Sacramento, CA — Eleventh-hour California legislation creating a regional grid eliminates all the guardrails added by the Senate and opens California consumers to price gouging, having to pay for coal power and federal preemption of California’s public health, environmental and cost containment laws.
AB 825 (Petrie-Norris, Rivas, Becker) was only put in print at 5:43 AM this morning, so it cannot be heard by the legislature until Saturday morning in the last hours of session, leaving no time for debate or amendment.
The bill removes all the important checks and balances amended into SB 540 (Becker) in the Senate.
“Shame on the legislature and Governor for participating in this eleventh hour power grab that rewrites the state’s electricity laws to give a blank check to the energy traders that control the regional organization to charge whatever the market will bear and use whatever polluting power source they want,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog.
“This bill flies in the face of everything we have learned as a state about allowing free market traders to set the price of our electricity and trusting Trump’s FERC not to disregard our clean energy laws. Every legislator who votes for the bill will be complicit. We urge legislators not to vote on AB 825, which is a modern repeat of AB 1890, the 1996 disastrous deregulation law passed unanimously at the end of session. The legislators who voted for AB 1890 never lived it down and neither will those who vote for AB 825.”
AB 825:
• Releases the Independent Systems Operator (ISO) and the regional organization (RO) from following California’s anti-price gouging law — requirements of Public Utilities Code 345.5(b), the Enron era law that required that electricity operators had to maximize supply and minimize price (erasing a Senate amendment in SB 540 that required the Code to apply.)
• Allows for coal power to be mandated by FERC and weakens California’s right to withdraw by allowing Trump’s FERC to mandate additional withdrawal conditions (erasing Senate amendments that sought to address both issues ).
• Allows for controversial capacity markets (prohibited under the Senate version) that are the big cost drivers in East Coast grid manager PJM, because it requires the reserving of capacity whether or not the electricity is used.
• Permits the entrance into the Western grid without the prior approval of the legislature or constitutional officers (removing a guardrail the Senate added).
AB 825 is opposed by the Consumer Watchdog, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Working Group, Former PUC President Loretta Lynch, Indivisible, Public Citizen, TURN (The Utility Reform Network), and The Protect Our Communities Foundation.
Read the full analysis by former PUC President Loretta Lynch.
Court noted how the recently deceased Senate leader John Burton adamantly opposed electricity regulation in a recent memo to the legislature asking them not to vote on AB 825.
“John Burton is rolling over in his coffin over AB 825,” Court said.
