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San Diego Gas & Electric filed a request with state regulators late Friday afternoon, asking for an 11 percent rate increase in 2019 and running through 2022.

The utility estimates a typical residential customer using 500 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month would see an increase of $6.13 and a typical customer using 25 therms of natural gas would spend $7.57 more on a monthly bill.

If granted in full, the proposal represents a $218 million increase over 2018 rates.

The state Supreme Court will review San Diego’s five-year-old pension cutbacks that, if overturned, would require the city to spend millions creating retroactive pensions for more than 3,000 workers hired since 2012. The court voted unanimously on Wednesday to review an April ruling by the Fourth District Court of Appeal that had vindicated the city and its pension cuts.

Republicans were not just casually supporting this bill. After countless negotiations with the governor, industry groups, taxpayer associations and community groups, Republicans have finally attained an equal seat at the legislative table. To echo the California Manufacturers Association, the California Chamber of Commerce, and countless other groups that share the common interest of the taxpayer, a free-market based cap and trade program is much better than a costly “command and control” alternative.

California is poised for a swift transformation of its electricity landscape — and that could bring tumult if preparations aren’t made soon to maintain quality and avoid reliability problems like rolling blackouts, the state’s leading energy regulator is warning. After decades of dominance by investor-owned utilities, electricity markets in the state are becoming more competitive. Ratepayers today have a growing number of choices for powering their lights, laptops and electric cars — from installing rooftop solar panels and consumer-scale batteries to joining increasingly popular government-run electricity programs known as community choice aggregation, or CCA. Currently, investor-owned utilities such as San Diego Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric together buy and sell more than 75 percent of the state’s electricity. Their collective share could plunge to 10 percent within the next five years, with CCA programs causing most of the change, according to the state’s most aggressive forecast. More conservative estimates still show major shifts away from the utilities.

Here’s a cynical view: Maybe the law’s stated goal wasn’t its real goal. Maybe influential teachers unions wanted to shower big districts with money to pave the way for teacher pay raises denied during the state’s long revenue recession. Want evidence?

On the micro level, consider what happened in Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district. In August 2014, the United Teachers Los Angeles issued a statement calling for a 17.6 pay increase and asserting the raise was affordable because of all the “extra dollars [that] have already flowed into the district as part of the state’s new funding formula.” In May 2015, the union ended up winning a 10 percent, two-year raise, and a year of retroactive higher pay. The following month, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson overruled an underling and said that Local Control Funding Formula money could be used for teacher raises. As Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, immediately pointed out, this is not what the Legislature intended when it passed the law.

On the macro level, consider what’s happened in Sacramento. The Brown administration has been implacably opposed to attempts led by Weber and Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, to determine how school districts have spent their Local Control funds. It doesn’t want the public to know.

The new economy is not like the old economy. Once that settles in, there is an obvious strategy to pursue: overhauling our education system so it produces far more people with elite job skills. These skills often involve critical thinking and a facility with science and technology. Fields such as information technology, life sciences, cybersecurity, robotics, automation, artificial intelligence-assisted research and advanced statistical analysis are certain to grow in coming years.

Homebuilding was down across Southern California in the first three months of 2017, but nowhere more than San Diego County, said a Real Estate Research Council report released Monday.

Residential building permits were down by 10 percent in the seven-county region compared to the same time last year and 37 percent in San Diego County.

Amid an abrupt slowdown in growth, nearly 4,000 food-service jobs may have been cut or not created throughout San Diego County from the beginning of 2016 through February of this year, according to an analysis of federal payroll data by Lynn Reaser, chief economist of the Fermanian Business & Economic Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Assembly Bill 199 was introduced in late January and authored by Kansen Chu (D-San Jose) and the California Building and Construction Trades Council, a labor union group. The bill requires workers to be paid “prevailing wage” on residential projects that have any agreement with “the state or a political subdivision” — a provision that extends the requirement beyond the redevelopment agencies, public agencies and low income housing projects covered under existing state law.

The report measures the “bare bones” cost of living — housing, food, transportation, health care, child care and taxes — to see what it takes for households to get by without public or private assistance. For a single adult living alone, that annual income is $27,942, or $13.23 per hour for a full-time worker. For a family with two adults, one preschooler and one infant, it’s $88,616.

Officials at The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a consumer advocacy group that monitors the state’s utilities and the CPUC, said the proposals represent “laudable goals” but the group doesn’t like the prospect of customers getting billed for projects that may not necessarily lead to “clear and direct benefits” to all ratepayers, especially in low-income communities.

Five years after arriving in San Diego as an exciting new alternative to car ownership and a weapon against climate change, car2go and its fleet of conspicuous blue-and-white Smart cars will vanish from local streets after today. . . San Diego was billed as a key milestone for car2go, the first North American city where the company would use all electric cars instead of gas-powered vehicles.

A just-released report hails California as the dominant state in the country when it comes to developing a clean-energy economy and promoting green technology.

If global warming is an existential threat to humankind, this hostility to a huge, promising source of clean energy is inexplicable. As the Union of Concerned Scientists says, “Effectively addressing global warming requires a rapid transformation of the ways in which we produce and consume energy.” That transformation will be far more difficult without nuclear power.

For the first three months of this year, registrations for new cars sold exceeded 500,000, a 3.8 percent improvement over the first quarter of 2015, marking the 22nd consecutive year-over-year increase in quarterly registrations.