FRIDAY AGGREGATE: ERRA Updates, Wildfire Math and CRI's 1-Year Birthday

Good morning from the West Coast.

California's three largest investor-owned electric utilities have updated their 2027 procurement forecasts, with lower resource adequacy and market price benchmarks producing different rate impacts for bundled and departing-load customers. All three forecast decreases in average bundled rates, while departing-load customers face increases, most steeply at SDG&E.

Elsewhere, new proposed decisions address cost-recovery requirements for utility undergrounding, the 2027 Wildfire Fund charge and expanded use of flexible grid connections to defer infrastructure upgrades. The CPUC's Safety Policy Division also identifies significant deficiencies in SCE's wildfire risk modeling ahead of its 2029 General Rate Case.

On the natural gas side, PG&E seeks a procurement incentive award and, separately, recovery of previously uncollected interest on gas transmission and storage costs.

NEWS & NOTES: Today marks the one-year anniversary of California Regulatory Intelligence. We'd like to thank everyone who has joined us on this wild ride, and we are especially grateful to all paid subscribers of CRI.

As Andreessen Horowitz recently noted, some of the best advice for new businesses is "don't die." And a year into our existence, CRI is still here. We didn't die. In fact, CRI will be adding a membership coordinator to better facilitate group and team subscriptions. So whether your organization wants 10 seats or 100, we can easily accommodate you. More info on that will be available soon.

And if you're wondering "why subscribe to CRI?" the answer is this: we have elite procedural fluency, rate literacy and institutional knowledge, and we can help shockproof you from late-discovered regulatory surprises.

Our main selling points:

• CRI replaces manual docket monitoring and rate-sheet excavation. We identify material filings, cover voting meetings and workshops, and analyze advice letters, rate changes, and regulatory frameworks.
• CRI aggregates a flood of information to facilitate genuine transparency. We believe that transparency without curation is opacity. Regulatory agencies have vast, never-ending document feeds and investor-owned utilities have public-facing information that is hard to use. We can help.
• We've been performing sophisticated document analysis for nearly two decades at high-profile energy law firms: speed-reading complex filings and exhuming rate schedules from opaque documents, long before AI tools became ubiquitous.
• We are read by your peers and your competitors. Law firms, government personnel, investors, developers, traders, utilities and community choice aggregators.
• Our competence extends beyond California. We have extensive knowledge of RTOs, ISOs and Canadian wholesale electricity markets. (See our growing body of work at RTO Insider.)
• Our resume also includes advisory work with a cryptographic startup competing in a DOE program, plus strategic communications with a nuclear energy developer and advocates for consumer-regulated electricity. When we published a Substack interview with the latter group, the story inspired action by a New Hampshire legislator, whose subsequent bill is now law.

If you follow the CPUC and its sister agencies, sign up today or contact us directly to discuss team access. Organizations can also engage CRI for embedded intelligence or bespoke regulatory support.

Thanks again to everyone who has been with us the past year. We are extremely grateful for your support and interest.

-- Michael Cade, Founder, CRI