A ‘North Star’ For California Utility Reform — Episode 234 of Local Energy Rules

Travis Gibrael:
There’s always going to be an economic dynamic where rate payers are paying extra just so somebody can pocket something, and that’s not justice. The reason people like co-ops and public utilities so much is nobody siphons anything off from those.

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John Farrell:
A gas main explosion that kills several people and destroys property… A major wildfire that kills even more people and destroys more property… Then a wildfire larger than several New England states… All due to negligent management and giving short shrift to maintenance. Is this utility company out of business? No! Last year Pacific Gas and Electric recorded record profits even as its customers pay the highest rates in the mainland U.S. Joining me in April 2025 to talk about a California senate bill to hold this utility accountable is Travis Gibrael, research and popular education organizer at Reclaim Our Power, a coalition of over 90 environmental justice organizations in Northern California.

I’m John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast about monopoly power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system.

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John Farrell :
Travis, welcome to Local Energy Rules.

Travis Gibrael:
Thank you so much, John. Such a pleasure to be here.

John Farrell :
One of the things I just love to ask all my guests, Travis, is about how they got into the work that they’re doing. So what is your path to becoming an organizer with Reclaim Our Power? What in life led you to working on these issues of energy justice and utility ownership?

Travis Gibrael:
Yeah, totally. I had a very, I would say maybe a roundabout route to come in. I wasn’t an electrical engineer or a policy expert, anything like that when I was in grad school. So I went to grad school in North Carolina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it was 2016 and I think just about everybody in my generation, I was feeling deep despair around climate change. It felt as though even the most aggressive politicians were basically doing nothing about it, and then all of a sudden the United States elects Donald Trump to be president who calls climate change a hoax, and the feeling of closed off futures and possibilities was just overwhelming.
So I was in grad school for social work and I was working for an organization called Resourceful Communities. We were doing a lot of food sovereignty stuff. I found that the thing that was giving me hope, giving me optimism was hearing about the renewable energy revolution happening outside of the United States. I was reading a lot of news articles about how many gigawatts of power were being installed, and I realized that I was interested in that angle, and so I asked my supervisor if she could connect me with a project that was focused on energy instead of food, and she connected me with this woman named Ajulo Othow, and we were working with rural electric co-ops in North Carolina to develop solar plus storage that would benefit black farmers in the Black Belt. And we actually went on to found a company called EnerWealth Solutions. Ajulo has gone on to found another company called Black Owners of Solar Services, BOSS, which the DOE gave a massive grant to last year or the year before. But anyway, so through that I was learning about co-ops and the history of the Rural Electrification Act and all that kind of stuff. So we were developing solar plus storage in these rural communities, but we were trying to do the installations through an equity lens.
So it was really important to us to try to hire a black owned company to do the solar installs and we couldn’t find one in all of the Carolinas. It’s the blackest part of the country in North Carolina, South Carolina and there wasn’t a single black-owned company there. And so as a backup plan, we were like, okay, what about a woman owned company? Couldn’t find one of those either. It was an entirely white male dominated industry.
So when I came out to California, I decided that we need more representation on the installation side of this work, and I’m an Arab American, and so I went up to Mendocino and I got my NABCEP (North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners) certifications. And this is the part that’s actually a little bit, I mean it’s almost a little bit spiritual, but literally while I was getting trained to be a solar installer was when the Camp Fire broke out and I woke up one morning and the sky was orange.
Our classes we were taking had to go indoors with air purification systems going on at the same time. And so just the physical impact of what the utilities were doing, it impacted me as I was trying to participate in the Green Revolution. In the months that followed, there was massive outcry. PG&E went into bankruptcy. All of the media coverage was talking about how the CPUC was going to bail them out with our money. And so it galvanized this huge amount of protesting and backlashing and I showed up for that. I was going to CPUC meetings when the Reclaim Our Power utility justice campaign got started, and I’ll come back to this in a little bit, but I started as a volunteer because I was already galvanized around these no PG&E bailout protests. Eventually they posted a job that I applied for and I didn’t end up getting that job and I needed money. So I actually went on to be a solar technician instead. And I still work for a small Bay Area Nonprofit that does solar installations below market rate. But a few years later, Reclaim Our Power was trying to implement a microgrid program. And so I applied for that and actually I was the only person that applied for it because it’s hard to find somebody that’s both a solar technician and deeply committed to social and economic and environmental justice, but somehow I was the Venn diagram. And so I got that job three years ago, and as time has progressed, my role has kind of expanded to all research and popular education.

John Farrell :
Wonderful. I really loved the fullness of the story that you told Travis in terms of your path. I feel like so many other people have struggled their way to find their work that they’re doing now. So I just love that you can give people a sense of sometimes we don’t always land there the first time we try, but I absolutely love what you said that you were the Venn diagram there in that overlap of someone who wanted to do microgrid work, but also had that deep commitment to equity.
You already mentioned PG&E that Reclaim Our Power works mostly in PG&E’s service territory in Northern California. And you already mentioned the Camp Fire, which is one of the things I was going to bring up in kind of setting the context for this Senate bill that the campaign is working on.
In the 2024 report that I wrote called Upcharge, PG&E was one of the utilities that we featured and this story of problematic utilities because it was guilty of negligence for four major disasters within 15 years that had a huge cost of human life and property damage. There was a gas explosion on the gas side of the utility in 2010, the Tubbs Fire in 2017, the Camp Fire, which you mentioned in 2018, the Dixie Fire in 2022. That seems to me when I was doing the research for this report, like plenty of evidence sufficient to want to fire the utility company and have someone else in charge.
But can you tell me a little bit more about the motivation behind Senate Bill 332? And just as a note, we’ll link on the show page to more detail about the bill for folks who want to get into detail. But could you tell us a little bit about what motivated folks at Reclaim Our Power to put this bill together?

