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PG&E asks California regulators to approve a 22% rate hike (www.nbcbayarea.com)

submitted 1 year ago by farcaster to c/bayarea

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During the first quarter of 2023, PG&E earned $623 million, an 18.2% jump in profits from the $527 million the company tallied during the same quarter in 2022, PG&E said Thursday in a quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I want to know how a utility made $17B in profit.

That’s about $425 per resident of California, FWIW.

Net income, after expenses are completely deducted, was substantially less - $406,000. About $10 per resident of California.

If you really do want to know what the money comes from and is spent on, I’m pretty sure it’ll be in the financial reports in much more detail.

Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-electric/net-income

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You have read these charts wrong. The 17B figure is 12-month trailing gross profit. You are referencing quarterly net income (and you've also made a typo, saying 406 thousand instead of 406 million). If you want to compare the "per resident" calculation (which I don't even see the point of), make your units match. Trailing 12-month net income is 1.944B, so more like $50 per person.

Now to make the "per resident" metric actually have any meaning:
First, if we're talking yearly profit skimming off of a utility, our goal is to estimate overcharges per billing address. Census data reports about 38.9 million residents and an average family size of 2.92 - but that's not enough, because PG&E doesn't serve the entire state. They serve about two thirds of the state - taking this into account, a very rough estimate (because population isn't evenly spread across a state) is that they service 8.7 million households. Thankfully for us, they directly report how many households they serve, and the actual number is about 5.2 million.

$374. The average yearly bill for a PG&E customer is $374 pure profit for the company. Now that's a more useful metric.

Oh, and that's assuming none of their operating expenses are inflated - which they likely are. So that's a lower bound for how much they're ripping off each household.