Caroline Petrow-Cohen
6 min read
In This Article:
As Southern California Edison faces scrutiny over the role its equipment may have played in sparking the deadly Eaton fire, the utility giant is facing some pushback from ratepayers over plans to seek another increase in electricity rates.
The California Public Utilities Commission is expected to make a decision this summer on Edison’s request to raise rates by 10% in order to pay for wildfire mitigation and cover “reasonable costs of its operations, facilities [and] infrastructure,” the request filing said.
If approved, the rate hike would mean an $18 average increase in monthly electrical bills for Edison’s 15 million customers.
Read more: Edison says dormant powerline is a leading theory for cause of Eaton fire
Although Edison filed its rate request before the fires, the timing doesn't sit well with some Edison customers, especially for survivors of the Eaton fire that destroyed swaths of Altadena during a series of historical Southern California wildfires in January.
The Eaton fire killed at least 18 people and burned more than 14,000 acres. The cause of the blaze has not been determined, but the company has acknowledged that it may have been sparked by a faulty dormant power line operated by Edison.
"There's definitely a great deal of resentment and anger," said Eaton fire survivor Rossana Valverde, who lived 300 yards from the Edison transmission tower where the fire may have begun.
Valverde's home is still standing, but she says it sustained heavy smoke damage and is filled with high levels of arsenic, asbestos and other harmful toxins from the fire.
"I think Edison has a tremendous amount of nerve to ask for more money right now when they won't even take responsibility."
Northwest Altadena resident Marisol Espino, whose home where she and six family members lived was lost to the fire, also is angry over Edison's proposed rate increase.
"We paid in our suffering, we paid in our displacement, we paid in our trauma and in our pain," Espino said. "Haven't we paid enough?"
Consumer advocates contend that Edison customers already are facing high bills.
"All rate increases have a significant effect on consumers because you're paying more for something that you paid less for before," said Lee Trotman, spokesman for the Utility Reform Network. "Edison is going to ask for the moon, and we're going to say, 'no, dial it back.'"
Already this year, the CPUC voted to allow Edison to raise electricity rates to cover $1.6 billion in payments it made to victims of the devastating 2017 Thomas wildfire. Investigators found that the utility’s equipment sparked the blaze, one of the largest in California history.
