California regulators Tuesday took several steps to implement higher electricity rates and stepped up load management, assure payment to the state’s wholesale power buying program and examine whether the parent corporations for the three largest investor-owned utilities have done enough to assure their financial viability during the persistent crisis surrounding supplies and prices.

The actions by the California Public Utilities Commission are expected to allow the state treasurer to proceed with the sale of up to $14 billion in revenue bonds, the largest public sector offering ever, and for negotiations with the private-sector utilities to be brought to some conclusion soon over sale of the utility transmission assets to the state in return for saving two of the utilities from bankruptcy.

The regulators also blocked one of the utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric, from proceeding with the sale of a small generating plant in central California, ordering it back into operation, and mandated that the utility also begin environmental assessment work in anticipation of an upcoming effort to eliminate a north-south transmission bottleneck known as Path 15 in central California.

The CPUC on a 4-0 vote (one commissioner was absent) established $3-3.5 billion of revenue required for the state water resources department’s power-buying as the so-called California Procurement Adjustment (CPA). In an expedited, but still-detailed regulatory process, the CPUC will determine how the rate increase is spread to customers in some variation of a “tiered” structure that gives incentives to conserve.

Workshops are going on this week, hearings will be held later in the month, and the CPUC President Loretta Lynch indicated that she wants a decision in time for customers to get initial bills before summer that will give them signals to cut their power use. “My goal is to promote conservation, so I want to get a tiered rate structure in place as quickly as the utility billing systems can be changed, so folks before the summer hits can know how much energy they are using and take appropriate measures to scale back.”

Turning down an alternate proposal to create another special surcharge, the CPUC nevertheless approved expanded voluntary curtailment and load reduction programs for more than just the largest industrial/commercial customers, including time-of-use metering for new customers joining the program and $350/MWh payments to customers bidding parts of their demand on a day-of and day-ahead basis. Blocks of residential customers could also be included.

“Customers recently have been curtailed time after time for protracted periods of time when what they thought they signed up for was not what they were experiencing,” said CPUC Commissioner Carl Wood, referring to the past CPUC-based voluntary curtailment program that had to be halted earlier this year. “So we have had difficulty getting compliance and cooperation with the program, as well as customers facing very serious fines and wanting out of these programs.”

The new program allows current customers to drop out, retroactively back to Nov. 1 or prospectively, with their penalties and rate savings netted out. That option was blocked for the past few months by the regulators.

The regulators also followed through on an item that has been on their agenda for two months, launching an accelerated investigation of the utilities’ holding companies regarding how much of the past debt they should absorb.

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