Southern California Edison (SCE), one of California’s big three investor-owned utilities (IOU), is implementing significant increases to their bundled electric rates. Starting Monday, April 13, 2020, SCE will raise rates by an average of roughly 7%, which will affect all categories of ratepayers. As stated in SCE’s recently filed Advice Letter 4172-E-B, the rate increases are targeted to increase SCE’s revenue requirement by $477.6 million dollars.
These rate increases were previously approved as part of SCE’s 2018 General Rate Case (GRC) settlement agreement, so the changes were previously known to be coming. But the timing for implementation is obviously not ideal considering that this comes during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, the entire state of California is under a shelter-in-place order, which was originally announced by California Governor, Gavin Newsom on March 19th.
We summarized the key provisions of the upcoming rate increase. We took it upon ourselves to dive into this untimely decision, lay out the facts, and uncover any silver linings.