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PacifiCorp has agreed to suspend all of its ratepayer-funded energy efficiency programs in California due to their current lack of cost-effectiveness, resulting in a 0.7% rate decrease for customers, according to a Friday filing at the California Public Utilities Commission.
PacifiCorp, which serves around 46,000 customers in Northern California through its Pacific Power subsidiary, sought to keep the programs running and redesign them, but ultimately entered into a proposed settlement agreement with the Public Advocates Office at the CPUC to wind the programs down by Jan. 1.
“PacifiCorp’s EE programs have historically not provided cost-effectiveness benefits to ratepayers and, indeed, show a decline in performance in recent years,” Cal Advocates said in a November filing. “Additionally, cost-effectiveness projections for PacifiCorp’s proposed redesigned portfolio show meager improvement and fail to deliver benefits to ratepayers that exceed program costs.”
Cal Advocates wrote that PacifiCorp had conceded “that it has not met overall portfolio metrics or cost-effectiveness standards and has struggled to maintain savings levels in its existing programs. For example, savings from the Wattsmart Business program have declined by roughly 75 percent between 2022 and 2024, while total portfolio savings fell by 40 percent in 2024 alone.”
