Another PG&E horror story

My wife and I live in Mariposa and are having serious issues with PG&E and our bill with their company. To provide background information, we have lived at the same home for two years and are on solar power with a large industrial-sized array on our rented property.

After our first year living here, we ended our year with a $0 balance and a large credit on our PG&E bill at the end of the “true-up period,” which is essentially a year’s worth of billing cycles. We produced far more power for PG&E than we used that year.

A year later, at the end of our second “true-up period,” our bill was just over $3,000. A 3,000 percent increase. We did not make any changes to our power usage that would warrant that much of an increase.

After spending a significant amount of time in April talking with PG&E customer service representatives, we were able to conclude that PG&E’s transformer on our property was faulty and it was pulling more power from the grid, which was inflating our bill. PG&E confirmed with us that this was the case and told us they’ would be correcting our bill. From June 2023 to January 2024, the faulty transformer on our property, which PG&E replaced in January 2024, did not allow us to send any power back to the grid from our solar panels, which made PG&E believe we generated no power. The day the transformer was replaced was the first day that our usage reports show we sent power to the grid since June 2023.

In May 2024, when we received our new bill, it had been adjusted down to $1,000, which would still reflect a 1,000 percent increase in usage up from our $0 bill, which we received at the end of our “true-up period” in 2022.

We called PG&E again and requested an update. They told us all of the corrections to our bill had been made and they would not correct it any further. All of the usage data from June 2023 to January 2024 show estimations “based on historical data.” If PG&E is truly using historical data, our bill for 2023-24 would reflect the usage from 2021-2022 and we would have a charge closer to the $0 we had the previous year.

We spoke further with PG&E customer service representatives who confirmed that our power usage had been reassessed using historical data, but not our power generation, which was not adjusted at all. We have disputed that for the last month and PG&E refuses to adjust our power generation for the period from June 2023 to January 2024.

Adding to the frustration, PG&E customer service representatives have confirmed that our usage and generation is showing that we’re on pace to have no charges again at the end of the true-up period in April 2025. In three months since our new “true-up period” began, we’ve earned a credit of $536 because we send PG&E far more power than we use from our solar panel array.

In the meantime, while we dispute this bill, PG&E is still making us make payments on our “corrected bill” from April. We started a payment plan, and so far, have paid PG&E more than $200, which we believe we should not have to pay in the first place. They’ve said if we do not make payments on the disputed bill, they’ll shut off our power.

PG&E, simply put, is taking advantage of us because of its own faulty equipment. The same faulty equipment which has started wildfires all over the State of California. The company has filed for bankruptcy because of the damages caused by wildfires that started from their faulty equipment and pushed the costs of that bankruptcy back onto its customers through fees and rate increases. Take a look at your PG&E bill and note that you’re paying for their wildfire relief fund and wildfire hardening.

Now we feel that they’re taking further advantage of us as individual customers due to their confirmed faulty equipment on our property. We’ve tried to work with them to correct this billing matter for three months and now feel we need to alert our local news stations, our elected officials and the California Public Utilities Commission to try to get help in correcting this unjust billing matter.

We have records of all of the conversations we’ve had with PG&E, all of our support ticket numbers as well as more than two years of usage and generation data to support our claim. We’d be happy to share this with any parties interested in following up with this submission.

Tony McDaniel
Mariposa