PG&E continues its sacred duty of keeping the lights on (and the bills skyrocketing) for roughly 16 million hapless souls across 70,000 square miles of northern and central California. 

From foggy northern-most sleepy town Eureka down to Bakersfield, and from the Pacific ocean to the Sierra peaks, this utility behemoth serves the San Francisco Bay Area, Fresno, Sacramento, and a patchwork of farms, suburbs, and mountain towns. 

With about 5.5 million electric accounts and 4.5 million gas ones, PG&E serves homes, businesses, factories, and orchards alike. Because who doesn’t love a monopoly that touches every part of daily life?

The company’s new 2027–2030 General Rate Case is a masterpiece of understatement: an 8% revenue grab in 2027 alone ($1.24 billion extra), followed by 6.1% annual hikes. 

PG&E, ever the optimist, promises your combined gas-and-electric bill will stay basically flat in 2027 thanks to some expiring temporary charges. 

The California Public Utility Commission’s Public Advocates Office, however, isn’t buying the corporate fairy tale. 

It projects average bills jumping 16% in 2027 and a wallet-crushing 30% by 2030. 

Translation: The typical household gets slapped with another $444 a year starting in 2027, climbing toward $840 extra annually by 2030. 

Ouch. This on top of monthly energy bills that already might be several hundred dollars –– and for some, significantly north of that? Because nothing says “customer-focused” like steadily climbing bills in one of the world’s most expensive states.

Enter California’s brilliant solution: Force everyone onto all-electric everything. 

Cities and the state are madly in love with heat pumps, induction stoves, and EV chargers, shoving them down throats via building codes, subsidies, and pious ordinances. 

Natural gas, you see, is so last century. 

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As customers obediently switch, gas volumes drop, and PG&E’s fixed pipeline costs get spread across fewer customers –– hello, classic “death spiral” of ever-higher per-therm rates. 

PG&E itself cheerfully advertises that heat pumps could save you ~$714 a year. 

Reality, as usual, is less shiny. 

Retrofitting a home for full electrification can easily run $10,000 to $30,000+ –– new heat pumps, bigger electrical panels, wiring upgrades, the works, even after rebates that never cover everything. 

Renters? Low-income families? Owners of 1950s houses with sketchy wiring? They often get hammered hardest. 

Then there are the charming electric-rate realities: sky-high baseline prices and time-of-use pricing that punishes you for cooking dinner or charging your car when the sun’s down. 

Those promised savings? They have a funny way of evaporating when your actual electric bill is already among the nation’s highest. 

Meanwhile, the grid needs billions in upgrades in part because of all this glorious electrification. 

Customers end up subsidizing their own expensive conversion while natural-gas holdouts foot the bill for an increasingly empty pipeline network. Truly a policy triumph.

No wonder San Francisco –– ever the trendsetter –– is throwing a tantrum and demanding a divorce from PG&E. 

After a century of flirtation, the city dusted off its municipalization dreams.

Because clearly, the same city government that struggles with homelessness and crime will nail electricity pricing and wildfire hardening.

Of course, wildfire safety and grid modernization are real needs, not corporate greed. But California’s regulatory kabuki and breakneck decarbonization timeline have produced exactly the mess you’d expect: soaring monthly bills, painful upfront conversion costs that hammer regular families, and escapist fantasies about municipal takeovers that would likely make things worse. 

The state’s electrification crusade might sound noble until you’re staring at a five-figure invoice and a summer bill spike. 

California desperately needs adult supervision and a pivot to sane energy policy.

Until then, PG&E ratepayers will keep enjoying the privilege of funding Democrats’ green dreams, one painful monthly bill at a time. 

Richie Greenberg is a political commentator based in San Francisco.