this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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TL;DR: PG&E has asked the CPUC to approve a 22% rate hike that factors in inflation and costs to move powerlines underground in high wildfire risk areas. The CPUC countered with "only" (my emphasis) a 12% rate hike and a proposal to insulate above-ground powerlines instead. The CPUC is set to decide on Nov 2.
My opinion: PG&E can go fuck themselves, and the CPUC can go help them, as per usual. If either of these organizations actually gave a flying fuck about people instead of dollars, they would cut executives' million-dollar salaries before asking for yet another rate hike. Fuck PG&E and the CPUC.
LOL, as if $1M is real money. Not a tenth of a drop in the bucket. But let's do the math!
Pretty outrageous sounding, even given most of that was "one time" rewards. Whatever.
$.003 paid to the CEO on every dollar in profit.
Executive pay ain't the problem. Hint: It never is the problem, but it makes for a convenient point for the public to direct their ire.
IDGAF what they pay the suits, I want to know how a utility made $17B in profit.
That’s about $425 per resident of California, FWIW.
Net income, after expenses are completely deducted, was substantially less - $406,000. About $10 per resident of California.
If you really do want to know what the money comes from and is spent on, I’m pretty sure it’ll be in the financial reports in much more detail.
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-electric/net-income
You have read these charts wrong. The 17B figure is 12-month trailing gross profit. You are referencing quarterly net income (and you've also made a typo, saying 406 thousand instead of 406 million). If you want to compare the "per resident" calculation (which I don't even see the point of), make your units match. Trailing 12-month net income is 1.944B, so more like $50 per person.
Now to make the "per resident" metric actually have any meaning:
First, if we're talking yearly profit skimming off of a utility, our goal is to estimate overcharges per billing address. Census data reports about 38.9 million residents and an average family size of 2.92 - but that's not enough, because PG&E doesn't serve the entire state. They serve about two thirds of the state - taking this into account, a very rough estimate (because population isn't evenly spread across a state) is that they service 8.7 million households. Thankfully for us, they directly report how many households they serve, and the actual number is about 5.2 million.
$374. The average yearly bill for a PG&E customer is $374 pure profit for the company. Now that's a more useful metric.
Oh, and that's assuming none of their operating expenses are inflated - which they likely are. So that's a lower bound for how much they're ripping off each household.