Anger over sky-high Pacific Gas & Electric bills and the company’s record profits is sparking a grassroots movement in Northern and Central California as well as a possible effort by Gov. Gavin Newsom to find temporary relief for customers facing big bills.

The group Stop PG$E has scheduled a rally for Tuesday on the west side of the state Capitol, and the plan is to use bullhorns to make their voices heard, said organizer Kellie Buster.

The rally is scheduled to begin at noon.

“The goal of this group is to get the … (all the PG&E) ratepayers on board, because if you don’t know about PG&E, they are knee-deep in politics, they give money to politicians,” she said.

Buster founded the group when she was living in Nevada City, a sixth-generation member of her family to live there. But now she lives in Missouri with her husband, forced to relocate because her retiree’s budget won’t cover her ever-rising electric bills.

Retiree Is Selling Her Home

Amy Hull of northeast Fresno, another Stop PG$E member, said she’s heard of one retiree in Fresno who has to sell her longtime family home because she can’t afford her electric bills.

Hull, who lives in a 2,500-square-foot home, said she and her family have made a concerted effort to cut their energy use. But even though they shaved 500 kilowatt hours off the bill, it was still double what she paid for the same billing period a year ago.

“I got involved (in Stop PG$E) because I was starting to get ridiculous electric bills,” she said. “I don’t have solar. We have a pool. And it was getting to the point where it’s almost as much as my mortgage.”

Kelly Smith, who joined Stop PG$E after founding a similar group on Facebook, said her family lives in a rural area near Grass Valley north of Sacramento. She’s having to tell her teenage children that they can’t take vacations or buy anything extra because she needs the money to cover the electric bill.

Getting Help with Past-Due Bills

And these are PG&E customers who can still afford to pay their bills. Many others can’t, so PG&E has pumped $55 millon into two assistance programs, REACH and REACH Triple Match, that provide up to $2,000 in energy credits for low- to moderate-income customers with past-due bills.

PG&E spokesman Jeff Smith said Thursday that Fresno County has the largest number of approved REACH applications, at 3,523, for a total of nearly $2.2 million. San Joaquin County has the second-largest, with 3,089 applications totaling nearly $1.98 million. That’s as of July 13, he said.

The number of customers who could benefit from REACH totals 325,000, including an additional 65,000 who can now qualify under the new guidelines, Smith said.

Smith said he had no data on how many customers overall are past due on their bills compared to prior years.

Money for REACH is coming from PG&E and not customers’ rates, he said.

The company has been holding workshops in Fresno this month to assist customers who are seeking to submit applications for a REACH grant.

Related Story: Trouble Paying Your PG&E Bill? Workshops in Fresno Can Help

Cuts to Equity Programs

Meanwhile, various California news media outlets are reporting that Newsom is working on last-minute legislation to provide some short-term relief to PG&E customers.

The governor’s office on Wednesday said it declined to comment on pending or proposed legislation or legislative proposals.

But a consortium of environmental, education, environmental justice, affordable housing, and clean energy nonprofits sent a letter a letter Monday to Newsom and leaders of the Assembly and Senate, urging them not to cut three programs that are funded through customer bills.

The California Schools Healthy Air, Plumbing, and Efficiency program, which funds improvements in schools, the Self-Generation Incentive Program that supports installation of energy generation and storage for vulnerable communities, and Solar on Multifamily Affordable Housing, which helps funds solar systems on multifamily, affordable housing communities, are essential to maintain, the nonprofits said in the letter.

“There are no ‘quick fixes’ to California’ high energy costs. Focusing on short-term tactics will not resolve California’s affordability crisis,” the letter said. “Instead, it will exacerbate it, making our energy system more expensive, polluted, and dangerous — specially for our most vulnerable communities.”

Instead, state officials should be working on long-term solutions to manage energy costs, the letter stated.

Reform Is Needed

In addition to Tuesday’s rally, Stop PG$E members are talking about a one-day boycott when all ratepayers don’t use power, Buster said.

The group also wants to put pressure on state officials to stop taking campaign money from PG&E, for PG&E to stop spending money on advertising, and for the California Public Utilities Commission to stop its seemingly continuous authorization of rate hikes.

“My bill in January was $850. There are more people out there with bigger bills than mine,” Buster said. “And everybody, everybody conserves. But it’s not our fault, it’s PG&E for raising the rates that are so unattainable for so many of us.

“It’s affecting the poor. We have members in our group that are wearing night lights around their necks. so they don’t turn on their lights. And these are elderly people. How is this OK? We live in America. Why is this OK?”

It’s also not OK, Buster said, for PG&E to use its revenues to pay for millions of dollars of advertising and to make political contributions.

In addition, she said, PUC commissioners should be elected instead of appointed by California’s governor.

“Every time they (PG&E) come up to the CPUC and say, ‘Hey, we need a raise because we just aren’t making enough money.’ They say, ‘OK.’ And all that’s doing is helping the people that are for-profit, this is a for-profit company. They want to make some money for their shareholders. But it’s hurting us.”

PG&E reported $2.2 billion in profits for 2023, a nearly 25% increase over the prior year, and has reported hundreds of millions of dollars in profits so far in 2024, in part because of rate hikes that took effect this year.