Commentary: Becerra's plan for free midday electricity would be a leap forward

Gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra has called the clean-energy transition “necessary and urgent” and has promised to make lowering power bills the center of his energy policy — which is key to electrifying everything.

That wasn’t always clear. During the primary, Becerra, a Democrat, was criticized for a lack of ambition on climate, including by me. But, against Republican Steve Hilton, who calls California’s climate policies “stupid,” Becerra is clearly the better choice.

The more I see of his plans, the more I realize voting for Becerra isn’t settling. He could be a great climate governor. His campaign recently announced a proposal called Power Hour. It would provide up to two hours of free electricity every day in the middle of the day, when the sun is brightest and power is cheapest, for millions of working families. I’ve argued for this idea before, because it could transform how we use our grid.

Right now, our grid is cheapest and cleanest in the middle of the day, when solar floods the system with abundant power. We have so much that California’s grid operator currently throws away more than 10% of our solar power during the spring. And it’s so cheap that, in the middle of the day, wholesale electricity sometimes costs less than nothing: Power plants will actually pay someone to take their energy because they have too much.

Yet our utilities mostly charge the same rates at noon as at midnight, when electricity is the dirtiest because gas plants are running. Power Hour fixes that. If midday power is free, families have every reason to charge their car, heat their water tank, and pre-cool their home while the sun is shining, storing that cheap clean energy for later. It’s a way to save the midday sun and spend it after dark.

Under Becerra’s plan, the free hours apply automatically to electricity bills, with no new paperwork. It could save a family about $1,000 a year.

There’s precedent for this idea. Australia began running a program with three free hours in July. Households can use up to 24 kilowatt-hours of free power in that window — more than the average California household uses in a day. That’s enough to run the dishwasher, do the laundry and charge an electric car at no cost.

As of this month, California has started its own pilot program, too. Clean Power Alliance, which supplies electricity to much of Los Angeles County, is giving more than 4,000 randomly selected households free power from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day for two years. Participants will still pay delivery charges on that electricity, but the power itself costs nothing. And nobody can lose: If a family’s bill ends up higher than it would have otherwise, the difference will be paid back. Researchers at UCLA are tracking whether free midday power gets people to shift when they use electricity.

But Becerra’s plan to bring this idea statewide could be undercut before he even takes office. California’s utilities commission is rushing through a new rule that could raise the fixed charges on every household’s bill. That’s the fee you pay before you even turn on a light switch, no matter how little power you use. California’s current fixed charge, set in May 2024, is already the highest in the country. Now regulators are considering moving another huge expense into those fees: wildfire costs, which run an estimated $250 to $490 a year per household.

Regulators want families to keep paying for wildfire costs in electricity bills. But that’s terrible policy. Utility equipment keeps sparking wildfires in a climate that fossil fuel pollution has made hotter and drier. So why should families and wildfire victims foot the bill? Utility shareholders and oil and gas companies should pay. Former state Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones has proposed a way to make that happen: a bill letting insurers and fire survivors sue fossil fuel companies for climate damages. That’s a far better approach.

Hiding these costs in fixed charges will only make things worse. When more of your bill is fixed, there’s nothing you can do to bring it down. Not rooftop solar. Not a battery. Not turning off the lights. Not even shifting to free midday hours. This would do a lot to ruin Power Hour before it even starts. Plus high fixed charges are regressive: the households using the least power will get hit hardest, and those are often the families already struggling to pay their bills.

The governor’s race isn’t the only one that matters for power bills. Los Angeles runs the Department of Water and Power, its own utility, making the L.A. mayor’s race important for energy policy, too. State regulators don’t control it, so Power Hour wouldn’t automatically reach the city. What’s worse, LADWP’s rate structure is stuck in the past— 2008, to be precise. For almost two decades, the utility has charged its highest prices from 1 to 5 p.m. on weekdays, when cheap solar floods the grid, and its lowest at night, when it’s burning expensive, dirty gas. That’s backward. The next mayor, whether it’s Karen Bass or Nithya Raman, needs to fix this fast. And making power free at noon would be a great place to start.

Statewide, Power Hour is just the beginning of the new climate leadership we sorely need. Becerra can also protect kids from extreme heat in classrooms, which are topping 100 degrees. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Legislature created a school electrification fund to replace old gas furnaces with clean electric heat pumps that cool classrooms and improve ventilation. But this year, Newsom let the program die, just days after half a million kids in Southern California had their school days disrupted by extreme heat. Becerra can bring it back. And he could also make it easier to aggregate batteries across the state, which would keep power bills down for everyone and particularly help lower-income solar customers in the Inland Empire and Central Valley.

The other candidate for governor, Hilton, has no plans to do any of this. Hilton promises to ramp up fossil fuels, back the Sable oil project off the Santa Barbara coast and scrap our environmental policies. He’s a climate laggard.

Ultimately, the choice for governor this November is simple. Becerra wants to save the midday sun and help us spend it after dark. Hilton wants to keep us in the dark ages, burning fossil fuels. California should choose the sun.

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Leah C. Stokes is an associate professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of “ The Carbon Wave” and writes the newsletter “ Notes From the Electric Era.”