{"id":499181,"date":"2026-10-17T11:20:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T11:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/499181\/"},"modified":"2026-10-17T11:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T11:20:11","slug":"sky-high-ladwp-bills-light-up-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/499181\/","title":{"rendered":"Sky-high LADWP bills light up social media"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Social media and online forums are aflame over higher than usual Los Angeles Department of Water and Power bills, with some customers noting recent charges hundreds of dollars<\/a> over what they paid in previous billing cycles and years<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Residents are posting bills they call \u201coutrageous,<\/a>\u201d \u201cinsane<\/a>\u201d and \u201cextremely crazy<\/a>\u201d as charges for summer use<\/a> continue to hit mailboxes. Canter\u2019s Deli made headlines when its owners received a $35,700 bill<\/a>, up almost $11,000 from four months earlier. <\/p>\n

Recent increases in sewer and trash fees, plus steadily rising water rates<\/a> and higher summer water use are partly to blame. But Angelenos\u2019 ire has been especially directed at electricity bills<\/a> as the extra AC needed during triple-digit heat waves landed people in the utility\u2019s higher-cost tiers, which also have been rising. <\/p>\n

\"Climate <\/a> <\/p>\n

Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science.<\/p>\n

More than 24,000 people have signed a petition<\/a> calling for the city to investigate the bills and adjust the tiers. It was started by a San Fernando Valley man who received a $2,115 electric bill for his 2,500-square-foot home that he said he kept at 74 degrees between the months of August and September.<\/p>\n

Electric bill sticker shock is common for customers of investor-owned utilities, but less so for municipally owned utilities such as DWP.<\/p>\n

Denise Grab, clean energy project director at UCLA\u2019s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said over the past three years, Southern California Edison<\/a>\u2018s rate for the typical household using 500 kWh per month has risen about 4% while DWP\u2019s has gone up 45%. But Edison still charges about 20% more than DWP<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re closer than they were last year,\u201d when she published a report comparing the two utilities<\/a>, Grab said. She also expects Edison rates to rise further when wildfire liability from the Eaton fire hits.<\/p>\n

DWP says its recent high bills are driven by spiking power use during the record-breaking summer heat, especially for air conditioning, not by rate increases. <\/p>\n

Most of its residential customers are in a three-tier price structure that changes seasonally.<\/a> As people consume more power, they are bumped into Tier 2, where electricity is more expensive, with the highest rates in Tier 3, which is only in effect from June through September. The pricing is designed to encourage people to use less electricity and cover the costs of providing power, DWP said. The utility adjusts the rates based on its costs before billing customers. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis year was especially difficult,\u201d said Joe Ramallo, chief customer officer at DWP. \u201cIt was so much hotter this summer than the prior.\u201d <\/p>\n

The city\u2019s independent ratepayer advocate Timothy O\u2019Connor agreed that high temperatures were a big driver of the skyrocketing bills, with more people moving into Tier 2 and Tier 3. But he added that rates have also been rising, with sharper increases in recent years as the utility catches up on infrastructure spending at a time when costs have gone up across the board. <\/p>\n

DWP controlled its increases pretty well from 2015 to 2023, he said. \u201cRates were going up, but they indexed really close to inflation.\u201d This year and last, however, rates have gone up \u201cwell in excess of inflation,\u201d O\u2019Connor said. <\/p>\n

From January 2025 to this October, Tier 1 rates went from 22 cents per kilowatt hour to 27 cents, a 23% increase in a year and a half. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis spending is core to keeping this utility operational,\u201d O\u2019Connor said, noting it has gone for valuable things like upgrading big transmission lines as well as the more local distribution lines, plus climate initiatives such as switching a coal plant in Utah to run on natural gas, with plans to convert it to hydrogen. Unfortunately the spending comes as climate change drives increasingly extreme heat waves and higher electricity use. \u201cIt\u2019s probably only going to get worse,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Ramallo said most DWP customers stay within the first two tiers and don\u2019t hit Tier 3, even during heat waves. <\/p>\n

There is a lot people can do to control their electricity use in the heat, he said. The utility recommends setting air conditioners to 78 degrees, closing curtains during peak sun hours and using fans to circulate the air. DWP also has payment options<\/a> to smooth out higher and lower bills, assistance for those who have difficulty paying, and energy efficiency incentives, such as rebates for attic insulation and more efficient equipment, including pool pumps. <\/p>\n

Ramallo said Micah Reed, who started the online petition, used six times the power of the median customer and the utility has offered him an energy efficiency audit, but Reed hasn\u2019t taken them up on it. (\u201cI asked them if they\u2019re going to make that available to every LADWP resident and they have not replied,\u201d said Reed.)<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor said he\u2019d like to see the utility allow more people into the low-income bill assistance program and reduce payments to customers with solar, which he said raise bills for customers across the board. He\u2019d also like to see the utility update its rate structure to better price power based on the times of day when it\u2019s most in demand.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we can get policies in place that accurately price energy and reward people based on when they use energy, that would help,\u201d he said. He noted that such rate reform, and boosting assistance to low-income customers in Los Angeles, is made difficult by Proposition 26, which limits the utility\u2019s ability to charge for anything other than the direct cost of providing power. <\/p>\n

Reed\u2019s online petition has attracted the attention of city Controller Kenneth Mejia, who said last week that he would investigate. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Controller\u2019s Office has received thousands of requests from frustrated Angelenos who are outraged by their unusually high LADWP bills,\u201d Mejia said in a statement. \u201cWe are specifically interested in understanding why certain rates have increased, how the Tier structure can trigger significant cost increases, and what more can be done to assist customers with these higher bills during peak seasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experts say the increases are likely to keep coming. A recent presentation <\/a>of DWP\u2019s long-term power plan modeled rates reaching 71.1 cents per kWh by 2044.<\/p>\n

As for this season, residents probably have another big charge coming, as many have not yet received their September bills reflecting the state\u2019s highest electricity use in four years<\/a>, and there was another major heat wave in October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Social media and online forums are aflame over higher than usual Los Angeles Department of Water and Power…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3653,8808,1750,9182,10527,193712,172557,193716,48,52,51,47,50,49,193714,592,193713,16019,193715,21699,72],"class_list":["post-499181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-bill","tag-cent","tag-cost","tag-customer","tag-dwp","tag-higher-cost-tier","tag-infrastructure-spending","tag-joe-ramallo","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-micah-reed","tag-people","tag-power-bill","tag-rate","tag-triple-digit-heat-wave","tag-utility","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}