A top California Democratic lawmaker is asking state regulators to crack down on utilities’ profits.
What happened: Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, chair of the Assembly’s Utilities and Energy Committee, is asking the California Public Utilities Commission on Monday to reject the state’s major investor-owned utilities’ requests last week to recover money from ratepayers to boost shareholder returns, according to a letter her office provided exclusively to POLITICO.
She has given other lawmakers until the end of the day to sign onto her letter asking the CPUC to reject the rate of return applications submitted last week by Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, Southern California Gas and San Diego Gas and Electric.
The letter asks the CPUC to deny the utilities’ requests to raise their returns on equity by approximately 1 percent, conduct its own independent analysis of return on equity and encourage alternative financing models to attract investment.
