PG&E recently acknowledged that it intends to have customers pay for an ongoing $6 million ad campaign, calling it “safety communications.” But critics say the utility shouldn’t be allowed to tap funds earmarked to help prevent wildfires on what they consider blatantly promotional commercials.
In the ad campaign that began last year, PG&E’s CEO Patti Poppe says that “to make our power system safer and more reliable…we’re transforming your local utility from the underground up.”
She goes on to talk about an ambitious plan to underground 10,000 miles of power lines across 21 counties that she says will make “us safer and it’s less expensive in the long run.”
PG&E recently told state legislators that it wants customers to pay for the three-year campaign out of a pool of funds known as the “fire risk mitigation memorandum account.”
But critics say that’s not what that fund is for, and the company should pay for those commercials out of its profits.
“It’s outrageous to charge customers for promotional advertising that only promotes the utility,” said Katy Morsony, an attorney with the ratepayer advocacy group TURN.
“The number one thing that people complain to me about regarding their utility,” she continued, “is that they see all these PG&E advertisements and they assume that they, as customers, are paying for them – and they ask me, are they paying for them?”
PG&E said in a statement that the ads are in response to customers wanting to know what it’s doing to boost wildfire safety and system reliability. But while Poppe boasts in one ad that the utility has buried “hundreds of miles” of power lines since 2021, critics say much of the 600 miles of lines buried so far is in previously burned areas.
Turns out this is not the first time PG&E has sought to pay for ads with wildfire money. Regulators have already authorized it to draw $15 million from wildfire funds to pay for what it calls educational ads between 2020 and 2022. That approval is interim, however, and awaits final regulatory sign off.
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PG&E says the 2020 to 2022 ads were designed to educate customers on how to “stay safe in the face of wildfire risks and the actions PG&E is taking to keep them safe.’’
But the Poppe ad campaign is clearly different, said one former regulator.
“It’s not about wildfires, it's about PG&E,’’ said Steve Weissman, a former CPUC regulatory law judge who is now with the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. “If the ad is going to be focused on the company and not on wildfire prevention, then the company and its shareholders have to pay for it, not the customers.”
Still, PG&E has resisted calls from ratepayer groups like TURN to require utilities to spell out who is paying for such ads – like the latest ones that tout PG&E’s efforts to provide a “safe, reliable and affordable energy system.”
Meanwhile, the utility has yet to formally ask regulators to allow it to pay for the ads with $6 million in wildfire dollars.
