Electricity in California


When government gets control of the free market, customers and voters lose
Maynard over at TammyBruce.com has some observations on the price of electricity in California.

My electric bill is incomprehensible by design. It's split into categories and subcategories, making it difficult if not impossible to answer the simple question of how much I'm actually paying for electricity. This is clearly the creation of a bureaucratic sadistic genius, who can now "prove" he's been completely helpful in presenting me with this labyrinthine document. Let me try to make sense of it. First of all, the electricity comes from two sources, internal and external, and they are split arbitrarily and billed differently. Second, there are independent charges for generation versus delivery. Third, there is a progressive rate structure, such that as you go beyond your (relatively small) "baseline", your rates move up. Fourth, my baseline varies seasonally, as do the rates. And of course there are a variety of taxes and surcharges. So the bill ends up being a huge tally of innocuous little pieces of the whole, and the total seems unreasonable, but it is beyond human comprehension to evaluate exactly where it went bad. I say this as a (you'll have to take my word on this point) reasonably intelligent person.

I can say with reasonable certainty that my incremental rate is high. I exceed my baseline (which isn't hard to do), and when you go 30% above baseline, they triple your rate to more than 20 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for SCE-generated electricity. Add to that about 4 cents per kWh for delivery, so I'm paying in total something like 25 cents a kWh. And I'm not even at the top of their "progressive" scale. I shudder to think what they charge when you reach double your baseline usage.

By the way, the average national rate for electricity is approximately 10 cents per kWh. Why is it, I wonder, that I'm getting such a relatively lousy deal here in California?

Here's an interesting Dept. of Energy page on national electric rates. I've placed a small copy of their rate chart at the top of this article. The locations where electricity is most expensive are Alaska and Hawaii (which have specific physical issues) and California and New England. I'll float this hypothesis: The more leftwing your legislature, the more you pay for electricity. I'm assuming that part of the problem is the progressive rate structures, which means in practical terms that one guy pays for the other guy's electricity. Thus, because electricity is expensive, it becomes even more expensive.

Let's see. Government sanctioned monopoly. High price. Deliberately confusing bills.

This helps the average consumer how?

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - August 4, 2006 at 02:56 PM  Tag


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