SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A major California gas company has been ordered to pay the state nearly $10 million and reimburse customers for money it improperly spent on work related to developing energy-efficient building codes.
The penalties faced by Southern California Gas Co. faces were ruled Thursday by the California Public Utilities Commission.
The commission, which regulates California’s major utilities, banned the utility from spending taxpayers’ money on building code advocacy in 2018 after the internal watchdog found the utility was fighting standards designed to make homes and businesses more energy efficient. to make.
Between June 2018 and January 2021, SoCalGas continued to send employees and consultants to participate in workshops, conference calls and meetings on the development of new state and federal building standards and also withheld important information from the committee, the ruling said.
The utility showed “profound, blatant disrespect for the authority of the commission,” the commission wrote in its ruling.
Christine Detz, a spokeswoman for the utility, said in a statement that the utility was reviewing the decision and looked forward to “further involvement in this matter.” She declined to comment further on Friday.
The $9.8 million fine is much less than the $124 million fine requested by the commission’s watchdog group and by Earthjustice, an environmental legal group involved in the proceedings.
But the fine sent a strong message, said Sara Gersen, a senior attorney for Earthjustice.
“SoCalGas has been rogue for too long, trying to undermine California’s climate goals and keep Californians dependent on polluting gas appliances. It’s good to finally see some measure of responsibility,” she said in a statement.
SoCalGas distributes natural gas to nearly 22 million consumers in Central and Southern California, according to its website.
It’s not the first time the utility has been embroiled in controversy. A blowout in 2015 at the utility company Aliso Canyon storage facility took nearly four months to get under control, becoming the largest known natural gas leak in the country’s history. The utility and parent company, Sempra Energy, settled with 35,000 plaintiffs last year for $1.8 billion.
This week, the utility settled another lawsuit related to the leak that alleged it violated a California law requiring companies to warn people about potential exposure to toxic chemicals. reported the Los Angeles Times:. The agreement requires the utility to pay $1.55 million to the Center for Environmental Health, which filed the lawsuit, the state and legal counsel, Detz told the Times.
The Public Advocates Office of the California Public Utilities Commission, the taxpayers’ watchdog group, has also claimed that the company improperly used tax money for activities to promote the continued use of natural gas in buses and to convince cities not to encourage electrical appliances in new construction. Detz, the utility’s spokeswoman, did not immediately comment on those claims.
California has set some of the country’s most ambitious clean energy goals, and to achieve them will require phasing out the use of natural gas.
This is already happening in a number of cities that have banned gas appliances in new construction.
The California Energy Commission dropped the requirement that new construction must be all-electric in its most recent update to: state building regulations. But the use of electric heat pumps is encouraged and new buildings must be “electrically ready” even if they use natural gas.
Meanwhile, a recent research by California researchers found that gas-fired stoves emit more methane than previously thought, even when turned off. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
California utilities are allowed to spend taxpayers’ money to participate in state and federal efforts to update building standards, but only if they promote stricter standards, not weaker ones.
In 2017, the Public Advocates Office found that SoCalGas had used taxpayers’ money to fight against the adoption of stricter building regulations that would reduce the need for natural gas.
That prompted the Public Utilities Commission in 2018 to ban SoCalGas from using taxpayers for activities related to new building standards, regardless of the utility’s position. It did allow them to transfer taxpayer money to other utilities working on such issues.
The $9.8 million fine is a result of the utility’s continuing to engage in that work by sending employees and consultants to participate in workshops, conference calls and meetings on the development of new state and federal building standards. , the committee wrote in its decision on Thursday.
The bulk of the fine is a $10,000 levy per day for 960 days, from June 1, 2018 to January 15, 2021. The ruling also limits incentive payments to shareholders related to energy efficiency programs.
How much money the utility company will have to pay back to taxpayers has not yet been calculated.