Pacific Power Wants a 57 Percent Rate Increase. What Can Crescent City Do?

November 13, 2026

By Six Rivers Solar

Pacific Power Wants a 57 Percent Rate Increase. What Can Crescent City Do?

On November 6, 2026, Pacific Power asked the California Public Utilities Commission to raise customer rates by 57 percent. The request covers about 46,000 accounts in Del Norte, Siskiyou, Modoc and Shasta counties, and the company wants it to take effect January 1, 2027. Nothing has been approved. Residents can comment on the case, check whether they qualify for bill discounts, and, if they own their home, look at producing some of their own power.

The Del Norte County Board of Supervisors does not usually draw a crowd for utility regulation. This week it did. Six residents came to the microphone, and according to Redwood Voice, the stories were variations on one theme. A farmer from Smith River described a monthly power bill that once topped out around $400, climbed to $1,000 after the last round of increases, and came back down to about $550 only after she cut everything she could cut. A union leader warned that a jump this size would force families to choose among groceries, prescriptions and electricity. She added a detail that people outside rural counties tend to miss. If your water comes from a well, the pump runs on electricity. A power bill you cannot pay is also a tap that does not run.

There is a number at the center of all this, and it deserves a careful look, because 57 percent is the kind of figure that travels faster than its explanation.

What exactly did Pacific Power ask for?

Pacific Power filed what regulators call a general rate case, the periodic proceeding in which a utility asks for permission to collect more money for running its system. The filing proposes a 57 percent increase in customer rates, worth about $103 million a year in added revenue according to news coverage of the application.

The company says a separate 14 percent rate decrease will take effect on January 1, 2027, and will partly offset the increase. It has not published a single net figure, so anyone telling you precisely what the two add up to is guessing.

Pacific Power asked for a January 1 start date. That is a request. The commission has to review the filing, hear from the public and from the state's ratepayer advocates, and then decide what is reasonable. Pacific Power itself says the review could take several months.

How much would a Crescent City power bill go up?

News reports of the filing put the increase at about $120 a month for a typical residential customer, depending on usage.

You can check that figure against the utility's own numbers. Pacific Power's customer notices use 850 kilowatt-hours a month as a typical household, and its most recent notice listed the average California residential rate at about 23.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. That works out to roughly $200 a month. Fifty-seven percent of $200 is about $115, which lands close to the reported figure. This is rough arithmetic. It ignores the offsetting decrease and the fixed monthly charge, and your own bill will move with your own usage. A household heating with electricity through a Del Norte winter uses far more than 850 kilowatt-hours, and its exposure is larger.

A local opinion writer made the point with a friend's $900 winter bill, which a straight 57 percent increase would push past $1,400. She was careful to call that an illustration. It is still a useful one, because the households with the highest bills are often the ones with the least room to adjust: older homes, electric heat, fixed incomes.

Why is the number so large?

Pacific Power's explanation is wildfire. Since 2022 the company says it has built more than 300 miles of covered power line and replaced more than 7,000 wooden poles with steel or fiberglass across its California territory. It also cites higher insurance costs in fire country and the general rise in what it costs to operate a grid. Because the company has not had a general rate increase in California since 2023, three years of that spending arrives in a single request.

There is a structural reason the number looks so severe, and it has to do with arithmetic more than intent. Pacific Power's California territory is enormous in land and small in people. The poles and wire needed to serve Smith River, Klamath, Yreka and Alturas cross a great deal of forest, and the bill for hardening them is divided among roughly 46,000 accounts. Fixed costs spread across few customers produce large percentages.

None of that makes the request reasonable or unreasonable. That judgment belongs to the commission, and it is precisely what a rate case is for. It does explain why this will not be the last large number. In 2022 Pacific Power requested an increase of about 25.7 percent for 2023. The following year it requested an adjustment that would have added about $34 a month to a typical bill. The requests keep coming because the underlying costs keep coming.

Why does this one sting more in Del Norte?

Two reasons, and both came up at the supervisors' meeting.

The first is a comparison. Eight days before the California filing, Pacific Power announced a proposed settlement in Oregon that works out to an average residential increase of 0.3 percent. The Oregon line is about twenty miles north of Crescent City. Same company, same year, and the gap between 0.3 and 57 is hard to explain to anyone who drives across it.