Travis Gibrael:
So I’m going to try to keep this brief. It’s hard because there are so many reasons that people in California just despise PG&E. A lot of headlines say it’s the utility that Californians love to hate, but so I’m going to try to keep it brief, but there’s a lot here. So San Bruno explosion in 2010, it killed eight people, destroyed 38 houses, and dozens and dozens of people were injured. In the ensuing investigation, what was revealed was an utter culture of neglect. They had terrible record keeping. They didn’t know when different pipes were installed and when they had last been checked, the seams were not done up to code. They just had no evidence of that. And what was really revealed was that there was this deep culture of putting profits over safety.
So for decades, and this is really outlined in a book about PG&E called California Burning by Katherine Blunt, a Wall Street Journal reporter that I really recommend to all listeners if they want to learn more about PG&E because we could talk for an hour just about the problems with the company. But at the end of the day, they had been taking money that was meant for safety and maintenance and putting it into profits instead and for executive bonuses and whatnot. Out of that investigation, I mean there were tons of lawsuits, they ended up paying like a half a billion dollars in settlements to people, and they ended up walking away with six felonies, one of which was obstructing an investigation, a federal investigation. And it was the first time in history that a utility had been charged with a felony like that.
And so you would think that because of all this extra scrutiny and because of revealing this decrepit corporate culture that it would really change how they do business. But it turned out that that same culture also applied to their electrical wires, right? Again, terrible record keeping. They hadn’t been putting money into maintaining them. And between 2010 and 2017, while that investigation was underway, they were found to be responsible for sparking over 1500 wildfires. And during that same time, they gave out 5 billion to shareholders. So it’s just like that disconnection between moving money that was meant for safety and maintenance into profits, neglecting the system, letting it fall apart, and then facing the consequences for that. 2017 was when the Tubbs fire happened. Now, in all fairness to them, CalFire did ultimately determine that they weren’t responsible for it. However, when they paid out settlements, they did pay out a lot of settlements to survivors of the Tubbs Fire. And so I think there is a sense of culpability, even if CalFire ultimately exonerated them from that. But in 2018 was the Camp Fire, which was the big one that I mentioned before. 85 people were dead. 19,000 structures destroyed 150,000 acres burned. $16.5 billion in liabilities. And that, compounded with liabilities that they had had from wildfires dating back to 2015, is what led them into bankruptcy in 2019. And earlier I mentioned there were massive protests happening at the time. It was about 30 billion dollars in liabilities that they were on the hook for in that moment when they went into bankruptcy. And so one of the things that is important to know is that in California, this was just a key moment of possibility. There were so many ideas that were being floated around about what to do with this criminal enterprise that is PG&E.
Sam Ricardo, the mayor of San Jose at the time, who’s now a congressman, had a proposal to turn it into a co-op. And 22 mayors across PG&E territory signed onto that idea, including the mayors of Berkeley and Oakland and Stockton, and all throughout the area. Scott Wiener released a bill that would turn PG&E into a publicly owned utility. And so there was a lot of possibility in the air. Our coalition came together at that moment saying, look, for too long, the energy system has been governed over and determined by people with a lot of privilege, people with a lot of education and backgrounds, but the frontline communities who are the most impacted by the failures of the utility system are never at the table. And so we are a coalition of all these environmental justice organizations. The founding members included APEN and CEJA, Local Clean Energy Alliance, Movement Generation, North Bay Organizing Project, a lot of folks, and we came in to say, no, you need a frontline community voice at the table in determining the future.
So what ended up happening was a bill called AB 1054 was passed, and this bill was actually literally written by PG&E’s lawyers, and it was passed through the legislature in fourteen days with basically no debate. It was just rammed through. And that was done using what they call a gut and fill strategy in the legislature where they take an existing bill, take out all the language and put in new language, and then pass it through as quickly as possible.
What this bill did was a bunch of things, but it’s really important to know because a lot of what SB 332 does is in response to what’s in this bill. The first thing was that it created the wildfire fund, right? So because of the massive liabilities of PG&E and the other IOUs, they were no longer able to get insurance. And so the state felt like it needed a pool of money in which to insure future wildfires.
And so that pool was capitalized at $21 billion. So half of that $10.5 is directly on rate payers bills. And one of the things that we’re pushing back against this is the fact that the reason we have these wildfires, obviously there’s a lot of environmental conditions, but this culture of neglect and putting profits over the people for so long has created this situation, but then the people are on the hook for bailing it out for paying for these liabilities. So you see that in that $21 billion wildfire fund.
The next thing was they changed the burden of proof. Now, this is kind of a complicated thing, but historically, a utility had to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it acted in compliance without negligence when it’s found responsible for sparking a wildfire. This changed the burden of proof so that actually the people had to make a case against the utility using data that the people wouldn’t have access to. So basically making it impossible to prove that the utility was negligent. Instead, if the utility is seen to have acted rightly if they have a wildfire mitigation plan that has been approved by the CPUC, right? The catch with the wildfire mitigation plans is they were all rubber stamped immediately after being submitted. When PG&E’s wildfire mitigation plan was audited by the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, it was found to be woefully inadequate. Woeful I think it’s just such a potent word there. It’s just like it didn’t come close to accomplishing what was needed, but it was still approved anyway, because basically the utility is too big to fail. And so the risk of not allowing PG&E to come out of bankruptcy to have access to the wildfire fund was seen as too big of a risk for the state. So even though they weren’t holding up their end of the bargain with their wildfire plan, it was still rubber stamped anyway.
Two more things that AB 1054 did was one, it created a six-step process for PG&E to lose its business license to operate, and it basically said that if they’re found out of compliance in this kind of way, then they move into step one. If they’re found to be further out of compliance, they move to step two, yada, yada, yada. And this is important because a lot of our organizing was based around this six-step process for a long time. And so there was a companion bill that was passed at the time. It’s called SB 350, the Golden State Energy Act. And what that did was it created a legal successor entity to PG&E called Golden State Energy, and it basically stated that if PG&E were to make it through this six step process and lose their business license, then their assets and operations would transfer over to this new entity called Golden State Energy, which was defined as a public benefit nonprofit.
So it’s still a private entity, but it’s no longer for profit. So there was this idea, even at the time that a not-for-profit utility would be better for the people of California, but the only way to get there would be to take away PG&E’s business license, which had to be done with justification. So we create the six step process, and at the end of it is Golden State Energy that’s waiting to take over operations. The final thing that they did is they started implementing public safety planned shutoffs where if the weather conditions are too dangerous for sparking wildfires, they just shut off the power to entire sections of the distribution grid. And people have been losing power for days, even weeks at a time because of these PSPSs, but they are legally shielded from any kind of liabilities to those. So in 2019, it was seen that there were economic losses totaling $2.5 billion because of these shutoffs, but there was a class action lawsuit against PG&E in response to that. But of course, they couldn’t go anywhere because this bill legally shielded them from that. So this is part of the story that people in California know about PG&E. It’s not only it’s sparking all these wildfires, it was responsible for this explosion, but they’re also turning off our power at random times because they’re worried about sparking new ones and there’s no accountability for it. If your food or medicine or if your medical device doesn’t operate and that causes major problems for people, there’s no recourse for that.

