Everyone in California has felt a spike in prices for a while now. Something has felt off about the price increase and Governor Newsom is now trying to find out why. The California Public Utilities Commission is holding a hearing on this matter right now to “examine possible drivers” of these price increases. Featured on the “SFist” was a graph featured below
It looks like to some that PG&E is price gouging but why? Western states’ regional utilities prices have remained relatively flat, but those huge spikes in the red lines and orange lines represent PG&E prices and Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) prices, and it looks very out of place. Governor Gavin Newsom is calling for a federal investigation into the PG&E price hikes. “The cost of natural gas has dropped across the country, but not here in California,” KTVU reports. “Prices here have soared compared to a year ago, with some customers seeing a more than 300 percent hike in their bills.” Newsom is calling on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to investigate. The agency is going to “immediately focus its investigatory resources on assessing whether market manipulation, anticompetitive behavior, or other anomalous activities are driving these ongoing elevated prices in the western gas markets.” PG&E did emerge from bankruptcy in the summer of 2020, but their deal to exit bankruptcy involved adding more state oversight. And that oversight is getting a real stress by PG&E’s drive to raise rates ever-higher, in ways that surely seem to indicate “market manipulation, anticompetitive behavior, or other anomalous activities” that Newsom indicated may be at play.
Have these prices affected you? Hopefully some good comes out of the investigation in hopes for lower prices. For the full article visit the SFist.
