SAN FRANCISCO LAWMAKERS at the state and local level are trying again to compel the transfer of PG&E’s local infrastructure to the city to create a public utility.
On Monday, State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, made public a bill he introduced earlier this year that would start the process of changing the way public utilities can be acquired by local jurisdictions by cutting red tape.
Wiener announced the bill at a press conference Monday morning on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. He was accompanied by members of the county Board of Supervisors, including Rafael Mandelman, Bilal Mahmood and Matt Dorsey. They said a resolution in favor of the bill will be introduced at the Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.
Some San Francisco residents and politicians have long held the idea that the city should dump PG&E and get its own publicly controlled power grid. Wiener put forth similar legislation in 2020, but alleges that PG&E was “so powerful” that the bill didn’t even get a hearing.
Wiener has accused PG&E of being too large, placing shareholders’ interests above the public’s, and failing to effectively maintain its infrastructure.
Public power in San Francisco already exists under CleanPowerSF through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, though customers use a hybrid of both CleanPowerSF and PG&E. Should the city ditch PG&E, the SFPUC would continue to serve as San Francisco’s publicly owned power utility, sourcing an electricity mix from California-certified renewable resources.
What the bill would change
Wiener’s new bill, Senate Bill 875, aims to alter the eminent domain process overseen by the CPUC, which he said will better position the city and other jurisdictions in the state create their own public utilities. That process includes establishing a value for any sale, proving a takeover would be in the public interest, and, if negotiations fail, a legal taking of the property through court proceedings.
Wiener’s latest version is designed to support a more fractured breakup of the utility by local jurisdictions that choose to create public entities, instead of one big takeover.
The bill does not outline specific changes but simply begins the process by stating the intent of the legislature to pass future legislation to make such separations easier.
Wiener said the ultimate goal of the legislation was to undo changes made to the process in 1992 that he said were pushed by private utilities and made the process more “convoluted and time consuming,” his office said in a statement.
Several cities around the state have their own public utilities, including Sacramento and Palo Alto, which offer lower rates for customers, something highlighted by Wiener.
Rates vary in both cities depending on the size of a business account and other factors, but Palo Alto Utilities customers generally pay about half as much across the board for their monthly utilities, while rates in Sacramento are an average of 45% lower than PG&E, with several types of bills achieving more than 50% savings, according to a review of both cities’ rates.
Wiener said San Franciscans were sick of paying double what their neighbors do.
“We’re fed up with a system that gives monopoly utilities a huge incentive to focus more on paying its shareholders than on actually providing the best possible service for the public,” Wiener said.
The company pays shareholders a quarterly dividend of 5 cents per share. PG&E’s stock price closed at $18.48 per share on Monday, near its 52-week high. Its 52-week low was $12.97. The stock is up nearly 14% this year.
“We’re fed up with a system that gives monopoly utilities a huge incentive to focus more on paying its shareholders than on actually providing the best possible service for the public.”
State Sen. Scott winer, D-San Francisco
PG&E spokesperson Lynsey Paulo said in an email that the utility had dropped rates four times over the past two years for an average monthly bill reduction of 11%. But records also show the utility asked the CPUC in October to approve a rate increase in 2027 by an average of about 5.4% and by about 6.1% in 2028, 2029 and 2030.
Those assembled at City Hall to trumpet Wiener’s renewed effort also pointed to PG&E’s past safety disasters such as the San Bruno pipeline explosion in 2010, the Tubbs Fire in 2017, the Camp Fire in 2018 and the Zogg Fire in 2020, as reasons to break away from the utility.
They also blamed the utility for repeated blackouts in the city, including most recently in December, when a fire at a substation in the SoMa District caused about 130,000 customers to lose power, including some in the Richmond District who were in the dark for several days.
Mahmood said there had been previous fires at the substation and that PG&E had not done enough to make the building safe. He also faulted the utility for relying on paper maps of the substation instead of more modern mapping, which he said slowed the response by the San Francisco Fire Department. And he said PG&E executives’ responses at a recent county Board of Supervisors hearing on the blackout “bordered on comedy.”
PG&E serves about 16 million customers in a 70,000 square mile service area that extends from coastal Santa Barbara County to Humboldt County and inland to just west of the Nevada border.