Both companies stand to make millions, if not billions, providing electricity to the new high-speed rail lines if the controversial project is approved.

“Of course they support it,” Kenneth Button, a transportation policy expert at George Mason University, tells the Washington Free Beacon. “They’re going to make a lot of money.”

A 2008 report commissioned by the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) described why utility companies should support the high-speed rail project: “The [high-speed rail system’s] relatively stable and large demand for energy…should make it an excellent customer for the utilities or retail sellers of renewable energy.”

According to a 2011 analysis prepared for the California High-Speed Rail Management Team, total electricity usage for the proposed rail system would be—“conservatively” speaking—about 8.32 million kilowatt-hours (KWh) per day. That works out to a little over 3 billion KWh per year.

According to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), customers of PG&E, Southern Edison California, and San Diego Gas & Electric, the state’s third largest utility, paid an average rate of about 15.2 cents per KWh.

At those rates, the total utility bill for the project would amount to about $1.26 million per day, or more than $460 million per year.

That figure would increase as more renewable energy sources are used to power the system. The Fresno Bee reported last year that the CHSRA expected to purchase renewable energy, at a substantial premium, for about 17.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. At that rate, the annual cost would rise to about $550 million.

PG&E and Southern California Edison, through its parent company Edison International, have heavily invested in renewable energy in recent years as they strive to meet statutory requirements under California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, which mandate that 20 percent of the utilities’ electricity come from renewable sources by 2010—and 33 percent by 2020.

High-speed rail projects often create windfalls for utility companies, Button said, which is why they are one of several interest groups that have consistently lobbied for high-speed rail throughout the country and in other parts of the world.

PG&E, for instance, spent $20,000 in support of California Proposition 1A in 2008, the passage of which authorized the sale of $10 billion in bonds for the construction of high-speed rail.

Both companies have also given considerable amounts of money to the political proponents of high-speed rail. California governor Jerry Brown (D), who actively campaigned on the issue in 2010, received $31,580 from PG&E and $25,000 from Southern California Edison that year.

Despite a number of setbacks, including a January 2012 report from the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group that warned the project, as currently conceived, could be “an immense financial risk” to the state, Brown has not budged in his support for high-speed rail.

“Critics of the high-speed rail project abound as they often do when something of this magnitude is proposed,” Brown said during his State of the State address in January 2012. “The Panama Canal was for years thought to be impractical and Benjamin Disraeli himself said of the Suez Canal: ‘totally impossible to be carried out.’ The critics were wrong then and they’re wrong now.”

Both companies are supporters of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), who has described himself as “a big, big fan of high speed rail.” Their PACs have given Reid a combined $10,000 since 2010.

Peter Darbee, PG&E’s former chairman and CEO, hosted at least one fundraiser for Reid in 2010, and personally contributed $2,000 to his reelection campaign that year. Days before that fundraiser, in August 2010, Reid hosted Darbee at a clean energy summit in Nevada. The event was co-hosted by the Center for American Progress, a controversial left-wing think tank and proponent of high-speed rail.

PG&E and Southern California Edison have both given generously to Rep. Jim Costa (D., Calif.), a former state legislator who co-authored a bill in 1996 that led to the establishment of the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

Costa is co-chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Caucus, which recently urged the Government Accountability Office to review the state’s high-speed rail project and consult witnesses “whose views were left out of previous reviews.”  The group recommended witnesses such as the author of Proposition 1A, and other proponents of the project.

No politician has received more money from the two companies than Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.). PG&E and Edison are Feinstein’s first- and second-biggest donors, respectively, over the course of her three terms in office. PG&E has given Feinstein more than $154,000 since 1992. Edison has given her $125,000 during that same period.

Feinstein is a long-time supporter of high-speed rail and has written to Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood seeking billions of dollars in additional federal funding for the California project.

Earlier this year, Feinstein wrote a letter to Brown urging him to address concerns over the state’s high-speed rail project or risk losing billions of dollars in federal funding.

“I encourage you to act swiftly to address the high speed rail project’s problems, which I fear will put more than $3.5 billion in Federal funding at risk if not addressed,” Feinstein wrote on Jan. 9, 2012. “I am concerned that our state’s future would be greatly hindered if this project either failed to get off the ground, or failed to be completed.”

In September 2011, after the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Transportation drafted a bill that cut all funding for high-speed rail, Feinstein offered a last-minute amendment to restore that funding to $100 million.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority spent $160,000 last year lobbying for such funding. Most of that went to Kadesh & Associates, a lobbying firm founded by Mark Kadesh, Feinstein’s former chief of staff.

Kadesh also represents Edison International, and has collected $180,000 a year from the utility company—more than half a million dollars in total—since 2008.

PG&E, meanwhile, has a number of connections to the movement supporting high-speed rail. Brown recently appointed Dan Richard, former senior vice president of public policy and governmental relations at PG&E, to chair the CHSRA.

