I spent some time digging into this a while back. I think this is a really poorly thought-out policy, in part b/c it's conflating three separate issues: 1. Low

I spent some time digging into this a while back. I think this is a really poorly thought-out policy, in part b/c it's conflating three separate issues: 1. Low and moderate income families should be able to afford their energy bill, and the "basic" energy use going forward may need to be higher esp as people need AC more of the year, etc. 2. There's a push to move people off natural gas appliances and onto electric appliances sooner rather than later, with the intention that eventually almost all of that electricity would be from green sources, and similarly to encourage people to switch to EVs. In order to do that, they partly want the marginal cost of electricity to be lower for everyone, even for people who end up paying more per month than they do currently. Everyone's supposed to feel an incentive to switch appliances. 3. There's a claim that the current pricing structure means that people with PV setups aren't paying their fair share for grid/infrastructure maintenance. Paying ~$0 for power b/c you use ~0 kwh shifts the 'burden' for maintaining the grid to people that don't have the ability to install solar. You can be in support of point 1 ... but we already have subsidies for low-income residents. If we need to expand those, we should have those conversations! But part 2, lowering the marginal cost of power by use has multiple downsides: - it _does_ penalize people who conserve energy. My own PG&E bill may roughly triple, in a small, well-insulated urban condo without AC. And because the income brackets are _so wide_, someone who makes substantially more money and who uses substantially more energy (e.g. private pool, EV, large house) can see their bill _decrease_ due to this change! - it's not clear that incentivizing people to replace appliances (or vehicles) before the end of their useful lives is a net carbon-saving move; the intrinsic carbon is real - for the medium term, a substantial fraction of CA power does still does come from natural gas; increasing home electricity use which does not replace home natural gas use (e.g. just running your AC more days b/c it becomes cheaper) will in some cases mean _more_ emissions - as an incentive structure, it's not even clearly effective; e.g. landlords won't be pushed meaningfully to update appliances which would lower their tenants energy bills - if it worked really well, and everyone tried to move to all electric appliances and EVs next year, the grid may not be able to handle it anyway Part 3 is a concern, but I don't think this is the way to address it. This says that people making over 180k would be paying up to $1536 just to be connected to the grid, before they draw their first kwh of power. People who are within reach of generating enough power to live off of will be nudged to consider disconnecting entirely. If they take that exit ramp, are the rest of us better off in any way? Lastly, of course, a fee that basically everyone in the state will be obliged to pay, which is based on income ... seems a lot like an income tax, but it's going to a private company. In my case, that company is a felon with multiple convictions.