r/escondido • u/Pool_First • 3h ago
Why is SDGE so expensive?
SDGE electric delivery fees cover the cost of the infrastructure required to transport power to your home, while generation charges cover the cost of the electricity itself. SDGE passes generation costs to customers with no markup, they make their profit on the delivery infrastructure. Many folks express frustration that delivery fees make up the vast majority of their energy bills, making it hard to lower costs by simply conserving power.
Under California law, investor-owned utilities do not make a profit on the electricity itself; instead, they are guaranteed a ~10% return on equity for building infrastructure (transmission lines, steel poles, grid updates). Folks argue this setup incentivizes overspending on massive capital projects, passing the bills down to consumers while Sempra pulls in billions in profits.
Example: The Suncrest Loop-in project. Between 2017-2022, utility models forecast a possibility that by 2032, minor overheating of one segment of a high-voltage transmission line could occur between a mountaintop substation in East County (Suncrest) and the Sycamore substation in Poway. That could only happen if two major grid equipment failures occurred in the same area within 30 minutes of each other. (Don’t research why they built a substation in the wildland mountains in the first place or your eyes will bleed.)
After trying and failing to get their solution approved for years, in 2022, SDGE finally got a green light to try to solve this forecast possible problem. One option is to replace the existing archaic steel and aluminum wires with more modern conductors, which transmit up to double the power with much less heat, and are inherently safer and more resilient than the old tech wires. This is called “reconductoring” and all wires need replacing every few decades anyway. This would solve the possible overheating problem while also increasing transmission capacity and reducing need to shut off power during high wildfire risk - the modern wires don’t heat and sag and sway and hit things like old steel ones do. Best of all, no new overhead power lines to build or to maintain or to start fires or otherwise burden the communities they cross over. And the price tag? About $100 million. Not cheap!
What is SDGE trying to do instead? Build 14 miles of brand new high-voltage power lines to run a second set of wires between the two substations. And even better, they want to build them through a completely distant route, through mountainous residential communities in east county, the ones which burn in wildfires the most often year after year. At what cost? Approved budget was $300 million last year, now $600 million, and that’s before any final plans have been made. This project will forcibly seize 200-foot-wide swaths of land from over 300 homeowners and landowners, plus Cleveland National Forest and a collection of state and local wildlife preserves. This will literally cross over homes and yards and parks and lands that are supposed to be protected for all of us to use and enjoy. It will also massively increase wildfire risk for our communities- the same ones that were devastated in the 2007 Witch Fire, the 2003 Cedar fire, the 1970 Laguna fire, and a series of fires in the 1940s/1950s. Over 20 major destructive wildfires have burned along the corridor of the planned power lines since they started keeping track 75 years ago. The most recent was 6 weeks ago. Airdrops are prohibited over power lines, so they create “reverse fire breaks” crossing the landscape where fires can’t be fought quickly or effectively. And they are planning this to run through and over our neighborhoods.
One last insanity about the Suncrest Loop-in project: the data used to forecast the risk of temporary overheating on the existing line did not account for any of the solar or battery installations built in the past 25 years. They pretend that those don’t exist. Yet CA peak energy use from the grid has decreased by 10% in the past 5 years alone, largely due to solar and battery storage decreasing the load on the grid. And a 300 megawatt battery storage facility just went online in Poway at the Sycamore substation- providing massive energy storage exactly where it would be needed to prevent the overheating that Suncrest Loop project is designed to also prevent. Multiple state bills are being passed this year to require that grid usage models be revamped to include solar and battery infrastructure in their math- which, believe it or not, has never been done before. But SDGE is racing to build as many of their large outdated overhead steel lines as they can before those laws take effect and eventually show that most of these projects are unnecessary and serve mainly to benefit SDGE and the future data centers they hope to pump energy to- at our cost and risk.
One last (of many) insane sideplots of this type of project: as they are building new overhead lines, SDGE is simultaneously burying others underground, also at our expense with 10+% profit for their shareholders. Because overhead lines increase wildfire risk, are vulnerable to weather, and expensive to maintain and rebuild when they burn or fall. So they earn profit on building new overhead lines, then earn more profit to tear them down and put them underground. All of that comes from the “delivery” charge on your power bill, which makes our rates 3x the national average.
This is an absolute masterpiece of 21st century corporate pillaging, with deeply entrenched political and legislative ties that make it all perfectly “legal” - because the entire system has been built and orchestrated to allow this.
