California Utilities Sizes and Costs

California Utilities Sizes and Costs

Sizes of California Utilities:

There are three large private utilities that I have some data on size of power bought, and also of cost comparison. The power bought is approximate since I read it from a graph of 2016 output.

The largest Private California electric utilities are:

SC Edison bought 80 million MWh (MegaWatt hours), and lost 8% in power lines. Of that, 33 million MWh have unspecified out-of-state sources.

PG&E bought 75 million MWh, and lost 9% in power lines.

SDG&E bought 17 million MWh, and lost 6% in power lines.

In California the CCAs (Community Choice Aggregation) bought about 9 million MWh in 2017, and in 2016 had about 1.3 million customers.

In 2015, California’s total electrical energy generated was 197 million MWh. Total sales were 261 million MWh, which includes out-of-state power. The three private utilities added up to 172 million MWh of the power purchased, or about 2/3 of that, ignoring line losses.

Relative Utility Costs:

On June 14, 2015, Jeff McDonald in the LA Times compared power prices from private versus city owned utilities.

For a monthly 1,000 kWh (kiloWatt hours) bill, the charges were for Private utilities:

Edison: $255.06
PG&E: $263.86
SDG&E: $311.71

The average of these three private utilities was $276.88.

For Public utilities, the largest was Los Angeles, with a cost of $167.56. The average of 12 public utilities were $163.59.

Comparing the private to the public, the cost ratio is $276.88/$163.59 = 1.69, or roughly two-thirds more.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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