California's electricity prices are growing so high that they threaten the state's ability to convince enough people to ditch fossil fuel-powered cars and appliances, new research says. The state's electric rates are now two to three times what it costs to provide power, a paper released by the energy institute at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and the nonprofit think tank Next 10 reported. Severin Borenstein, a UC Berkeley energy economist who spearheaded the paper, said he's concerned that California is saddling its electric rates with too many things that are divorced from the direct cost of powering homes and businesses. The state could end up in a situation where electric rates are "vastly higher than the true cost of using electricity," Borenstein said. "At the same time, we're going to have rates that are going to be so high that it will be a huge discouragement to using electricity for things that we need people to adopt if we're going to decarbonize the economy."