John Farrell :
So let me see if I can just summarize this back. So you have a utility with this history of causing disasters being found liable, and a history of neglect in terms of investment in maintenance and operations that could have potentially prevented or mitigated some of these events that occurred, and a culture of shifting funds from maintenance to profits, then all this bad stuff happens. The utility is found liable. It has to declare bankruptcy. It’s evident that it is responsible for all of these terrible things that happened, and they, to get through a bill that essentially says, if we do it again, you’ll cover the insurance cost for us. You will have to prove that we’re liable rather than us having to share the data to show that we’re liable. And we are now allowed to shut off the power preemptively to people in part to cover for the fact that we didn’t do enough maintenance to make sure the grid could survive these conditions without sparking wildfires. And on top of that, there’s now a lengthy process in order to cause us to lose our business license, despite the fact that we’ve already been a terrible business partner. Did I get that pretty close?

Travis Gibrael:
Yeah. Yeah. You basically got that. And so earlier I mentioned that they submitted their plan, it was found to be woefully inadequate. That actually did move them into the process. So they moved into step one of that process of that six step process. Three months later, they sparked the Dixie Fire. Now, the Dixie Fire was the single most destructive single source wildfire in California history. It burned almost a million acres. That’s basically the size of a state in New England. So this is while they were in this six step process, but there was no accountability. There was a small settlement outside of court, and they got a little fine. And then the next year, they were actually removed from the six step process. And there’s a quote from William Alsup who was the judge that was overseeing their probation. So they went into probation in 2016 as a result of their felony convictions for the San Bruno explosion.
And in 2022, William Alsup who was overseeing that said, PG&E has gone on a crime spree and will emerge from probation as a continuing menace to California. And so basically, I think one thing I want listeners to really understand is there has been so much media coverage of this, and there have been so many court cases and the utility hasn’t changed, right? 12 years after the explosion, the judge looking at their actions most closely is saying that they’re still the same criminal enterprise they were before.
But here’s the thing that I think really galvanizes where we’re at in 2025, and this is the final part of the story of PG&E that I want to share. So now it’s all about rates. So previously there was so much focus on destroying the public trust and destroying the public air and whatnot, but now the rates have just gone absolutely through the roof. PG&E rates since 2020 have gone up 70% in the last three years. They’ve gone up 56%. Last year there were six rate hikes, and they just asked for a seventh one a couple of weeks ago. As a result, we now pay the highest rates in the continental United States. It’s only Hawaii that pays higher rates than us. There are 7 million people in the state of California that are behind on their bills, and that’s data from the CPUC. And so 7 million people is more people than there are in 35 states in the United States, and that’s how many people are not just struggling to afford their bills, but are actively behind on their bills. As a result, 300,000 families in the state of California have had their power shut off last year. And so when you get your power shut off, that is a punishment for poverty and it can lead to spirals into bigger problems.
So everyone in California agrees that our rates are a crisis, and there’s a lot of debate about what’s causing that, but everyone can point that it’s wildfire mitigation. Everybody says wildfire mitigation is the core of why our rates are so high. But a recent article by Cal Matters looked into how the 27 billion on wildfire mitigation has been spent, and there’s just huge questions about accountability, about misplaced finances. Their numbers don’t add up, they double charge for things here and there. In 2024, there was an audit of the system that was just really saying, this is the worst accounting that we’ve ever seen. And at the same time last year, PG&E announced record shattering profits of $2.5 billion. So when people see that they can’t afford their bills, yeah, so that rate hike that was requested a couple of weeks ago that I mentioned was exclusively to just boost shareholder profits. And if you Google that, that’s what all the headlines are really highlighting.
So yeah, now we’re in affordability crisis. It’s causing the cost of living crisis in California to expand. People are getting their power shut off. It’s causing poverty in the state, and yet the utility is announcing record breaking profits, and they’re asking to raise the rates even more to make even higher profits. And that’s not even talking about other issues that people have with PG&E, which is delays on interconnections and hookups, like when new housing developments are built, there have been years long delays before they actually get access to power, which costs millions of dollars to developers and to cities and counties. A lot of people have big issues with their relationship to the rooftop solar industry. They lobbied for NEM3 to be passed, which basically knee capped the whole industry. A lot of people are dreaming about a high DER future and community solar and multimeter microgrids, all of these things about how the grid could operate in the future. But the IOU has been stonewalling all of those efforts because anything that seemed to interfere with their profits, it’s not good for their bottom line. So they won’t allow it to happen. Even though the technology exists, the expertise exists, and the people of California really want to see these changes.

