The president of the California Public Utilities Commission Wednesday gave a qualified thumbs up to the recently imposed federal wholesale electricity price mitigation measures, saying they are having an impact in “tamping down” power prices, but they are not enough.

At the same time, delayed retail electricity rate increases for California’s two largest private-sector utilities that went into effect last month are now starting to impact consumers, and the regulators are hearing about it. And not surprisingly, consumers don’t like the increases.

“People are feeling it and small businesses are feeling it,” CPUC Chief Loretta Lynch said. “We’re really seeing the impact now on a individual customer basis.

“FERC price caps are still more than double what we paid two years ago for the same amount of electricity,” Lynch said. “Is it better than 30 cents — 9.2 cents/kilowatt? Sure, but is it better than the 3.5 cents that we should be paying? No. It (federal price caps) has had some effect on the 30-cent range, but I think it is a start, not a finish.”

In response to questions about California needing more retail electric rate increases if FERC does not grant the state’s request for the full $8.9 billion in refunds, Lynch said the two issues are not related. “We’ve already spent the $8.9 billion,” Lynch said. “The 3 cent/kWh increase the commission issued in March we think is sufficient to cover the going-forward costs of energy even under these extraordinary circumstances.

“If we got the money back, we first would need to make sure the utilities are made whole for what they’ve already spent for buying electricity, and then if there is anything left, maybe you could reduce rates rather than keep them so high. But it is not a question of `if we don’t get refunds, rates are going to go higher’.”

The CPUC’s ongoing investigation of possible generator gaming of the market is being assessed along with the state attorney general’s similar probe, said Lynch, who noted that they are trying to determine what issues still have to await FERC action before civil (or criminal) lawsuits can be filed in court. Lynch, a lawyer, said she has seen “some fruitful legal opportunities” in the data gathered so far.

A little known part of some of California’s emergency electricity legislation (SB 5X) passed this year is the opening up of so-called “public goods” funds to local governments in addition to utilities. Thus, the CPUC can become a direct co-sponsor for various local programs with cities and counties, and in the case of San Francisco where the regulators are headquartered, Wednesday the city and the regulators launched an $8 million program.

“The City/County of San Francisco came up with a very creative program where it is the energy efficiency entity providing services to small businesses, and we thought that would be a creative program and contracted directly with the city, providing $8 million in grants,” Lynch said.

Lynch announced a number of actions the CPUC will postpone when it meets in its regular business meeting today, including a low voltage ruling pushed by the governor that was expected to be quickly passed, but PG&E came up with some eleventh-hour concerns. “The governor’s office, the energy commission and the utilities have been working cooperatively for several weeks to examine where low-voltage could occur, the benefits and the costs. Those cooperative efforts were on track until [Tuesday] when PG&E submitted its comments with significant concerns they had not raised before with the governor’s office or energy commission.” They were questioning the benefits that they previously estimated.

“It is quite unfortunate that those concerns were not raised over the past six weeks, but only yesterday. The questioning of the benefits did not come to our attention earlier.”

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