The Lights Aren’t On Yet: Southern Humboldt’s Grid Lags Behind California’s Green Ambitions

This is the fourth in a series of reports from Assemblymember Chris Rogers’s April 4 town hall in Southern Humboldt. Previous pieces covered federal Medicaid cuts and their impact on local healthcare, Rogers’s AB 1984 and the fight over corporate money in elections, and state forestry legislation. Future reports will cover the proposed Garberville Business Improvement District and the nationwide U.S. Forest Service restructuring.

The first question out of the gate at last week’s Garberville town hall with Assemblymember Chris Rogers cut right to it: if the state is pushing hard for electric vehicles and clean energy, what exactly is Southern Humboldt supposed to do about it when the grid here is already maxed out?

Rogers sits on the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee and came prepared. He cited a new analysis by Sonoma Clean Power, the public community choice energy provider for Sonoma and Mendocino counties, finding there is no available electrical or transformer capacity anywhere north of the Sacramento Delta to support new renewable energy projects. We were unable to locate that analysis as a standalone public document, but the finding tracks with CAISO’s own interconnection heatmap, which shows no deliverability for new projects in Northern California based on its most recent study.

The problem isn’t just local. Transformer shortages are a nationwide crisis, with lead times for large power transformers now running two to three years and demand up more than 100% since 2019 as electrification accelerates across the country. Transformers are the physical bottleneck between the power that exists and the power that can actually reach homes and businesses.

The state can mandate EVs and clean energy all it wants. Without the hardware to move electricity from the grid to where people live and work, those mandates collide with physics. Communities across Northern California have been told to slow or stop housing development because the grid can’t support new hookups, even as Sacramento sets ambitious timelines for going all-electric.

Developers won’t invest where infrastructure doesn’t exist, and under the current planning process, infrastructure doesn’t get built until developers invest. “The first step is making sure that we have the planning in place to be able to deliver the infrastructure needed for electrification, for renewable energy projects,” Rogers said. “And I’ll tell you, it’s a bit of a chicken and the egg problem.”

That planning runs through the CPUC, which works alongside CAISO to decide what infrastructure gets built and where. Together they look at what housing and projects are coming and determine where transformers and transmission lines need to go. The math favors places that already have density and development in the pipeline. Rural communities with fewer projects on the books get left out, even though they’re the ones who, arguably, need the investment most. About two weeks before the town hall, Rogers had both agency heads in front of his committee.

“We beat them up a little bit about this,” he said. “The way that they fundamentally plan their infrastructure disadvantages communities that don’t have that in place.”

PG&E, the Regulator That Works for the Utility, and What Your Bill Pays For

You can’t talk about the grid in Northern California without talking about PG&E, and you can’t talk about PG&E without talking about the agency supposed to keep it in check. California already has the highest residential electricity rates in the continental United States, sitting at roughly 33 cents per kilowatt hour as of early 2026, nearly double the national average. PG&E customers specifically have seen rates climb 43% over the last three years alone, and the CPUC approved six separate rate increases for PG&E in 2024 while the utility posted record profits. The number one driver of those increases, Rogers told the room, is wildfire mitigation costs. But, he said, PG&E had been making the problem worse deliberately.

*PG&E Statement on Rates: Regarding rates, in March, PG&E lowered residential bundled electric rates for the fifth time since January 2024. PG&E’s most vulnerable customers have seen residential bundled CARE rates decrease by 23% over that time, and the average bill for a CARE customer using 500 kWh per month is about $30 less monthly. Non-CARE residential bundled rates have dropped 13% and the average monthly bill is $23 less (500 kWh/month), compared to January 2024. This reflects our ongoing commitment to managing energy costs for all our customers.

“The number one reason that your utility rates are going up is the costs related to wildfire mitigation. We fixed some of that last year because PG&E was intentionally doing the more expensive projects and getting a higher rate of return for them.”

That gets at a deeper problem Rogers named directly. The CPUC, the body charged with regulating PG&E and the state’s other large investor-owned utilities, has, in Rogers’ view, stopped doing its job.

“The system is fundamentally broken with the way that the CPUC regulates PG&E,” Rogers said. “I think they are the very definition of a captured regulator. Many of the decisions that they make are about keeping PG&E out of bankruptcy and not about holding PG&E accountable for what they need to do.”

The term “captured regulator” describes an agency that has come to serve the interests of the industry it’s supposed to oversee rather than the public. It’s a charge that has followed the CPUC for years and not just from outside critics. Former CPUC president Loretta Lynch has said publicly that the commission became too cozy with PG&E, saying “when PG&E says jump, instead of asking why, they say how high.” A CalMatters opinion piece by Lynch published last year documented how the CPUC ignored independent audits showing PG&E couldn’t account for hundreds of millions in wildfire funds it had already collected, then approved more funding anyway. Rep. Josh Harder introduced legislation this year banning former CPUC commissioners from lobbying for utilities, citing data showing nearly half of commissioners since 2015 walked out the door and into utility lobbying jobs.