John Farrell :
Sometimes you read about or in hearing your recitation of all the problems and just sort of sit here gobsmacked about the fact that it would take another piece of legislation to change the way that this system operates. The evidence is so overwhelming that this utility is not doing its job well and in a competitive environment, it’s hard to imagine that it would still be in business. And yet because we have this monopoly system, here they are years later having done all of these things wrong and they’re still in charge of the system, it blows my mind.
I want to ask you specifically though about the affordability thing, which is kind of this last piece that you touched on. It’s sort of ironic in a way that they killed lots of people, destroyed lots of property, but it was when the bills got really high that people are like, we got to solve this. This is a real problem. I mean, there’s something laughable about that, but it is a really big deal. I mean, the context you just gave was something I’d never heard before. 7 million people behind on their bills, 300,000 being shut off. I mean, everybody’s losing their power through these so-called public safety power shutoffs regularly anyway, but now they’re being shut off permanently. So what is Senate Bill 332? What can it do to help with this issue around affordability and around shutoffs?

Travis Gibrael:
The core of the bill that our coalition is really excited about is a feasibility study, but we’re going to come back to that in a second because a lot of our analysis is that feasibility study is what could create a path forward that would really address affordability in a serious way. But the things that the bill does on top of that, and as you mentioned, the bill has a lot in it along affordability. The first thing is that wildfire fund that I mentioned before, right now, rate payers are on the hook for 50% of the capitalization of that fund, the $10.5 billion. And so the bill actually drops that down to 5%. That’s 10.5 billion or $10 billion that rate payers would save. Now, that in itself wouldn’t fix the affordability crisis, but I think that that is more of a moral imperative because they’re choosing to prioritize profits for all of these years. They made that money, so they should fix the problem out of that money that they already sent to their shareholders, like we shouldn’t on the hook to bail them out again in the future.
But then the second thing is it pegs rate increases to the consumer price index to CPI. So Mark Ellis, who used to work for Sempra, which is the owner of SoCal Gas and San Diego Gas and Electric, used to work as an economist for Sempra. He has noted that in recent years, the IOU’s rates have increased at about double the consumer price index, whereas the publicly owned utilities have been about half. In California, it’s actually way more than that. In California, it’s more like three to four times the CPI that PG&E’s rates have been going up. And so it is possible to run a utility within a hard limit like a CPI.
Now, a lot of critics would say that if you have this hard ceiling on what can be spent, that would actually prevent the utility from getting important work done because they need to be able to charge more in order to do all the work that the PUC, the Public Utilities Commission, is asking them to do and so on and so forth. But when you look at their audit of 2024 and they somehow misplaced $3 billion, they overstated their expenses by $3 billion, but when you actually add up all the expenses, they don’t come close to that. And we say, no, there actually is a way to fit all of this work into a hard limit. You just need to do better accounting and you need to prioritize better. In the same way that the public utilities do.
I know longtime listeners to your podcast know that the way that utilities make their money is whenever they build something, they get a rate of return on that. So the more expensive the things that they build, the more profits that they can pocket. So that’s a structural incentive to spend as much of our money as possible because then they can make the highest returns that way. But if they have a hard limit about how high they can go, then they have to start making harder decisions about where they’re going to spend their money.
And then the last thing on affordability speaks to that same thing about spending as much money as possible, but it requires that whenever they go into contract to build anything, they have to demonstrate to the PUC that they’ve entered the best value contract based on however many bids they’ve gotten on it. One of the ways that they really bury the cost increases is through something called advice letters where they submit 50 or a hundred of these, and the PUC doesn’t really have the resources to sift through them and determine this is a good usage of money and this isn’t. It’s just kind of a morass of unaccountable expenses. And so what this does is they have to justify which contracts they go into in a way that just creates at least one more layer of accountability.

