California Low Income Discount Enrollment Could Expand by 1 Million

The California Public Utility Commission will decide on June 27 whether to adopt automatic enrollment for low-income customers in the utility discount program known as CARE or California Alternate Rates for Energy. The Commission's Administrative Law Judge issued a draft decision in late May recommending that over one million low-income households now enrolled in LIHEAP and/or several health and welfare programs be added to the CARE discount through automatic enrollment.

Currently, CARE provides a 20 percent discount to eligible customers of six investor- owned utilities (Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, Southern California Gas, Avista, and Southwest Gas). Just over 2 million households who are at or below 175 percent of federal poverty guidelines are now enrolled at a cost of around $244 million. The Commission estimates some 3.2 million are eligible. The Commission's goal as cited in the draft decision is 100 percent participation. Enrollment of an additional one million customers would cost an additional $182 million.

During the past year, in the wake of California's energy crisis, the utilities have conducted a massive "rapid deployment" effort to enroll more households in CARE as well as in LIEE, the utility funded Low-Income Energy Efficiency program. From May through December of 2001, the utilities reported increasing their CARE penetration rates through expanded outreach and the rapid deployment initiatives. For example, of the four largest utilities, all are now above 50 percent penetration, and Southern California Edison reported 88 percent penetration.

The draft decision sets a schedule for each utility to meet penetration goals, assigns a role to the commission as administrator of data exchange for the automatic enrollment process, and outlines a methodology for utilities to compute penetration rates using updated census data.

Page Last Updated: December 7, 2005