By Ahmad Faruqui[1]
The answer to that question is an unqualified yes. Why is that? Because electric rates are at an all-time high in California. For one of the two large investor-owned utilities in the state which serves 5.5 million electric customers in northern California, the least expensive rate, which is charged during the off-peak period, has virtually doubled in just five years. It is now more than 30 cents/kWh.
The average residential rate for that utility now exceeds 40 cents/kWh, more than twice the US average. It is just a question of time before the average rate will cross the half dollar mark. Thus, customer bills are much higher today than they were just a few years ago and energy affordability has surfaced as a big challenge for the state’s legislators.
At the same time, the State of California is strongly committed to mitigating the harmful effects of climate change by replacing technologies that run on natural gas with technologies that run on electricity. Within homes, it wants to replace gas furnaces and gas water heaters with heat pumps, gas stoves with induction stoves, and gas clothes dryers with electric clothes dryers. In the field of personal transportation, it wants to replace internal combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles.
The state, in conjunction with the federal government, is providing strong financial incentives to customers that lower the cost of buying and installing these electrification technologies. These incentives include tax credits and rebates. However, a major barrier to customer adoption remains the high operating cost of electric technologies, which continues to worse as electric rates continue to climb.
When customers install solar panels on their roofs, they lower their electric bills. Electrification finally becomes affordable.
Then why is the State of California doing everything possible to make solar panels less attractive for customers to install? Why does it keep on arguing that when customers install solar panels, that creates a cost shift from the poor to the rich?
Those are some of the questions that Jeff St John of Canary Media and I discussed for 45 minutes in a “fireside chat” at UC San Diego’s Design Laboratory. Following our dialogue, the floor was opened to questions from the roughly hundred people who were in the room and a lively debate took place. The recording of the entire conversation can be found here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LypQZAh1grvJT7l48_l0bfw3hu-tNrvy/view?ts=66f48a13