John Farrell :
I should mention that Mark Ellis was a guest on Local Energy Rules, also on episode 226, and he talked about this issue of in particular, inflated utility profits, which obviously bears a lot on the affordability crisis. We’re going to get to the feasibility study and the potential structural change later, which I think will probably answer this question more fully, but you talk this, the advice letters and the contracting and adding another layer of accountability. Do you have very much confidence in the people who would be responsible for implementation of that to do it well? Well, I mean, technically we already have public regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission. Arguably, they’ve already been watching what PG&E has been doing, and so to some degree, the affordability crisis is their fault because whatever they’ve been doing has been insufficient to hold the utility accountable. I mean, if you’re missing $3 billion, what have you been doing as a regulator? would be one of my questions.

Travis Gibrael:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, so two responses to that come to mind, one, to be as generous to them as possible, they are understaffed and they would need more resources in order to really take this seriously. But like you said, there’s not a lot of evidence that they have the appetite to take it seriously because of these too big to fail situations where they’re like, okay, yeah, your wildfire mitigation plan is atrocious. Your accounting is off by $3 billion, and we will send a strongly worded letter that you need to get your act together. But if we took any actual action with real consequences, if there’s any chance that this could disrupt service to the people of California, or it could make your finances a little bit wobbly, which would lead to an uncertain future, we can’t rock that boat. So they don’t actually have the ability to go after them in a serious way because they’re afraid of what could be the consequences of an even less stable utility.

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John Farrell :
We are going to take a short break. When we come back, I ask Travis about the remaining components of the Senate bill, including a feasibility study focused on an ownership transition for the state’s investor owned utilities. We also talk about how the bill deals with utility shutoffs and whether there’s an existing utility company that serves as an inspiration. You’re listening to a local individuals podcast with Travis Gibrael, research and popular education organizer at Reclaim Our Power, a coalition of over 90 environmental justice organizations in Northern California.
Hey, thanks for listening to Local Energy Rules. We’re so glad you’re here. If you like what you’ve heard, please help other folks find us by giving the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, five stars if you think we’ve earned it. As a bonus, I’ll gladly read your review aloud on the show if it includes an energy related joke or pun. Now, back to the program.

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John Farrell :
I want to ask you about some of the other provisions before we get to the big question of feasibility study, but some other provisions that are in Senate Bill 332, there are some provisions around wildfire mitigation, safety, and resilience. Could you just maybe give us a broad picture of some of those other components?

Travis Gibrael:
The core of it revolves around audits. So at the time of the campfire, the hook that broke and that sparked that fire was almost a hundred years old, and I don’t remember if I read it in California Burning or somewhere else, but basically the average piece of equipment in PG&E’s grid is something like 30 years beyond its usable life. We’re talking about an ancient grid that was built with parts that shouldn’t be in the field about 60 years. And on average, they’ve been there about 90, and when they audit themselves, they don’t do anything about it. They can’t be trusted to audit themselves. So the component of the bill that focuses on this is that a third party has to audit the whole system every three years. Now, that might be too frequent, that can be debated when the bill is on the floor, but the way that it’s currently written, the whole system gets audited by a third party, and all the pieces that are seen to be well past their usable life on the verge of breaking, those get flagged and the utility gets fined for being out of compliance.
Now, we were really careful. We don’t want to add to anybody’s bills. So these fines can’t come out of rate payer bills come out of the utility profits, but the money from those fines is then required to be used in order to fix the equipment. So bring the equipment up to code. So that’s the audit portion of it also. And when equipment gets replaced, the goal is to replace it in a way that is better, like more wildfire safe. So that could be using quick trip technology, or it could be insulated wires. It could be undergrounding if necessary, but undergrounding is really expensive, so try to avoid that whenever possible, but basically bring it up to a standard of wildfire mitigation every time you’re replacing equipment.
The second thing is basically the same idea, except it’s building back after disasters. So this would really apply to SCE right now, Southern California Edison, which is building back after the Eaton fire in LA County, which happened just a couple months ago in January. I want to note that 29 people were killed in that fire, and it is really likely that Southern California Edison is going to be held responsible. LA County is already suing them under the belief that they too prioritized profits over the safety of the system. But anyway, there’s a portion that says when you’re building back after a disaster, you want to build back in the most cost-effective and wildfire safe way possible.
And the final piece is around executive compensation, and it basically states that executive bonuses cannot be determined by profitability, but instead only through what one might call a performance-based lens in which improved safety, improved affordability, those are the things that lead to stronger executive compensation rather than cutting corners, cutting costs, and improving profitability for shareholders.

John Farrell :
I know we’re going to get to the very juicy question next, but I have to ask this one quick follow-up and feel free to just skate over it quickly. But it would seem with lots of old equipment and a utility business model that is focused on profits for building things, that it could actually be profitable for utility companies to solve the wildfire crisis with regard to old and aging equipment because they just can replace things that makes the grid more resilient and then get paid for it. So I’m kind of curious if you have any broad thoughts about why they haven’t been doing that?

