Opinion: Southern California Edison is a predatory corporation getting rich off a basic human need

It was 103 degrees in Los Angeles today. 106 in Riverside. 107 in San Bernardino.

My Southern California Edison bill before this heat wave was $357.54. In January it was $105.20. My household hasn't changed — a laptop, a refrigerator, a coffee maker, a microwave, a heater/AC unit. What tripled wasn't my usage. It was the price SCE decided to charge.

SCE's model isn't meaningfully different from the predatory schemes that have always targeted people with no other option — payday loans, auto title loans, rent-to-own agreements, pawnshop loans. All of them share one design: find the customer with no alternative and no cushion, price the product so it never quite gets them out of the hole and profit from the gap between what they owe and what they can pay. SCE doesn't even need fine print. It has a captive, majority Black and Brown ratepayer base in the Inland Empire with nowhere else to go, and it prices electricity — a legal necessity, not a discretionary loan — the way a payday lender prices a two-week advance: knowing the customer can't cover it, and profiting anyway from the shortfall.

Let's be clear what SCE is: a subsidiary of Edison International, traded on the NYSE, its stock up more than 20 percent since January — the same months my bill more than tripled. It's a monopoly with a state-guaranteed rate of return and a customer base that can't shop elsewhere. The only real check on it is regulation, and that check has gone soft. Food prices nationally are up 25 to 30 percent over the past decade. SCE's residential rates are up more than 80 percent over the same stretch — two to three times the pace of food, with no leap in efficiency to explain it.

This isn't a faceless market failure. It has names. Pedro Pizarro, CEO of Edison International, made this choice. Steven Powell, president and CEO of SCE, made this choice. So did the board that approved their pay. I can absorb a $357 bill — I have savings, and if it came to it, I could take my kids somewhere cooler. Most of my Inland Empire neighbors cannot. We are poorer and hotter than the coastal communities down the same freeway, and SCE strips away the dignity of the multiracial working-class families who live here, the same way a title lender strips the equity out of someone's only car.

Here's the contrast SCE doesn't want you to sit with: when the company finally agrees to give a struggling customer relief, it isn't relief. Wait two more full billing cycles, then knock $90 off a $300 bill — the customer still owes $210. That's not a discount. That's a company calculating exactly how much desperation it can extract before the number looks bad in a press release.

That's not a coincidence. Rising heat, rising unemployment, the worst air in the nation, a quadrupled bill and a "discount" that still leaves you owing $210 — stacked in the same neighborhoods, on the same households — is a business model, not bad luck. It works exactly like the payday lender, the title loan shop, the rent-to-own showroom: find the customer who can't walk away, price the necessity so the debt never quite clear and let the compensation committee keep signing the bonus checks.

Do the math on what "struggling" means out here. California unemployment insurance tops out at $450 a week — about $1,800 a month, best case. Average rent statewide runs $2,700 a month. You cannot pay that rent on unemployment. You certainly can't pay it plus a $210-and-rising electric bill in July. So the state, county, and federal government try to keep you fed through CalFresh and covered through Medi-Cal — programs that require you to keep looking for work, recertify online, and show up for virtual check-ins. To do any of that, you need electricity. SCE knows power sits in the same category as water, shelter, and food — a precondition for everything else. Yet it doesn't proactively enroll eligible customers in its own discount programs. It waits for you to find the program, apply, and then wait roughly two billing cycles for an approval that, when it lands, knocks off maybe 30 percent — often less — of a bill you already couldn't afford.

So who's getting ahead? Not the roughly one in five SCE customers reportedly significantly behind on their bills. Not the median SCE employee, at about $220,000 in total compensation. Pedro Pizarro made $5.61 million in 2016, the year he became CEO. By 2025 it was $16.6 million — a 20 percent raise that year alone, nearly tripling his pay over the decade his customers' bills climbed 80 percent. Steven Powell's pay jumped 65 percent over the same period, to $6.5 million. Jill Anderson, SCE's EVP and COO — the person directly responsible for the grid that keeps failing Inland Empire families in the heat — took home $3.39 million. About 90 percent of Pizarro's pay now comes from stock awards and bonuses tied to financial results, not safety or affordability. All three got richer in a year Edison International's net profits reportedly surged more than 200 percent, approaching $4.9 billion, boosted heavily by wildfire-related cost recoveries. My rate hikes are functionally their bonus pool — the same math as a lender who profits more the longer the borrower stays trapped.

None of this has slowed the company's political spending — it's accelerated it, and shifted toward Sacramento rather than Washington. A decade ago, Edison International's state lobbying averaged around $1.7 million a year; by 2023 it had roughly doubled to $3 million. In the 2025–2026 legislative session, SCE's standalone state advocacy spending has reached $18.75 million — more than a tenfold jump in a few years, while federal lobbying has stayed flat near $850,000 to $900,000. That tells you where SCE believes its real fight is: Sacramento, where rate cases, wildfire liability and CPUC oversight get decided. SCE has built a bench of former elected officials and staffers to run that operation, the same way a payday lending trade group keeps former regulators on retainer to fight interest-rate caps.

There's a climate irony sitting on top of all this. SCE has publicly committed to 100 percent clean energy by 2045 while remaining an active member of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association that has fought federal carbon limits and slow-walked the clean energy transition its own members claim to champion. The commitment is for the press release. The lobbying is for the balance sheet — the same gap between what a rent-to-own showroom advertises and what its contracts actually deliver.

Meanwhile, roughly 80 data centers now operate in Southern California, and SCE is reportedly sitting on a queue of new data center demand totaling something like five gigawatts — much of it concentrated in Ontario, Fontana and Rialto. Warehouses and data centers increasingly pair SCE's grid with their own rooftop solar and battery storage to dodge the peak pricing residential customers can't escape. We're funding the infrastructure buildout. Someone else with capital is using it to avoid the bill.

Say plainly who absorbs the difference. The Inland Empire is majority Latino — Hispanic residents make up more than half of Riverside and San Bernardino counties' population — and it's one of the fastest-growing destinations for Black Californians priced out of the coast. Per capita income here runs at less than two-thirds of Orange County's or the Bay Area's. This region also regularly ranks worst in the country for smog and ozone, with asthma rates in some neighborhoods approaching 20 percent — and some of SCE's own gas "peaker" plants, built to meet heat-wave demand spikes, sit inside that same pollution corridor. The communities breathing the dirtiest air in America are paying the most to keep the grid running and getting the least help when they can't.

California's next governor needs to treat this as the crisis it is, not a rate dispute for commissioners and utility lobbyists to negotiate quietly. Real reform means binding rate limits tied to what households can actually afford, automatic enrollment in discount programs instead of a two-month application gauntlet, and an end to executive pay that scales with profit while ignoring affordability. Short of that, the state should be willing to convert utilities like SCE into publicly held ones. A utility that answered to ratepayers instead of shareholders would have no reason to profit from a heat wave — and no reason to treat a basic human need like a payday loan with a meter attached.

Let me say it directly: it's time for California to replace for-profit corporate utility monopolies drunk on fossil fuel subsidies and corrupting our politicians with lobbying dollars. We need publicly owned utilities delivering 100% clean, reliable and affordable power across the Golden State.