Anyone who believes the last few years’ spate of ultra-destructive wildfires has diminished the clout of California’s biggest privately-owned electric companies will now have to accept reality: they are as powerful as ever, if not more so.

Consider the latest achievements of Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the nation’s largest power provider and always a pace-setter for other companies like Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric.

Within the space of 14 days last fall, PG&E, with a little help from its colleague utilities, killed a legislative bill designed to provide oversight of its spending on wildfire mitigation, and then won a $944 million rate increase from the state’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to “reimburse” it for storm damage expenses and its work to lessen the chances of starting more fires.

That’s right, no one really knows exactly what PG&E or the other big monopoly utilities are doing to prevent more fires like the ones that almost pushed them into bankruptcy three years ago. But PG&E still will get almost $1 billion from its customers for whatever it is doing, or almost $6 per month from all of its more than 5.6 million customers, both residential and commercial.

More increases are coming, too. The latest PG&E increase comes atop three earlier ones this year. The other big generating firms have not gotten as many recent increases, but the precedent has now been set.

Meanwhile, by law, no utility is supposed to get a nickel from the PUC without strong evidence of how it will be spent, what the split will be between profits and funding of needed operations.

The Legislature’s killing the accountability bill, known as SB 1003, on the last day of its regular 2024 session assures that PG&E and its cousins will be back for more “reimbursements” for expenses they have not detailed, at least until something like SB 1003 finally gets passed.

It’s a further example of the power of electric companies in Sacramento, as their lobbyists continue beating back any effort to rein in utility clout. Other examples in recent years include creation of the $13 billion “Wildfire Mitigation Fund,” designed to reimburse the companies for damages assessed to them after fires they cause, and PG&E’s escape from the threat of a breakup in the wake of several multi-billion fires it caused over the last seven years.

Said The Utility Reform Network, a group that sometimes has had success in cutting down utility rate increases, “Voters have a right to be upset that elected officials put the record-breaking profits of PG&E shareholders over millions of residents struggling to pay their record-breaking utility bills. It’s unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, PG&E continues trying to justify selling off a stake in its power-generating business to the global investment firm KKR, part of the company’s plan to transfer its non-nuclear power generating functions to a new subsidiary called Pacific Generation. That new outfit — merely PG&E operating under a different name — is supposed to have a better credit rating than the parent company, which could save consumers $100 million over the next 20 years — or about a trivial 6 cents per month per customer.

If the PUC greenlights this shift, PG&E would have even more bureaucracy standing between customers and its power sources from dams to windmills to solar farms and old-fashioned power plants. That could enable it to obfuscate when it causes fires and consumer groups attempt to assess responsibility for them.

If PG&E gets away with this kind of machination, be certain other utilities will follow.

It’s just another example of how they and the PUC tout even the tiniest cost reduction to customers, but then regularly slam them with multiple rate increases amounting to far more.

This pattern will not end until there is some sort of accountability for the utilities and the PUC, which have acted with impunity in recent months, while their customers were distracted by the presidential election, campus unrest and international conflicts.

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.