For restaurants, retail shops, farms and small offices across Lake and Sonoma County, electricity is one of the largest and fastest-growing operating expenses on the books. PG&E’s pending rate case gives a clear view of where it is headed next.
What Is Filed for the Years Ahead
PG&E’s pending General Rate Case, filed in 2025, requests:
- An 8% revenue increase for 2027
- 6% annual increases for 2028 and 2029
A general rate case is a request, not a settled outcome. The Commission reviews it, and final figures generally differ from what was filed. But the direction of the filing is the useful signal, and it points the same way the last decade has.
Delivery Is Where the Growth Is
Transmission and distribution charges — the cost of delivering energy rather than producing it — are up about 13% this year, and are expected to keep growing for the next several years.
This is the part of the bill worth watching most closely. Delivery charges are largely insulated from fuel prices, so they do not fall when natural gas is cheap. They fund grid hardening, wildfire mitigation and infrastructure work — and in territory like ours, that work is not slowing down.
Look at your own bill and find the delivery portion specifically. For many commercial accounts it is now the larger half, and it is the half least likely to reverse.
Why This Matters for a Solar Decision
A commercial solar system is a twenty-five year asset. Its value is the electricity you do not buy over that period — which means every increase in the rate you would have paid makes the system you already own worth more.
That is the part businesses tend to underweight. A solar investment is not only a reduction in this month’s bill. It converts a portion of your energy cost from a line item that gets repriced every year by a proceeding you do not participate in, into a fixed cost you have already paid.
The larger your daytime consumption, the larger the portion you can convert.
What Solar Does Not Do
Worth saying plainly: no system takes a commercial bill to zero. Fixed charges, non-bypassable charges and the energy you draw after dark all remain, and they are subject to the same rate case as everything else.
What a right-sized system does is take the largest controllable piece — your daytime energy consumption — off the table. That is the piece rate increases hit hardest, because it is the piece you buy most of.
What to Do With This
Pull your last twelve months of bills and look at two things: the total, and the delivery portion as a share of it. Then ask what portion of that a right-sized array would retire.
That is the calculation that matters, and it is one we will walk through with you using your actual numbers rather than a general claim about rates.
Request a free consultation and we will work through your bills with you.