Hoping this mega-mess pushes the city's effort to buy its own grid past the finish line. PG&E has been fighting it tooth and nail.
Not that it will necessarily make for fewer blackouts, but a ~50% rate discount would be nice. That's what users in Santa Clara pay IIRC, and SF even owns the hydro generator at O'Shaughnessy Dam.
> SF even owns the hydro generator at O'Shaughnessy Dam.
They own the dam, but the Federal government still owns Hetch Hetchy water and land. Permission to use Hetch Hetchy is governed by the Raker Act, which stipulates[1] that SF can only resell the electricity and water through public municipal districts, not to private utilities:
> Sec. 6. That the grantee is prohibited from ever selling or letting to any corporation or individual, except a municipality or a municipal water district or irrigation district, the right to sell or sublet the water or the electric energy sold or given to it or him by the said grantee:
> Provided, That the rights hereby granted shall not be sold, assigned, or transferred to any private person, corporation, or association, and in case of any attempt to so sell, assign, transfer, or convey, this grant shall revert to the Government of the United States.
The original plan was that SF would build both aqueducts and transmission lines to SF, branches of which could serve other municipal districts. But they only ended up building the aqueducts, and contracted with PG&E to transmit the electricity. The question is, is SF violating the Raker Act? Previous administrations have said no or demurred requests to answer the question; typically the people raising the issue want the dam removed. SF claims PG&E is acting as their agent and everything is above board. But, above board or not, I've read some old articles that suggest there's a 50+ year-old understanding or gentlemen's agreement between SF and PG&E, that PG&E would give the City of SF (if not its residents) sweetheart pricing on transmission, etc, and defend the status quo in DC so long as SF didn't attempt to buildout it's own transmission lines or otherwise cut PG&E out of the loop. But if SF did do that, PG&E would lobby DC to terminate the grants under the Raker Act. From the beginning, many cities in California, and even politicians outside California, have resented the Federal grant to San Francisco, so presumably with the right trigger a very large lobby could quickly arise and demand the Raker Act be replaced with a new deal that gave other municipalities in California a direct stake in Hetch Hetchy. It's even possible PG&E comes out on top, because who's going to transmit the electricity?
Of course, that story leaves alot of unanswered questions. But it sounds plausible to me. With CEQA, etc, there's zero chance SF could ever build out its own transmission lines today; it would take untold billions and, more importantly, decades--far longer than the Raker Act would likely survive. Currently the City of SF basically pays nothing to power its public buildings (schools, etc), MUNI buses and trains, and possibly SFO (which SF owns and operates). The budgetary and logistical upheaval that would happen if the Raker Act grant was rescinded (which, again, almost every other municipality in the state would support) is mind boggling. Even if we assume every mayor has earnestly wanted to cut PG&E out of the loop and do right by SF residents' individual power bills, what sane, term-limited administrator would invite that chaos? Plenty of mayors have broached the subject, but invariably such suggestions silently stop, so presumably it's just a negotiating tactic with PG&E that both sides are very careful not to let get out-of-hand.
Even if SF lost the hydro plant outright (which seems unlikely) there's still plenty of margin for SF residents to come out on top. SVP in Santa Clara doesn't own much generation, yet its rates are 60% lower.[0]
Then there's the state-wide need to increase transmission capacity because of the switch to renewables, the future politics of which are kinda unpredictable. It's hard to imagine SF getting singled out and left out in the cold, considering the state already has many large municipal utilities getting better deals for their residents.
They're not. Rural electricity can be had in the United States for far less than PG&E's charging. Look at Hawaii, Alasaka, TVA, etc., etc. PG&E is expensive because they have to pay for negligence, homicide, stock buybacks, dividends, executive bonuses, lobbyists, and back maintenance.
It's also worth noting that PG&E's got a history of astroturfing. Back in the 00s there was a local blogger, Greg Dewar, who ran a blog called the N Judah Chronicles. Ostensibly it was a blog about Muni and transit issues, but when muni power in SF came up for a vote boy was he hopping mad. It wasn't until someone else called him out for being on the PG&E payroll that he owned up to being paid to astroturf.
Most people agree that we need utilities to be monopolies. PG&E, for all intents and purposes, is an arm of the state. Perhaps it’s private in some sense but we all know it’s the government. It has to abide by all manner of government mandates, there is no competition. If you want it to go bankrupt just let it go bankrupt. Whatever replaces it will be the same thing. I don’t have a solution but all the teeth gnashing isn’t going to change the fact that electricity is a government issue and whoever runs it will work at the behest of the California government and the voters.
Pass whatever rules you want. It isn’t going to change the fundamental nature of the org, which is a reflection of the voters. This is a government problem, through and through
If - if - people who live in the boonies deserve to have the burying of their tens of thousands of line-miles subsidized by others, it's by taxpayers, not by electric users in efficiently-served areas.
