By Hudson Sangree
Members of the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday met in Bakersfield, a stronghold of conservative interior California, and heard a much different kind of public comment than they’re used to in San Francisco.
Bakersfield is the county seat of Kern County, a hub of oil and natural gas production and home to some of the state’s largest solar arrays. Instead of insisting that state policies should speed the demise of fossil fuels, as Bay Area speakers tend to do, residents and local officials urged the commissioners to hang on to natural gas.
They said they don’t want to give up their gas appliances or pay more to transition to renewable energy. California’s environmental plans call for the retirement of its natural gas fleet and a reliance on carbon-free electricity.
“I’m here to talk about choice,” said Grace Vallejo, a city council member from Delano, Kern County’s second largest city. “I know there’s a lot of talk about renewable energy, about the solar, about the wind. But I think that as local governments, we should be given the choice for our residents.
“I think the gas is something we should never eliminate or even try to control because, for us, if we want to have gas in our homes, that should be our choice,” she said. Vallejo said she has asthma and cares about air quality, but “I don’t want to be told that I have to put solar on my home. I don’t want to be told if I have to have all of the items in my home be electric.”
Electrification of buildings, including new and existing structures, is seen as a way for California to meet its goal under Senate Bill 100 of eliminating the state’s use of fossil fuels by 2045. (See West Coast Pushes for Building Electrification.)
Insisting that new homes include solar panels will raise the price of new houses in a state where affordable housing is in short supply, Vallejo said. “I’m only asking that you do a balanced decision for balanced energy,” she told the commission.
Alan Christensen, Kern County’s chief administrative officer, said he was concerned about the costs of the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas-reduction goals being passed on to disadvantaged communities.
He praised Pacific Gas and Electric’s recent proposal to the CPUC to regionalize its operations after it emerges from Chapter 11 reorganization. The state’s largest utility is in bankruptcy following years of catastrophic wildfires in Northern California. (See PG&E Tries to Appease Governor with New Plan.)
“Whenever you can get to the locals, that’s always a good thing,” Christensen said. But “we feel the system should be set up so that when fires occur in other areas, we should not have the responsibility to receive the rate increases associated with those issues. Those responsibilities ought to be borne by the areas where they occur.”
Wildfire costs in California are passed around, or socialized, through the state’s uniquely broad use of “inverse condemnation,” a legal principle that treats utilities as insurers of last resort, regardless of negligence.
The major fires of 2015, 2017 and 2018, ignited by PG&E equipment, occurred in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills and in the relatively wealthy Napa and Sonoma counties. Much of the costs of those fires could be passed on to ratepayers throughout PG&E’s 70,000-square-mile service territory, which stretches from near the Oregon border to Kern and Santa Barbara counties in the south.
Kern County covers a vast area of the agricultural San Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert and hasn’t experienced the massive, deadly wildfires of its coastal neighbors and counties to the north.
When fire costs are shared by ratepayers throughout PG&E’s system, “those costs will be borne by many of the disadvantaged communities in Kern County,” Christensen said. “We have many of them [that are] below the poverty level.”