Travis Gibrael:
Oh, why haven’t they been doing it? Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say some of our analysis, and this gets to a cynical place, but if you spend a lot of time thinking about PG&E interacting with PG&E, it’s easy to get cynical. But if you think about an old piece of equipment that is on the verge of collapse, if you go in and you fix a few little pieces and extend its life for a long period of time, then that only costs a tiny bit. And you can’t really generate large profits off of that. But if you allow that to fail, really collapse, and then you have to rebuild it altogether, that is a really expensive capital investiture, and you can make a lot of profit off of that. So there is a way that they’re subtly, structurally incentivized to run things to failure, so then they can be paid a lot to replace them wholesale as opposed to just doing little bits of maintenance along the way.

John Farrell :
So rather than an oil change, I just wait until the car’s cylinder head seizes up and I replace the entire engine.

Travis Gibrael:
If you’re getting paid for replacing your car, then do it that way.

John Farrell :
Alright, let’s get to this feasibility study. This is kind of the big piece of the bill. As you mentioned before, you’re obviously trying to target this issue of affordability as one of the big pieces, and you mentioned that rates going up much faster for investor owned private utilities, than they are for publicly owned utilities. So is ownership a part of this feasibility study? Talk to me about what is going to be studied as part of the component of this bill.

Travis Gibrael:
This is the work that we have been focused on for a long time. So the feasibility study has three primary components to it. The first is a historical assessment of energy justice, and basically it’s an accounting of all of the harms and impacts of the IOU system leading up to this point, the distribution of harms: who has been harmed by it, in what ways? Economic ways like the health and trauma impacts of explosions, wildfires, pollution, sacrifice zones. This is the core of environmental justice, is to determine the ways in which the system structurally impacted certain populations. Because later on, and I’ll get to this in a second, but we have a reparative mandate. So if you have an accounting of the harms that were caused in the past, then you can focus on how to make amends in the future. And there’s also looking at impacts of hookup delays, the quantification of liabilities.
And we have a component about land back. If you read Beth Rose Middleton Manning’s, great book Upstream, it talks about the early roots of our power system in California came directly through land theft from the Maidu people in the Sierras. And so for us, reparations to indigenous people is a big part of what we’re focused on. So that’s part one. Part one is the historic harms.
Part two is kind of the juice of this conversation, which is a comparative study of the costs and benefits of transitioning all of the IOUs from a for-profit model to a not-for-profit model. And I mean, it’s sweeping. It asks all the questions. It looks at regulatory impacts and legal impacts, impacts on labor, workers’ pensions, all of the questions that you might come up with. And I will say that initially our campaign was really focused on this SB 350 that I mentioned earlier that would transition to Golden State Energy, but we actually got a lot of feedback from allies saying there are better ways to do it than going to a private nonprofit.
So we decided to be more agnostic. And so it’s a comparative study of a co-op model, a public model, and the private nonprofit model. And so instead of saying, no, it has to be this one way, it says, let’s get the data, let’s get all the information about these three possibilities, and then once that’s all out on the table, then we can really talk about what’s the best way forward for California. So that’s the second part.
The third part is what we call the just design features. And this is something that an environmental justice organization is really focused on like ours. But if you were to build a new utility from scratch, i.e., new DNA, new operational mandates, then how would you center justice in that new utility? So one of the things that I mentioned before is the reparative mandate repairing the past harms of the IOUs, but we’re also looking at social equity, ecological sustainability, climate resilience, minimizing environmental harms, centering the deeds of low income people, disadvantaged communities, talking about participatory governance, structures of accountability, social costs and benefits, and then alternatives to shutoffs for nonpayment of bills. And that’s another part of the bill that maybe we want to circle back to in a second, the shutoff portion, but that’s also part of the feasibility study. How do you design the utility in order to create a 21st century utility that centers justice in a way that historically utilities didn’t need to or didn’t think they needed to.

John Farrell :
Do you imagine that there will be a component of this study that will look at kind of the structural nature of the utility. And what I mean by that is we’ve seen some restructuring of electric utilities. California famously went south with the Enron market manipulation crisis where the power generation was broken apart from grid ownership, and so that you had these different entities that would generate power from the ones that would maintain the grid. But one of the issues that we find, and you kind of touched on this briefly earlier around interconnection for example, is that right now you have this issue where if the utility makes its money building things and other people have maybe more cost effective ways, more community-centered ways of building things, they butt heads with the utility. Can you imagine any part of this study looking at this issue of the structural operation of the grid where maybe you separate asset ownership of generation and or a grid infrastructure from grid operations?
So you have some people call this a independent distribution system operator model where the utility is really mostly just designed around making sure it is getting power to where it needs to go, and is having lots of other competitive providers guided by the principles of what you need from your market around low income, around environmental impacts, et cetera, actually providing those services. So it can be, I think, ideally a little bit more community centered in its approach. I guess I’m just kind of curious if there’s any role like that, something that obviously my organization is very interested in.

