California bars utilities from cutting off power to customers who fall behind on their bills when it’s dangerously hot outside — a basic safety protection. Losing power in some rural areas can also mean losing water, and in cities, having no way to cool down can be dangerous, even deadly, when hot weather spans several days.
California regulators concluded more than a year ago that rules protecting delinquent customers from power shutoffs during heat waves weren’t strong enough. They ordered the state’s largest utilities to come up with better safeguards.
When the utilities unveiled their plan in December, their proposals barely changed anything, the commission concluded on Thursday, finding their proposal “does not offer sufficient health protections for ratepayers.”
The commission had set a May 1 deadline for the new rules. Utilities missed it, and consumer advocates filed emergency motions to force action.
As another stretch of dangerous heat gripped the state, the California Public Utilities Commission wrote stronger rules itself. In a 4-0 vote, the commission lowered the temperature at which utilities must stop shutting off power to delinquent customers, from 100 to 90 degrees, and ordered utilities to adopt a more protective, region-specific heat standard within six months.
A battle to define extreme heat
During a record heat wave two years ago — the hottest July in California history — The Utility Reform Network, a consumer group, asked the utilities commission to revisit its definition of extreme heat. The group’s emergency request argued that “heat kills more people directly than any other weather-related hazard.”
The rules already barred electric utilities from disconnecting residential customers for nonpayment if forecasted temperatures soared above 100 degrees within 72 hours.
But a single statewide threshold, the group argued, didn’t account for how differently Californians experience heat depending on where they live.
Regulators declined to treat the request as an emergency, but ordered the utilities to come up with a plan for changing the 100-degree threshold by working with advocates and others.
The utilities proposed using CalHeatScore, a newly created state tool that scores heat by ZIP code – from Level 0 to 4 – using local health data and historical impacts, taking into account data on nearby cooling centers, as well as the number of children and seniors, who can be more susceptible to extreme heat.
The problem: the utilities proposed setting the cutoff threshold at Level 3 — a higher bar than advocates wanted — and keeping 100 degrees as the backstop when the index wasn’t available.
Advocates filed protests seeking a wider safety net, arguing for a lower Level 2 index score and a 90-degree backup threshold.
Utilities said they could not meet the deadline because CalHeatScore’s own data system, run by the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, was not yet ready to support them. Advocates countered that the utilities offered little evidence for sticking with the higher 100-degree threshold.
By May, with utilities still behind schedule, The Utility Reform Network joined with the San Diego-based Utility Consumers’ Action Network, the National Consumer Law Center and the Center for Accessible Technology, asking the commission to intervene.
The commission sides with advocates
This week the commission rejected the utilities’ proposal, siding with advocates. The path the utilities were proposing would be “no different” than prior practice. The resolution noted the extreme heat threshold is already below 100 degrees in 41 of California’s 58 counties.
A 90-degree day might be routine in dry, inland cities such as Bakersfield or Fresno, but such temperatures could be atypically dangerous in coastal or mountainous communities where fewer homes have air conditioning and people are less acclimated to the heat.
San Francisco, for instance, defines heat as extreme when temperatures climb above 85 degrees. In the far northwest county of Del Norte, extreme heat means anything above 76.8 degrees, the commission said.
“A single threshold temperature level needs to be more protective of residents in areas of the state that are not accustomed to high temperatures,” the commission wrote in its resolution.
Utilities move to comply
While the utilities had wanted a narrower safety net for customers, they are now stressing they will comply with the more protective standard.
Last December, the major investor-owned utilities had together argued that extending protections to consumers at lower heat scores would halt disconnections too often, deepen unpaid balances, and add costs without a comparable health benefit. In a January filing, according to a PG&E spokesperson, the utilities argued that the 90-degree threshold was “overbroad.”
The protections would apply only to shutoffs for unpaid bills. They would not prevent outages caused by equipment failures, wildfire-prevention shutoffs, or other emergencies. Nevertheless, advocates say the changes are important.
“When electricity is shut off to a home, it can have a sort of a cascading effect of problems on tenants,” said Jason Zeller, an attorney with the Utility Consumers Action Network. “If tenants don't have electric service, they can be subject to eviction; if they have children, they can lose child custody.”
Reached ahead of the vote, all three utilities said they were prepared to comply with the commission’s new rules. Edison said the resolution would strengthen protections during extreme heat and that it was ready to change its disconnection policies. SDG&E said it supported the added safeguards and would implement the commission’s final requirements.
“Disconnection is a last resort at PG&E, only after multiple attempts to contact customers and offer payment plans and assistance programs,” said PG&E spokesperson Adrienne Moore. The region-specific standard is expected to be implemented within six months.
The commission’s independent Public Advocates Office had pressed for stronger protections throughout the process, formally opposing the utilities’ plan. Director Linda Serizawa the vote would provide consumers with “protection that takes effect when they need it most.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