As the Free Beacon noted on Wednesday, two former PG&E employees currently hold senior positions in the Brown administration. Dana Williamson, former public affairs director for PG&E, was recently hired as Brown’s top lobbyist in Washington, D.C. The state of California has spent more than $1 million lobbying since 2009 on a host of issues, including high-speed rail.

Nancy McFadden, who also worked in public affairs for PG&E, is Brown’s executive secretary for legislation, appointments and policy. She previously served as general counsel to the U.S. Department of Transportation and was deputy chief of staff to former vice president and high-speed rail enthusiast Al Gore.

McFadden is also a former member of the Apollo Alliance, an influential conglomerate of labor groups and green energy proponents that boasts connections to Van Jones, the former White House green jobs czar, and John Podesta, former president of the Center for American Progress and co-chairman of the Obama-Biden transition team.

In 2010, the Apollo Alliance drafted the “Apollo Transportation Manufacturing Action Plan,” which called for “$10 billion per year for inter-city and high-speed rail.”

The “Apollo Economic Recovery Act,” a collection of policy recommendations authored by the group in December 2008, shared a number of similarities with the Obama administration’s stimulus package, signed into law several months later.

The 2009 stimulus allocated $8 billion for high-speed rail, including a $2.55 billion grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the largest single recipient of stimulus funds in the state of California. Since then, and at the request of Feinstein, the federal government has approved an additional $1.64 billion for the state, for a total of $4.2 billion.

The Apollo Alliance is currently chaired by Phil Angelides, a former California state lawmaker and unsuccessful Democratic nominee for governor. In the early 2000s, Angelides laid groundwork for California high-speed rail as state treasurer, and proposed a $6 billion bond-issue in 2002 for the project with Costa.

And there have been losers: Solyndra, A123, Ener1, Fisker Automotive, First Solar Inc., Amonix Inc., Beacon Power Corp., Energy Conversion Devices Inc., Nevada Geothermal Power, Abound Solar, SpectraWatt, Cardinal Fastener & Specialty Co., Evergreen Solar, Bright Automotive Inc., SunPower, green energy shareholders, former Department of Energy loans director Jonathan Silver, and the American taxpayer, among others.

But few companies have more successfully cashed in on the flood of federal support for green energy than Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E).

PG&E is the largest utility in California and operates as a near-monopoly in the northern half of the sate. It ranked 177th on last year’s Fortune 500 list, raking in $13.8 billion in total revenues and $1.1 billion in profit.

The company, which enjoys an extensive network of former high-ranking employees holding influential positions in government agencies at the federal and state level, has benefitted handsomely from government financing of green energy projects.

According to Recovery.gov, PG&E received federal grants and contracts worth more than $47 million as part of the 2009 stimulus package.

But that is hardly the extent to which the company has benefitted from federal largesse.

PG&E has become an aggressive buyer of power supplied by solar, wind, and other renewable sources, in large part due to statutory requirements under California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, which mandated that 20 percent of the utility’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2010—and 33 percent by 2020.

According the Department of Energy Loans Program website, PG&E is the sole purchaser of power from a number of green energy projects financed with taxpayer dollars. Six solar projects that will sell power to PG&E have received a combined $5.5 billion in taxpayer-backed DOE loans, nearly one-third of the total funding allocated for the program in the stimulus package.

Those projects include the controversial BrightSource Energy development, linked to former Obama fundraiser Sanjay Wagle and Democratic fundraiser Harvey Whittemore, a close friend of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) who is currently under FBI investigation for allegedly making illegal campaign contributions.

Additionally, PG&E has a power purchasing agreement with the Genesis Solar Energy Project, which has come under fire in recent months for its connection to the deaths of a number of local kit foxes—a protected species—and the possible defiling of a Native American burial site.

A renewable energy developer who has done business with PG&E told the Washington Free Beacon that the company operates as “basically a monopoly” in northern California, and is “pretty much impossible to deal with” as a result.

Projects cannot get approved without a power purchase agreement (PPA), typically lasting 20 years or longer, with PG&E, which routinely exploits its clout to demand exceedingly low prices.

According to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the government agency responsible for regulating the company and determining how much it can charge customers, payments made under PPAs “are fully recoverable in rates over the life of the PPA.” In other words, the costs are ultimately transferred to customers.

PG&E has managed to insulate itself from nearly all of the risks involved in the development process, the developer said, requiring prospective developers to put down multi-million dollar deposits and “jump through a ton of hoops” to get projects approved. Additional expenses—equipment upgrades, for example—are also typically passed on to consumers.

Another source, who has worked with PG&E in the past, declined to comment on the company, citing a fear of retribution. The developer who did speak to the Free Beacon said he was told not to speak to the press for this very reason. “They are shady as shit,” he said of PG&E.

