every nickel of the billions in losses it has piled up since the state’s wonderful adventure in deregulation blew apart. Of course, PG&E; can make this position sound quite reasonable, especially when certain bits of history are not mentioned.

*

The utility, for example, would prefer not to revisit the fact that in the first few years of deregulation it raked in, by design, great gobs of money, as did Edison in Southern California. Collectively, California ratepayers like James Snowden forked over tens of billions of dollars to compensate the utilities for their so-called “stranded costs,” which is to say, for investments sunk into such items as nuclear plants unwittingly sited near earthquake fault lines. That sort of thing.

Not coincidentally, the utilities managed during those flush early days of deregulation to nurture whole new companies that now produce and market energy across the nation and globe. Their executives, however, become quite grumpy whenever it is suggested that these new and decidedly non-bankrupt firms might pitch in to help make the California utilities whole again. No, no. Firewalls must be honored, and all that.

They also dance an odd little two-step when it comes to gouging. Yes, the utilities will agree, those dreaded out-of-state generators have backed up the truck and, exploiting holes in California’s deregulation model, made out like bandits. Still, they don’t seem to believe it is their problem. Let the ratepayers take the hit, they insist. We’re merely innocent bystanders, pass-through victims.

However complicated the energy fiasco can seem at times, in one important way it’s quite simple. Whatever caused the train wreck--Texas energy pirates, Sacramento bungling, an unfounded faith in free market theory, or all the above--if PG&E; has its way, the James Snowdens of California eventually will be stuck with the bill. This is all that happened Friday: Utility executives, frustrated because Sacramento wouldn’t accommodate them in their quest quickly or thoroughly enough, decided to take their shot in court. There ain’t no wait until next week with these people.