Southern California Edison rate increases for southern California customers coming in April
SANTA BARBARA COUNTY, Calif. – Southern California Edison (SCE) announced its plan to increase electricity rates for southern California customers starting in April, according to the city of Santa Barbara.
The increases will impact both residential and business customers, with residential customers seeing about a $5 increase to their bill each month and businesses seeing about a $10 increase per month, according to Bryan Latchford, spokesman for the city's trash and recycling team.
The increases are in response to energy market changes, SCE's energy storage measures to support grid reliability, and wildfire risk reduction, Latchford said.
"The energy market is affected by many factors, but it appears the drought and a natural gas pipeline explosion last fall are the key drivers of the higher costs of energy procurement that we are all seeing," said Acting Sustainability and Resilience Director Alelia Parenteau.
"Added to these factors are Edison's increased costs to improve the energy grid so that we all have more reliable service during extreme weather events and have better infrastructure in place to reduce wildfire risk."
Santa Barbara Clean Energy, which provides Santa Barbara residents with green energy delivered by SCE, said that its customers will see higher rates on both the generation and delivery charges due to the above factors.
"One of our goals in launching Santa Barbara Clean Energy is to provide cleaner electricity that supports Santa Barbarans with reserves to offset these energy market spikes in the future," Parentau said.
"Since we just launched residential service in October and commercial service in March, our program rates are positioned with Edison's to provide a stable transition for customers."
