Important developments in California for utility affordability
You probably need all three
California’s Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is working on establishing methods to measure affordability for utility service. The CPUC governs ratemaking for the state’s investor-owned water, energy, and telecommunications utilities.* The idea behind the CPUC’s process is to craft sensible, valid metrics to gauge low-income households’ ability to pay for essential services.
As part of their efforts, CPUC has been reviewing the latest academic research on affordability measurement. I was involved in this process through a series of conversations with CPUC staff and a workshop in San Francisco earlier this year. It’s been fascinating to watch the CPUC grapple with this important issue, and gratifying to see principles that I’ve advanced take shape in policy.
The room where it happens...
Comprehensive measurement
I spend a lot of time thinking, researching, and writing about water affordability; other scholars think about energy and telecom—that’s how industries and disciplines are organized. But of course, the same people who use water utilities also use electricity, gas, telephones, and Internet service. The affordability of any one of these services depends in part on the prices of all the others. So a realistic picture of utility affordability has to include all of them.
What’s particularly exciting about the CPUC’s current work is that they’re crafting a single affordability metric to capture the cost of all these utility services. That requires defining essential service levels for each service, measuring the prices for those levels of service, and estimating the ability of low-income households to pay for that bundle of services in combination. It’s an analytically daunting task.
Principles in practice
The CPUC staff took up the challenge, and crafted a smart proposal for comprehensive affordability measurement. The proposal sets essential water supply at 50 gallons per person per day (gpcd), Essential energy is set at “baseline quantities,” with end use studies underway. Telecom essential services are defined as 20 Mbps, 1024 GB/month, and 100 minutes per month. The total price of essential service for all three is the real cost of utilities.
The proposal then uses a combination of three metrics to assess affordability: the Affordability Ratio (AR), Hours at Minimum Wage (HM), and the Ability to Pay Index (API). Each of the metrics offers a different but important perspective on affordability. Here’s how the CPUC report summarizes the three metrics:
The report describes each metric in detail and discusses the ways that they can complement each other. I won’t lie—I’m pretty geeked to see the first two of those, since I introduced and have been evangelizing for them in the water sector. CPUC staff have picked up these principles and run with them.
The CPUC affordability rulemaking process is ongoing, but this staff proposal is an exciting development in utility pricing.
© 2019 Manny P. Teodoro