For a sitting assemblymember who serves on the Utilities and Energy Committee to use the same language publicly is notable. Rogers sits at the table where these decisions get made.

All five CPUC commissioners are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate, making the upcoming governor’s race a direct lever on energy policy. Rogers urged residents to press candidates on their CPUC intentions before the June primary, pointing out that with no political celebrities in this race, rural communities have more pull than usual.

The Solar Wrinkle Nobody Talks About

One of the sharper exchanges of the evening came late, when a community member raised the state’s solar buyback policy and what it means for people trying to reduce their reliance on PG&E.

Here’s how it works. If you have solar panels, any extra power they generate during the day that you don’t immediately use gets sent back to PG&E’s grid. Until 2023, PG&E credited you close to the full retail rate for that power, roughly 30 cents per kilowatt hour. Then the CPUC cut that buyback rate by about 75%. Now PG&E pays solar customers around 4 to 9 cents per kilowatt hour for the power they send back, while still charging those same customers 30 to 45 cents per kilowatt hour to buy power during evening peak hours.

When PG&E buys solar power during the day at cheaper rates, the utility stores it in its own utility-scale battery systems, (the company now has over 4,600 megawatts of battery storage under contract), and then sells power back from those batteries during high-demand evening hours at full retail rates. The solar customer generates the power, sells it for pennies, and then buys it back at a significant markup.

The CPUC’s stated rationale for the buyback cut was that daytime solar floods the grid when demand is already low, and that non-solar customers were subsidizing the credits. The result has been a sharp drop in rooftop solar installations statewide, with the financial case for going solar without also buying your own home battery system having largely collapsed.

That’s the contradiction at the heart of the state’s green energy push. California says it wants more people to go solar. But the regulatory structure now makes it financially punishing to do so unless you can afford to add a battery storage system on top of the cost of the panels themselves, putting it further out of reach for working households.

Rogers ran into the same wall last year when he carried legislation letting large energy users generate their own power on-site rather than drawing from the grid. Businesses and industrial facilities that generate their own power are customers PG&E can no longer charge for electricity. That bill, Rogers said, went nowhere.

“The challenge we ran into in Sacramento was PG&E, San Diego Gas and Electric, SoCal Edison, they want to make sure that electricity ends up on the grid and helps fund other things like wildfire mitigation,” Rogers said.

It is the same dynamic at every level: a utility financially rewarded for keeping customers grid-dependent, a regulator, critics say, that prioritizes that utility’s solvency over ratepayers.

What’s Actually Happening on the Ground

After the town hall, we followed up with Second District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell, who has been out front on PG&E issues for the communities in her district hit hardest by the grid limitations.

Bushnell confirmed the broad strokes of what Rogers described but added ground-level detail. The Fortuna grid upgrade is nearly finished, she told Redheaded Blackbelt in a phone interview. Applications for new hookups there are moving. The Tesla battery packs for Fortuna’s city hall and sewer plant which sat idle for years are finally online.

Southern Humboldt’s situation is more complicated. The $33 million transmission upgrade running from Cottonwood to Bridgeville, then to the Alderpoint substation and into Garberville, is in progress and on track to be complete by the end of 2028. Bushnell said she has seen construction at the Alderpoint substation and has no reason to believe it isn’t moving forward.

Tesla battery packs going in near Petrolia are another piece of the puzzle. Once in, they’ll charge during off-peak hours and backfill the line, freeing up some capacity from Petrolia into the Garberville area.

“People are getting movement on their applications from two years ago,” Bushnell said. “They’re getting calls saying, ‘Hey, we can hook you up next week.’ Those are smaller hookups — homes, smaller businesses. But it’s movement.”

*PG&E Statement on Humboldt Capacity: PG&E is committed to providing safe and reliable energy to our customers while supporting economic growth across Humboldt County. Each month, PG&E evaluates new business applications and coordinates closely with distribution planning teams to connect customers.

Over the past three years, PG&E has connected 711 customers who otherwise could not have been served without the investments and updates made to our system. We are open for business—and doing so more efficiently. By connecting more customers at a reduced unit cost, we help lower overall costs, which benefits all customers through more affordable energy.

This progress has been enabled by strong collaboration among our local teams and the implementation of a strategic capacity plan. In 2022, 10 significant projects were identified to increase capacity in Southern Humboldt. To date, seven projects have been completed, with three more underway, strengthening infrastructure and expanding access to reliable power.