Travis Gibrael:
Yeah, yeah, I love that question. And I’m sure Lorenzo Kristov, he’s a longtime friend of our campaign. He’s been really supportive, really helpful expert here. So yeah, he’s a big proponent of DSO model. Our bill does explicitly call out a study of a DSO as a question of separation of ownership and operations. The study is sweeping. There’s two things to say about this. The study, it considers whether transmission and distribution should be separated. What’s the order of taking over parts of the grid? It explores a lot of the nuanced questions around should it be this or should it be that? How to go about this and that.
But I would say that one of our main analyses is there is a built-in profit incentive. There’s always going to be an economic dynamic where rate payers are paying extra just so somebody can pocket something, and that’s not justice. The reason people like co-ops and public utilities so much is nobody siphons anything off from those, right? There’s no overpaying, just so an investor you’ve never met who’s probably already quite wealthy, can pocket even more of your money. There’s just a fundamentally extractive nature about that, which, should this transition happen and our IOUs become not-for-profit utilities, that dynamic would no longer be on the table. Yeah, for us, that’s a core meaning of economic justice.

John Farrell :
Well, thank you for answering that question about the study. Let’s circle back to this issue of shutoffs because you’ve mentioned it several times, and this is an ongoing justice issue for many years across the country. I mean, we’ve had some studies, I think by the Center for Biological Diversity about the range of shutoffs even during the pandemic, when people are forced to work from home, do school from home, you have the ongoing problem with people with medical devices and other needs for electric access. Just taking away the fact that, of course, we all expect to have a refrigerator that can keep our food cold and keep it from spoiling. So the idea that you can live in modern society without electricity kind of blows my mind. But anyway, I’m editorializing too much. Tell me what the bill says about shutoffs.

Travis Gibrael:
A little bit of the backstory is the Center for Biological Diversity are our allies and co-sponsors of SB 332, and the portion that’s around shutoffs was originally like their freestanding bill of the year, and we actually joined forces and brought these bills together to create a little bit more of an omnibus utility transformation bill. So SB 332, the shutoff during the pandemic, there was a moratorium on utility shutoffs, and it was just kind one of those moments where it’s like under emergency situations, we discover, oh yeah, anything is actually possible. Any policy that we’ve been fighting for can just be passed without too much debate, as long as it’s an emergency. But it’s as though daily life in which people are still impacted by these in the same way is no longer an emergency. Yeah. So it’s just to say a little context that for a couple years from 2020 to 2022, there was a moratorium and it was demonstrated that the utilities could still operate without being able to shut off the power to people who couldn’t afford to pay their bills.
So what this does is it basically bans shutting off the power to certain vulnerable groups. Ideally there would be a blanket ban. Absolutely, you can’t shut off power to anybody, but because of the political appetite, it was whittled down to elderly folks, people with disabilities, pregnant people, children under five – families with children under five, and yeah, basically if they demonstrate that they meet that criteria, then the utility is just not allowed to shut off their power no matter how far behind on their bills they are. There’s a little bit of context that I think is worth putting in here. So California has been trying to tackle this in various weak ways. So the PUC is currently debating a percent cost to reconnect after your power has been shut off. So it’s like if you have this huge amount of utility debt, which led to your power getting shut off, in order to get reconnected, you have to pay a certain percentage of that debt. So you don’t have to pay all of it, you just have to pay a percentage. And right now, the PUC has a proceeding about what that percentage will be.
There’s currently two other bills in California that relate to shutoffs. SB 24 prohibits shutoffs during bad air quality days for everybody, but if the air quality is fine, they can shut off your power. And there’s another one that’s a six month deferment for hardship where you would have no late fees added on during those six months, but ultimately, it still doesn’t protect you fully.
One of the statistics that I think is really, really important is if you take all 317,000 shutoffs that happened last year in 2024, you take all of those families who have their power shut off and all of the utility debt that led them to have their powers shut off, the total cost of that debt is the equivalent of roughly 2.5% of the profits that the utilities gave out to their shareholders.
So the money that went to Wall Street that went to the shareholders, a tiny fraction of that could have kept the power on for all of those people, but instead, wealthy people who probably didn’t even need the extra padding to their income anyway, they got a windfall. So that’s important to note. And the other important thing to note is there is precedent. Chicago banned water shutoffs for the inability to pay. There’s no qualifying, no only this category or only that category just… In Chicago, if you can’t afford your water, they won’t shut it off. And their evidence is they have a 95% payment rate. So it’s not sending them into bankruptcy, protecting the most vulnerable in society, but ultimately, shutoffs are a question of how expensive our rates are. It always comes back to that affordability question.

John Farrell :
I’m sure everybody, well, we could talk philosophically about this. I mean, I’m sure there’s the concern in the abstract that, oh, if you don’t punish people for not paying their bill, they won’t pay their bill. And yet there’s very little evidence of that, right? Most people pay their taxes, most people pay their utility bills, most people pay their car payments or whatever. It’s so funny to have this essential public service, the provision of it based on a very, I think, ill-informed idea of why people would pay or not pay, and one that seems to only be based on some notion that there has to be a punitive element to non-payment. It boggles my mind, but as part of the feasibility study sort of writ large and this envisioning of a different form of utility, you mentioned that there’s three models, public cooperative or a not private nonprofit to be considered. Is there any particular existing US utility company of those ownership types or not that feels like it’s kind of an inspiration for how you could have a more justice centered utility?

