Creative Commons/Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

Electric power lines in San Francisco

Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s residential customers could be slapped with new monthly fees, and its most energy-efficient and lowest-income customers could face additional fee hikes.

The California Public Utilities Commission is scheduled to rule Thursday on the company’s proposal to charge all of its residential electricity customers a flat fee of at least $2.40 per month.

The company is also proposing to increase rates for customers who use the smallest amounts of electricity, in an effort to reduce the bills of big energy users, such as residents of energy-inefficient McMansions in the far stretches of the East Bay.

After California's energy crisis, when electricity prices skyrocketed early last decade, the state ordered PG&E to reduce prices for low-income residents and customers who use the least electricity. To subsidize the reduced prices, rates are higher for customers who consume a lot of electricity.

Now, after 10 years, PG&E is appealing to regulators to allow it to close that price gap.

The proposal represents “the most significant changes in residential electric rate design in the last decade,” CPUC Administrative Law Judge Thomas Pulsifer wrote in a report that commissioners will consider Thursday.

PG&E also wants to replace a rule that allows it to send monthly bills of at least $4.50 per customer, regardless of how little electricity is used, with the ability to charge flat monthly fees of $2.40 for customers with very low incomes and $3 for everybody else.

More than 85 percent of PG&E's customers would see bill increases of 10 percent or more, while 5 percent would see their bills go up by 20 percent or more if the proposal is approved Thursday, according to Pulsifer.

The proposal has been widely criticized by utility consumer advocates, alternative energy companies and groups representing low-income Californians.

The Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit that represents communities of color, estimated that the rate changes would cost customers in the Central Valley who use little electricity an extra $18 per month. Those living in cooler parts of the Bay Area would be hit with slightly smaller fee increases, spokesman Bruce Mirken said.

“We’re looking at something that really is going to rob Peter to pay Paul, when Peter is the person who makes less money and is using less energy,” Mirken said. “That strikes us as wrong and going in completely the wrong direction.”

PG&E, however, argues that the rate changes would correct an imbalance that unfairly impacts its biggest customers.

Prices charged to those who use more electricity are “far above the cost of service, and far higher than the rate charged by other California utilities, and most other utilities in the United States for that matter,” company attorneys wrote in a filing with the CPUC.

“[T]hese simple and common sense proposals have been met with remarkable responses that defy common sense and fair public policy,” the attorneys wrote. “[I]t would appear obvious that changes are necessary.”

CPUC Commissioner Mike Florio said he would recuse himself from voting on the proposal because he fought against the rate hikes while working previously as a staff attorney for The Utility Reform Network.

"I was a witness in that case," Florio said in an email. "Would love to vote but can't."

Florio was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown as one of two consumer advocates on the five-person panel, but he has been forced to recuse himself repeatedly from votes on issues affecting PG&E rates because of work undertaken in his former job.