What do the Gifford Fire and our exorbitant electricity rates have in common?
It’s hotter and drier now, exacerbating both wildfires and the cost of electricity. Global warming, better known as global heating, has raised the frequency, size, and price tag of wildfires. In the early 1980s, the annual cost to Cal Fire to suppress California wildfires was $14 million. That’s increased to $3.7 billion for fire protection, resource management, and fire prevention as of 2021-22.
The cost to fight fires seriously impacts our electricity rates. Electrical equipment causes less than 10 percent of wildfires, but those fires tend to happen during and because of heavy winds, so they end up accounting for roughly half of California’s most destructive fires. PG&E went into bankruptcy in part over its roughly $30 billion liability for wildfires in 2019.
The cost to produce the energy itself is just a small fraction of the utility bill, regardless of the source.
From 2019 through 2023, the California Public Utilities Commission authorized PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric to charge $27 billion to ratepayers for wildfire prevention and insurance costs. More than half of the rate increase went for vegetation management and hardening the grid to prevent wildfires. Between 2021 and 2024, PG&E buried 800 miles of power lines, at a cost of between $3 million and $4 million for each mile, with approval for $3.7 billion to bury another 1,230 miles of lines through 2026.
PG&E and the other utilities pass those costs to ratepayers. PG&E raised electricity rates 41 percent in the last three years and 101 percent in the last 10 years. The other utilities have also had similar expenses. The result is that California has the second highest electricity rates in the country, and one third of those utilities’ low-income customers fell behind in paying their power bills.
A large part of those wildfires is caused by climate change. The trillions of tons of CO2 we’ve emitted into our atmosphere have trapped massive amounts of heat. This extra heat, in turn, has changed our weather patterns, making it generally hotter and dryer where we live. Each year, California now has 78 more hot, dry days primed for wildfires than we did 50 years ago. The dry vegetation has turned our forests into a giant tinderbox, and those fires have become more destructive and expensive.
In order to halt the rising costs and destructiveness of wildfires, we need to stop global heating. That requires switching from gasoline and natural gas to electricity. EVs are already cheaper to own and operate in the long run, and heat pumps for home and water heating are on a par with natural gas, without the toxic emissions that pollute our homes. However, up-front costs are prohibitive for some, and many just aren’t ready to make the leap from gas and gasoline to cleaner, more efficient electricity. So, in order to do that, we need to lower the cost of electricity so it becomes the obvious and accessible choice for more people.
We can reduce our electricity rates by 10 percent by using more cap-and-trade revenue to increase the “climate credit” on our utility bills. Assembly Bill 745, currently in committee, aims to do that. We can effect a much larger rate reduction by taking the huge costs of wildfire prevention out of our utility bills. To do that, we may need to create a fee for developers who want to build at the wildland urban interface. That would shift the cost of fighting wildfires onto those building homes in harm’s way.
Ultimately, it’s not electricity itself that’s so expensive in California. It’s living in a state that is prone to wildfires, and we have been putting those wildfire costs into our electricity bills.
Let’s stop complaining about how much electricity costs in California and put the blame where it belongs—wildfires made worse by climate change. Then, we can address the root of the problem.
George Hansen writes to the Sun from Arroyo Grande. Send a response for publication to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 9 – Oct 16, 2025.