By Parke Troutman, Utility Campaign Manager
New year, new approach to fighting SDG&E’s profitmongering!
Although SanDiego350 has long agitated against San Diego Gas & Electric and its parent company Sempra, we are excited to announce our new volunteer-led Utility Justice team dedicated to fighting for clean and affordable energy and we’re kicking it off with a training on Saturday, January 31st and SDG&E protest on Feb 2nd.
LET’S UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM WITH SDG&E…
Solar has become the cheapest form of energy globally, yet sunny San Diego has some of the highest electricity rates in the nation. Why? The explanation has everything to do with San Diego Gas & Electric, the for-profit private monopoly that distributes electricity to San Diego.
A monopoly… wait, aren’t those illegal in the United States? It’s true. Since 1890, American law has mostly banned monopolies because they charge whatever they want and they throw their weight around politically.
Yet an exception has been carved out for utility companies. Private utility monopolies are allowed to exist because competing utility companies would be chaotic. (Imagine if you had four different companies’ power lines running down your block.) The bargain, however, is that these monopoly utilities like SDG&E must follow state regulations, in our case via the California Public Utilities Commission (typically called the CPUC).
The CPUC is supposed to protect the public’s interest and ensure that rates are “just and reasonable.” Yet if you’re reading this, you know something is wrong. You probably know that SDG&E is raking in massive profits while more than one in five ratepayers locally is in debt to them. If you have or have considered getting rooftop solar, you’re probably aware that SDG&E helped gut rooftop solar. (Now they’re going after energy efficiency programs.) You might also know that they’re owned by Sempra, a transnational company focused on natural gas distribution. Which is all to say: they are acting like a monopoly without brakes.
So what’s the CPUC doing? It exists exactly to prevent abuse and yet here we are. The CPUC’s failures are often seen as an example of regulatory capture. This happens when an industry exerts tremendous influence over its regulators, both directly and over the elected officials that appoint its members and empower it through legislation. Imagine if a defendant got to choose the judge, their dozen lawyers got to have private conversations with that judge and so forth.
There is a coziness between San Diego Gas & Electric, on one hand, and, on the other, regulators and policymakers (whose numbers include not only the governor and the state legislature but San Diego City Council and the mayor, who had the opportunity five years ago to fire SDG&E but balked at the last moment). This coziness is made possible by the public’s absence from deliberations. In addition to all the ways that the CPUC is rigged in favor of the investor-owned utilities, there’s a natural tendency to try to get along with the people in front of you. And if it’s just representatives of utility companies and regulators in the room, well, you can see the results in your high electricity bills.
WHAT IS SANDIEGO350 DOING ABOUT IT?
SanDiego350 is now participating in a new statewide coalition focused on affordable clean energy. In our first campaign at the CPUC, we argued that the allowed profit rate for investor-owned utilities in California was way too high. The CPUC only slightly lowered the rate, but they rejected the utilities’ request for even higher profit rates. Similarly, you can compare San Diego City Council’s interactions with SDG&E at its annual presentations on their rates in 2024, when few people showed up to voice opposition to those rates, with when we and our allies organized turnout folks at the 2025 presentation in December. Compare the Instagram video from last month’s council hearing with, well, no one made an Instagram for the 2024 hearing because it was so perfunctory that no one would watch it.
JOIN OUR NEW UTILITY JUSTICE TEAM
Our new team will focus specifically on clean and affordable energy, using a wide variety of tactics, including advocating for state legislation, educating our local elected officials and the public and drawing media attention to SDG&E’s high rates and opposition to climate action. But it all starts with you. This is a great opportunity to help shape our campaign to fight SDG&E and win both cleaner energy and lower rates. As a budding team, we’re looking for all kinds of skills and experiences. If you would like more information about joining the team, please contact Parke at parke.troutman@sandiego350.org.
UTILITY 101 TRAINING – Jan 31st
Please join us at a training on Saturday, January 31, 2026 at 10:30 am. We’ll do an overview of how San Diego ended up with one of the very highest electricity rates in the Country, and discuss what we can do about it. Register here.
PROTEST SDG&E – Feb 2nd
Two days later, on Monday, February 2, we are also participating in an action to protest SDG&E. You can register for that here.