Travis Gibrael:
Yeah, so unfortunately, our best example is not a US based utility, but there is one that does exist. It’s in Germany, it’s called EWS Schönau – for all the German speakers out there, forgive me for my lack of knowledge about how to pronounce German – but EWS Schönau is a really interesting story. In the eighties and nineties, a bunch of anti-nuclear activists were really upset that their IOU was investing in nuclear power. And so they fought back. They got a ballot initiative that ultimately passed, and they took over the utility, they bought it out, made it into a co-op, but not only is it now a people owned utility, and it now serves 200,000 people in Germany, but it actually does have this justice vision at the center. So it’s antico anti-nuclear. It is 100% powered by renewables. They have all kinds of initiatives in it towards boosting social and environmental justice within their service territory. They give out grants to support others who are trying to do something similar.
So our staff actually has this dream of taking a little field trip out to Germany and visiting this utility and seeing what we can learn from them. I would say the closest example we have to home here in the United States is probably Kauai. I know you’ve talked about this in the past, but I think it was 2002, the people of Kauai formed a cooperative and bought out their IOU, and now it went from 100% fossil fuels to 60% renewables. People’s rates have come down. There’s a lot more energy democracy there, and obviously it’s a small island that doesn’t have a very high population, but this idea that the people can take over something and then better meet their own needs with it, I think is really at the heart of so many efforts towards municipalization and towards creating the world we want to live in that’s not based on capitalist exploitation, but instead on the people collectively meeting their own needs.

John Farrell :
I did interview David Bissell, the CEO from Kauai Islands Utility Cooperative probably more than five years ago at this point. I think it was pre pandemic. I think the thing that is important to point out though is that you mentioned that it is a small utility, but on the other hand, it’s also an island, literally, and when we talk about electricity, being an island actually is often much more expensive and much more challenging to deal with. You don’t have a neighboring state or a neighboring utility that you can tap into in times of distress. And so the fact that they have been able to accomplish both lowering rates and increasing renewables in a cooperative structure as an island in my mind, actually speaks even more highly to that business model as a way to provide electricity service. Then it says that it’s not applicable, for example, due to its size. So anyway, I just wanted to note that I think Kauai could be a really good model that we could look to here in the US.

Travis Gibrael:
One more thing I’d like to add on that is just a shout out that two efforts that have not yet succeeded but have been a big inspiration. There’s the effort in Maine for Pine Tree Power. I know that a lot of the provisions that they wrote into how the new utility would operate do have a lot of justice components, especially around renewables, especially for workers and economic justice questions. And I listened to your episode where you interviewed Sarahana Shrestha in New York State, and their effort to transform the Hudson Valley IOU into a public entity I think is actually a really strong parallel, except for the fact that pg e is one of the largest utilities in the country and has an iron grip on California state politics. And I don’t think the Hudson Valley IOU has the same kind of political power. But their effort is also writing a lot of justice provisions into how this new utility would operate. So we’re really inspired by their work.

John Farrell :
Well, Travis, thanks again for the amount of time that you’ve taken with me to describe the work that you’re doing and really dive deep on this bill. What is the next step for SB 332 if people want to follow along or even get involved in seeing what its progress might be?

Travis Gibrael:
Yeah, so this is a really exciting moment. If you’re listening to this podcast in April of 2025, the bill is going to be heard in committee on April 21st. It’s a Monday. That’s the utilities committee. The judiciary is the following week. Basically, the bill has to pass out of committees by early May in order to be heard on the Senate floor. Then in June passing on to the assembly. It’s a moment where amendments could come in. Some of the things I’ve talked about on this podcast could no longer be in the bill by the time you hear because of how politics works. But we don’t want people to think of this bill as all of the work that’s being done. The bill is in a lot ways, a North star, which is an organizing strategy. It’s about building narrative. It’s about building culture, and it’s about convincing the people of Northern California or even all of California that alternatives are possible. You just need to find the political will to do it.
And the more people who tune in to this fight and say, I want to participate in it, that’s what builds people power. We don’t believe that Sacramento would make the change on their own, but the more voices that they hear pushing back and speaking up all across the state, that’s how change happens. I will give a shout out that on April 24th, we’re going to have a major action in Sacramento. We’re going to pack the CPUC, we’re going to have a lobby day for the bill. We’re going to have a press conference and a rally. People from all over the state are going to be present for that. The people of California just need to make it clear to their lawmakers that this is something that really, really matters to them, and it’s a change that they really, really want to see. And so yeah, the more jurisdictions that make a big statement about this, the more people that are calling their legislators, your assembly members, your senators, it’s like everything else. It’s only the power of the people rising up as a unified voice that will force lawmakers to make hard changes.

John Farrell :
Well, Travis, thank you again for joining me, and I wish you the best of luck in the coming weeks here with your North Star and with this effort to hold this terrible utility accountable in California.

Travis Gibrael:
Yeah, it’s been a real pleasure talking with you today.

*****
John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with Travis Gibrael, research and popular education organizer at Reclaim Our Power, a coalition of over 90 environmental justice organizations in Northern California. On the show page, look for links to an overview of Senate Bill 332 and the Reclaim Our Power coalition. Also, we’ll have links to the Local Energy Rules podcast episode 226 with former utility executive Mark Ellis, and episode 92, with Kauai Island Utility Cooperative CEO David Bissell. Local Energy Rules is produced by myself and Ingrid Behrsin, with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschbach. Tune back into Local Energy Rules every two weeks to hear how we can take on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local, and thanks for listening.