When reached initially for comment, PG&E spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo asked to know the source of the allegations—either the name of the developer’s company or the particular stage of the development process the company was engaged in. Paulo later said she understood why the sources would prefer to be kept anonymous.

She said that while PG&E recognizes that renewable energy is more expensive, the company is meeting the California utility mandate “in ways that are cost effective to our customers.”

PG&E maintains a strong political presence in Washington, D.C., having spent $81.4 million on lobbying since 2008. The company’s political action committee has given nearly $380,000 to Democrats since 2008, more than double the amount it gave to Republicans during that same time. PG&E corporate officers and board members have given tens of thousands of dollars to President Obama and other Democrats since 2007.

The company is actively involved in California politics as well, primarily in support of Democrats. In 2010, PG&E gave more than $1 million to Democratic candidates, and more than $645,000 to the California Democratic Party. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) received $31,580.

“PG&E believe that everybody benefits from a vibrant multipart system that provides the electorate with a broad field of qualified candidates,” Paulo told the Free Beacon. “Contributions are paid for with shareholder funds, not utility customer money.”

Former PG&E employees currently hold, or previously held, high-ranking government positions at the state and federal level, furthering the company’s influence.

Frank Lindh worked 16 years as an attorney for PG&E before being named general counsel of the CPUC. (He is also the father of convicted terrorist John Walker Lindh, who he has claimed is “entirely innocent.”)

The relationship between PG&E and the CPUC has come under fire following an explosion at a San Bruno gas pipeline that killed eight people and destroyed nearly 40 homes. A subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that a history of operational deficiencies at PG&E and inadequate regulation by the CPUC were to blame for the tragedy. The company announced on Monday it would pay the city of San Bruno $70 million in restitution for the blast.

The CPUC, which has the final say with respect to the PPAs between PG&E and developers, has on occasion rejected PPAs that it deems are “not price competitive with projects that are currently being offered to PG&E.”

What this typically means, the developer said, is that higher-cost PPAs are revised to be brought in line with lower-cost arrangements, resulting in a better deal for PG&E.  “This drives investors crazy,” the developer said.

Mindy Spatt, spokeswoman for The Utility Reform Network (TURN), told the Free Beacon the CPUC’s cozy relationship with the utilities it regulates is “the most egregious example” of how utility companies are able to game the system for their own gain at the expense of customers.

At least two former PG&E officials currently hold senior positions in Gov. Brown’s administration. Former director of public affairs Dana Williamson was recently hired as a senior adviser, who will oversee the administration’s lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C.

Last year, Brown appointed Nancy McFadden, PG&E’s former senior vice president of public affairs, to the position of Executive Secretary for Legislation, Appointments and Policy. McFadden had previously served as general counsel to the U.S. Department of Transportation and was deputy chief of staff to former vice president and green energy investor Al Gore.

McFadden is also a former member of the Apollo Alliance, an influential conglomerate of labor groups and green energy proponents that boasts connections to Van Jones, the former White House green jobs czar who resigned under a cloud of controversy, and John Podesta, former president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress and co-chairman of the Obama-Biden transition team. PG&E has donated at least $75,000 to the Apollo Alliance since 2008.

Paulo said the company’s network of former employees in influential positions was a testament to PG&E’s “impressive and experienced workforce.”

“Because of their talents, some of our former employees are called for opportunities in both the public and the private sector,” she said.

Perhaps the most controversial former PG&E employee to hold an influential government post is Cathy Zoi. A former energy analyst for the company, Zoi served as chief of staff for environmental policy under President Clinton and was CEO of Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, and was until recently President Obama’s Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). Part of her responsibilities included overseeing almost $17 billion in federal stimulus funding for renewable energy projects.

Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner reported, “Zoi’s tenure was rife with conflicts of interest.” Her husband’s window manufacturing company, Serious Materials, was publicly praised by Obama and visited by Vice President Biden. Serious received a stimulus tax credit worth more than $584,000 and was the first window company to receive stimulus financing.

More:

Zoi testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in favor of a HOMESTAR program, also known as cash for caulkers, which became another subsidy for Serious.

At the time of her nomination, the couple owned between them 120,000 stock options in Serious Materials, according to her April 2009 personal financial disclosure. She also owned at least $265,000 of stock in a Swiss company called Landis+Gyr that makes “smart meters,” high-tech thermostats that the administration has promoted for saving energy.

Zoi left the Obama administration in February 2011 to join Silver Lake Kraftwerk, a private equity fund financed by the controversial left-wing billionaire George Soros, who said, “developing alternative sources of energy and achieving greater energy efficiency is both a significant global investment opportunity and an environmental imperative.”

PG&E’s considerable political clout is evident to those with experience working with the company.

“There is definitely some politics going on,” the developer told the Washington Free Beacon. “Everyone’s in bed with everyone else.”

“There is money to be made,” he added. “But PG&E is making most of it.”