Have you heard the news? PG&E is reporting record profits for the past year.

Normally, this is where we’d say, “Stop us if you’ve heard this one before … because you have, going back more years than we care to count.”

But we can’t write it off even that easily. Not this time. This latest windfall is the utility’s biggest insult to the public to date, and it’s not even close.

Here’s why: PG&E made these profits by raising your rates largely under the guise of “we really need this money to keep our equipment safe” six different times in one year.

SIX times. In a year.

Let’s see a show of hands: How many of you got six raises last year? Or even one?

But PG&E pulled it off, for no other real reason than it was responsible for causing so many destructive fires in the past.

You couldn’t make up a story like this if you tried, and the fact the state of California and its ever-compliant California Public Utilities Commission allows this hogwash is obscene.

PG&E — a public utility, we’ll remind you — reported a profit of $2.48 billion for 2024. That’s up about a quarter of a billion dollars from the then-record $2.24 billion profit of 2023. (We don’t yet know how much of a bonus CEO Patricia Poppe will get this spring, but last year it was around $17 million.)

Of course, from its end, PG&E points out that the company did complete a good amount of much-needed safety upgrades — including 366 miles of system hardening with 258 miles of underground power lines and 108 miles of stronger poles and overhead components.

The company also noted that for the second consecutive year, no major wildfires were started because of its faulty equipment.

That’s good, but let’s keep this in perspective: “Not starting major wildfires” should be a bottom-line basic expectation that any public utility meets every single year, without exception. It shouldn’t turn into a cause for celebration because you actually avoided it two years in a row.

The timing of PG&E’s tone-deaf message is bad, too. On one end of the country, you’ve got a new administration bragging about how much waste it’s eliminating (accurate or not, and in many cases, that’s a “not”). There’s even talk of sending money back to taxpayers because so much of it had supposedly been wasted in the past.

Yet, we didn’t see anything in PG&E’s news release about sending any of this most recent windfall back to the ratepayers that continue to fund their ever-growing pile of cash. Huh.

In 2000, PG&E customers paid an average of 11 cents per kilowatt hour in California. Today it’s 44.65 cents. When is too much finally enough? Apparently never.

If only we had some government agency that supposedly controlled this sort of thing. Oh wait! We do! But the next time the CPUC turns down a P&E rate increase, it’ll be a first. Every one of those five commissioners draws a six-figure salary; seems to us an actual rubber stamp would be just as effective at a fraction of the cost.

“If the PUC doesn’t address the outrageous profits for PG&E coming from outrageously high utility bills, then the state legislature must do it,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Action. “Ratepayers at California’s investor-owned utilities deserve more affordable electricity.”

We agree. Now that would be news worth celebrating.