Key Southern Humboldt capacity initiatives include, but are not limited to:

• Substation upgrades completed in Rio Dell and Garberville, with additional work beginning this year in Fort Seward.
• Significant transmission enhancements now in the final stages of design, with implementation planned soon to support growing energy demand across the county.
• The Petrolia Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), the first project of its kind in PG&E’s service area, scheduled for completion by the end of 2026. This project will serve as a proof of concept for using innovative technologies to better utilize existing distribution infrastructure and support new load.

Cannabis Operators and the Generator Question

Another energy issue on Bushnell’s plate involves cannabis cultivators and generator use. Reader messages came in this week asking whether the county is eliminating generator use for cannabis licenses.

The short answer is: it depends on when you got your permit and what’s written into it. Humboldt County’s original cannabis land use ordinance didn’t address power sources at all, meaning older legacy permit holders may have no generator restriction on their books. That changed with the county’s updated Commercial Cannabis Land Use Ordinance, which requires mixed light and nursery operations to run on grid power or on-site renewables like solar. Newer conditions of approval began including specific end dates for generator use, with at least some permits carrying a cutoff of January 1, 2026 for anything beyond emergency backup.

Bushnell’s advice to operators is straightforward: read your permit.

“They cannot blanketly say no more generator use if your permit allows for it,” Bushnell said. “Refer to your conditions of approval.”

If your permit includes an expiration date for generator use, that date stands. If it doesn’t, you’re within the terms of your permit and can continue operating, according to Bushnell.

The harder situation belongs to cultivators who have done everything asked of them. They applied for grid connection. They received a will-serve letter from PG&E. But for some larger commercial hookups, the grid simply doesn’t have the capacity right now to bring them online, leaving operators stuck in the queue through no fault of their own. Their paperwork is in order. PG&E has acknowledged them. The infrastructure just isn’t there yet.

“We’re supposed to punish them because they have done everything they have been required for their conditions, and they are not getting hooked up by PG&E?” Bushnell asked rhetorically. She was on the phone with one such operator the morning we spoke. “That is no fault of their own.”

Bushnell said she expects the county to recognize those cases and work with operators rather than penalize them for a failure that sits with the PG&E grid issue, not the grower. Those cultivators have the paper trail to prove it.

As for state oversight, regardless of cultivator panic spreading over ongoing inspections by Department of Cannabis Control, the state isn’t the enforcement pressure point here. Generator use is a Humboldt County ordinance, not a state regulation.

That jurisdictional reality matters. It means the conversation about generator timelines stays local, between operators and the county, not the state.

Which brings it back to the grid, and to a difficult truth about where Southern Humboldt finds itself right now. The cannabis economy that once defined this region has contracted sharply since legalization. According to a May 2024 county report on commercial cannabis permitting, the South Fork Eel and Middle Main Eel watersheds, the heart of Southern Humboldt’s cannabis country, have seen a combined 644 cultivation operations removed since the county’s permitting process began. More sites have been shut down or walked away from than have ever been formally approved.

The grid isn’t being pushed to its limits right now, Bushnell acknowledged, but that’s not because the infrastructure problem has been solved. It’s because the businesses and operators that would have been straining it have largely gone. New outside investment isn’t lining up at the door only to be turned away for lack of power. It just isn’t coming.

“We’re not seeing that kind of development happening,” she said.

The only reason the 2028 upgrade timeline feels more manageable than it did two years ago is because the economic pressure that made it urgent has eased for the worst possible reasons. For the operators still in the queue, still holding their paperwork, still waiting on PG&E, that timeline matters. And according to Bushnell, the county hasn’t lost sight of them.

Meanwhile, the Grid

Even as California pushes forward with the most aggressive electrification goals in the country, boasting over 1.8 million EVs on the road and the highest number of charging stations nationwide, communities like Southern Humboldt are still waiting for the infrastructure to catch up with the policy. The state’s 2035 mandate to end new gas vehicle sales hit a wall in Washington this year when Congress revoked California’s federal waiver, but the state has pressed on regardless, with a $200 million EV incentive program in the works to keep the push alive.

In Southern Humboldt, the grid situation is still a real limitation to the economic development the area desperately needs. But if Bushnell’s update is any indication, the picture is at least clearer than it was two years ago. Construction is happening. Battery packs are going in. Applicants for long-stalled hookups are getting phone calls.

It’s not fixed, but it’s moving.

Articles in this series: 

• ‘We’re Trying to Do the Hard Things’, Assemblymember Rogers Told SoHum in a Town Hall Yesterday
• ‘It’s a Big Club and You’re Not In It’: Assemblymember Chris Rogers on Dark Money, Rural Power and the June Primary
• Old Trees, New Laws: Southern Humboldt Brings Its Forestry Concerns to Town Hall

Note: This article was updated after publication to correct a typo.

*Note: After this article was published, PG&E contacted Redheaded Blackbelt with additional information. That information has been added and is marked with inset boxes and an asterisk.