Politico California Climate
PETRIE DISHES: Affordability is hot right now, and Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris is right in the center of the debate.
As chair of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee, she’s taking a hard look at any and all options to lower electric bills and prevent them from skyrocketing further as utilities’ wildfire costs rise.
Last year, her end-of-session push to deliver a one-time bill credit of up to $30 for most customers by cutting spending on state programs for school HVAC systems and residential solar didn’t make it through. This year, she said she’s more determined than ever.
We asked her about rising costs from wildfire damages, increasing demands on greenhouse gas proceeds and where cap-and-trade reauthorization fits into the negotiations around electric bills.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Are you going to bring back your effort to remove certain public programs from ratepayer bills?
Yes, because my bill last year, AB 3264, initiated a value for money review of those programs. We’ll be getting that data and be able to do that analysis in July. We have a hearing scheduled for August that is going to be focused on public purpose programs and evaluating the efficacy, and we will come out of those hearings with recommendations about what should stay and what should go.
There’s a third category where maybe these are things that are worthy efforts, but shouldn’t be shouldered by ratepayers. That’s going to feed into our conversation about Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund investments [investments from cap and trade].
There’s a debate going on in the Legislature about whether to do structural reforms to the program before reauthorizing it post-2030, versus doing a clean reauthorization, letting the California Air Resources Board take the reins on program reform and just focusing on where the GGRF money will go in budget negotiations. What’s your view?
I believe that cap-and-trade has been a success for California and for our climate goals. It has been the most cost effective thing California has done to reduce emissions, and so I’m of the mind that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
That being said, certainly we are taking a really close look at the mechanics of the program and identifying any necessary steps to submit, but that certainly doesn’t look like, in my mind, blowing it up and starting over again. We know it works. Let’s build on that strength.
On GGRF expenditures, I think that there’s a very widespread desire to take a very hard look at where those dollars are going, and to ask ourselves, A, is that the most cost effective way for us to be spending that money? And B, are we investing those dollars in things that have real, concrete benefits for California? That, to me, is the framework that we need to be thinking about as we move forward and evaluate how we’re going to prioritize those dollars in the future.
You’ve said the GGRF has been a slush fund for the state, and you don’t want that to keep happening. How do you prevent that when lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom are leaning on it for things like backfilling the DMV’s budget?
The approach that we’re trying to take on the Assembly side, under Assemblymember [Jacqui] Irwin’s leadership, is really to start with articulating and defining principles that all of the Assembly agrees on. Then we use that as the prism by which we evaluate individual opportunities.
I think it’s completely inappropriate for the governor to propose that we utilize GGRF dollars to backfill DMV shortfalls. That’s absolutely not consistent with the vision for the program or the promise that we made to Californians as we’ve implemented cap-and-trade.
What about the state’s wildfire liability fund that ratepayers and shareholders pay into 50-50? PG&E said on their earnings call that their shareholders are worried about that and they want to see reform. What is the state of conversations on that?
The LA wildfires stirred up two things. Number one, the size of the fund that we initially structured, even if this wasn’t the big one, when the big one comes, that’s not big enough. Second, I think it was a huge wake-up call for the [publicly owned utilities] that are covering areas that previously we did not think constituted a wildfire risk.
There will be conversations both about the existing fund, and I expect that there will be conversations with POUs about whether or not a fund is needed to cover additional entities in the state. It’s very early stages in both of the conversations, but I think it’s a really important thing for us all to take a very hard look at. — BB