California must extend BioMAT to fight wildfires and protect jobs | Opinion
On Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first day in office, he held a press conference on wildfires and called on state agencies to do more to fight the growing wildfire crisis. Since then, wildfires have only grown more deadly and more expensive. Yet the California Public Utilities Commission is scheduled on Dec. 18 to end an important wildfire reduction and climate protection program, called the Bioenergy Market Adjusting Tariff Program (BioMAT), which requires utilities to buy power from small local projects that convert forest and other organic waste into energy.
The CPUC’s decision to end this program will cause serious harm across the state, including the loss of hundreds of good jobs and nearly $100 million dollars of federal and state funding. Ending the tariff program will also take an important wildfire mitigation tool off the table — even though the CPUC has acknowledged that wildfires are the single biggest cause of increasing electricity costs.
Tribes, water agencies, fire protection and resource conservation districts have all asked the comission to extend the program. As the state’s water and wastewater agencies have noted, the tariff program increases energy reliability for emergency and essential services, including water pumping needed to fight fires.
The CPUC’s decision to end the tariff program is painfully ironic and just plain wrong: First, the Newsom administration frequently criticizes the federal government for ignoring the law, but the CPUC (with five commissioners appointed by the governor) will violate at least two state laws by ending this program before the requirements of those laws are met.
The Newsom administration also criticizes the Trump administration for ignoring science, but the public utilities comission is doing the same thing by ignoring the state’s many climate change, air quality and wildfire reduction plans that call for the tariff program.
Newsom recently touted the jobs benefits of this tariff program’s projects in his California Jobs First initiative, but he will kill those very same jobs by letting the CPUC end this project.
The California Public Utilities Commission’s hypocrisy is deeply troubling: The agency has repeatedly found that the program helps mitigate wildfires and provides other important public health, safety and climate benefits. Now, it’s claiming that it is ending the BioMAT program to save ratepayers money, but it has never quantified the supposed savings and ignores the actual ratepayer savings that this program provides by reducing wildfire costs and increasing energy reliability.
Ironically, while the CPUC is about to end the tariff program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture just approved a loan guarantee for a $42 million forest BioMAT project in the Central Sierras. Both the Newsom Administration and the U.S. Forest Service have provided funding to this project to reduce wildfire risks in an extreme wildfire risk area. The Calaveras County Water District also supports the project, which will help ensure reliable and lower cost energy for the water agency and surrounding community. It will also create good jobs and economic development in a low-income county.
All of this funding and these benefits will be lost, however, if the comission adopts its proposed decision to end the BioMAT program on Thursday.
Newsom was very clear about the urgency of reducing wildfires, the need to follow the science and the law and the importance of protecting public health and safety. The governor should remind the CPUC that those are still the state’s priorities. That means continuing the BioMAT program to reduce wildfires, provide reliable clean energy and create good jobs and economic development.
Julia Levin is the executive director of the Bioenergy Association of California and former deputy secretary for climate and energy at the California Natural Resources Agency.
This story was originally published December 16, 2025 at 5:00 AM.