The second is timing. Crescent City's new water and sewer rates took effect on July 1 after a protest drive fell short of the signatures it needed. The average in-city water bill roughly doubled, from $22.49 to $46.18 a month, and sewer rose from $72.21 to $98.06, with further increases scheduled each year. At that hearing one resident told the council that utilities would go from about 17 percent of his Social Security income to about 30 percent. Meanwhile, the county has lost nearly $370,000 in federal energy assistance funding since 2024.

A household can absorb one increase. Three in a year, on a median county income of about $67,000, is a different problem.

What happens next?

The supervisors agreed on four steps: invite Pacific Power to explain the request at a public meeting, which they hope to schedule for November 24; explore becoming a formal party to the case; ask the commission to hold a public participation hearing in Del Norte County; and coordinate with Siskiyou, Modoc and Shasta counties so that four small voices become one larger one.

Individual customers have a role as well. Public comments are part of the record the commissioners read. You can send yours to the CPUC Public Advisor's Office at public.advisor@cpuc.ca.gov, and you can speak at a public hearing if one is scheduled here. Rate cases are rarely approved exactly as filed. The size of the final number depends in part on how much scrutiny the request receives.

What can a household do in the meantime?

Start with the programs that already exist, because many eligible households never sign up.

CARE gives income-qualified customers a discount of 25 percent or more on their bill.
Energy Savings Assistance provides free weatherization for qualifying owners and renters.
Medical Baseline offers additional lower-priced energy for customers with qualifying medical needs.
Time of Use plans can lower a bill for households able to shift laundry, dishwashing and water heating away from peak hours.

Then look at the house itself. In a climate like Crescent City's, electric resistance heat and an old water heater are usually the two largest lines on the bill. A heat pump or a heat pump water heater attacks the kilowatt-hours directly, and every kilowatt-hour you stop using is one that no future rate case can reprice.

Which brings us to the question a solar company would be expected to raise, and that deserves a straight answer.

Does solar make sense under Crescent City skies?

Crescent City is among the cloudiest places in California, and it is fair to be skeptical. The skepticism rests on an intuition that solar panels need heat and blue sky. They need light. Panels produce on overcast days at reduced output, and they run more efficiently in cool air than in desert heat. Germany built one of the largest solar fleets in the world at latitudes mostly north of Maine, under skies that would look familiar to anyone on the Del Norte coast. Western Oregon and Washington have done the same on a smaller scale.

Whether solar makes sense on a particular roof comes down to that roof: its direction, its pitch, the trees around it, and how much power the household uses. Those are measurable, and they vary from one street to the next.

[CONFIRM WITH SIX RIVERS: annual production figure for a typical Crescent City system, and one Del Norte installation or customer we can reference here.]

What does solar change, and what does it leave alone?

Solar changes how much electricity you buy. Every kilowatt-hour your roof produces is one you do not purchase at Pacific Power's rate, whatever that rate becomes after this case and the next one. The cost of a system is set when it is installed. It does not go before a commission every three years.

Solar does not make a utility bill disappear. Pacific Power restructured its residential rates in June 2026 around a fixed monthly Base Services Charge, and that charge stays whether you produce power or not. The credit you receive for power sent back to the grid also follows Pacific Power's rules, which differ from PG&E's.

A battery changes the picture further by letting a home use more of its own power in the evening, and it keeps the lights and the well pump running when the grid goes down. For a rural household, that second benefit often matters as much as the first.

The part you control

There is a reason this rate case has landed so hard, and the dollar amount explains only some of it. The request was written in Portland. It will be decided in San Francisco. The people who will pay it live in Crescent City, Smith River, Gasquet and Klamath, and for most of the process they are spectators.

That is worth resisting in two ways. Send the comment. Show up on the 24th if the meeting happens. Rural counties are easy to overlook, and a full record makes them harder to overlook.

And then take stock of your own house, because that is the one piece of the energy system where the decision is entirely yours. For some homes the answer will be insulation and a heat pump. For some it will be solar, with or without a battery. For some the numbers will not work, and it is better to know that than to wonder.

If you would like to see what your roof could produce, Six Rivers Solar has been installing on the North Coast since 1980, and our free solar report takes about two minutes. We will tell you plainly whether it pencils out.