The difference between being taxpayer-financed and user-financed is that Ellison is on the hook for 10000x as much as granny instead of 20x. If it's a public good it should be paid by the public. A six-year-old keeping the light on at night should not incur a 120% surcharge for burying the transmission lines to a mansion in St. Helena.
Follow the money. Who appoints people to regulate electricity in California? The governor. Who mentored California's current governor? Willie Brown. Who does Willie Brown work/lobby for? PG&E.
The California Assembly is one of the weakest legislative bodies in the entire nation. It's too disorganized to engage in any effective oversight or lawmaking. It's left to the people to come up with constitutional amendments to try to manage this enormous machine.
It's a beautiful state. There's literal mountains of opportunity here. It's lately all too easy to become irrationally angry at these con artists and their ruinous agendas.
Please note that AB 1890 which deregulated and divested electricity markets was passed during the tenure of Pete Wilson with the help of a bunch of Republicans holding the legislature budget hostage.
California has been dealing with the idiocies caused by that ever since.
One-off incidents don't really mean anything in the big picture.
However, I do recall back when there were grid problems in Texas a few years ago someone justifying the high prices California paid as due to their high grid reliability and solid regulatory framework (California pay 2x as much IIRC). I'm too far away to really get into the details but it'd be much more interesting to have a comparison on the reliability of the Californian grid compared to other US states and even countries. When it comes to high availability the diminishing returns to spending set in pretty quick and I get the impression there is a slow return to economic reality happening as voters are forcing governments to start paying attention to energy again, environmentalists or otherwise.
That claim would be hilarious and also wildly inaccurate, that OP apparently never heard of a PSPS. California’s grid is not particularly resilient or reliable, and certainly not in the 2016-2020 time frame. Also, the regulatory framework is awful and high prices are driven by a mix of 1- regulatory capture and disincentives to utilities saving money, 2- wildfire mitigation costs, 3- NIMBYism and the lack of ability to build anything quickly, and then a hodge podge of CA specific issues.
One of those specific issues is that California electricity prices include what amounts to a redistributive tax, in the form of programs like CARE and FERA - probably about a third of households in the state are eligible for CARE which provides a 30% or more discount on normal prices. While there are low-income discount programs for other states none of them have nearly the reach of the CA programs.
Have been in California for 10+ years and I've never seen anyone describing California's electricity infra as reliable. It shows the same kind of failure that's too familiar to many Americans: a vital service is managed by a corporation that has no incentive for better services, and market forces do not work due to the nature of the service. (If the power at your home in SF goes out all the time, it's not like you can find another provider - the best you can do is move to, say, Nevada, which is not realistic for most people.)
I lived in California until 2018; I think I missed the beginning of the premptive outages during high winds/fire danger, but the grid sections I lived in were much more reliable where I live now, near Seattle with PSE as the utility power supplier. I was also out of CA in the post-Enron rolling blackout era.
The PNW has a more challenging environment with respect to trees pulling down lines than suburban California; I expect two nines of utility power availability here; some years will get three nines. When I was in California, many years had no outages and I don't remember any years where I had less than 99.9% availability. Even when I did eventually decide to get a UPS, it was just because one day there were several brief interruptions.
Obviously, local conditions vary, and I managed to avoid the two recent periods of larger scale grid instability, but at least in my bubble, nobody talked about grid reliability, because it was just there. Plenty of complaints about rates and how long it would take to get service changes.
The same substation went up about a decade ago, I'd be pretty cautious about calling problems with PG&E infrastructure "one off".
California's rates were rationalized, in part, because California is taking steps to increase reliability. It's been decades seen we've seen rolling blackouts at the hands of Enron. Long-term plans to increase intra-state transmission capacity are in place and are currently being executed (you're welcome to dig them up on the ISO's site). The weather related preemptive power cuts have been pared back dramatically since their introduction. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people without power for days versus hundreds or thousands for hours.
Let's not forget that the "grid problems" you're referring to cost some ratepayers tens of thousands of dollars because that's the sort of retail electric plan that was legal in Texas.
But also please don't lump all Californians one group. PG&E rate payers are extorted for some of the highest electric rates in the nation (as are SDG&E and most IOU rate payers). Folks with access to municipal power in California pay far less.
Dunno, I think it's quite reasonable to class electricity as a natural monopoly. What's less reasonable is regulatory capture. Landline telephones were insanely reliable in their heyday because they were required to be so. PG&E is reckless because they're allowed to be reckless.
Edit: For non-Americans, landline telephones were highly regulated up until '82 with AT&T having a government sanctioned monopoly.
Sure, and I would be lying if the libertarian bacon-wrapping of what I said was more than an litmus test and karma play, but the concept of good governance on a company like PG&E is so far out of the realm of possibility since citizen's united (and the public warping of perspective to agree with it) I don't see a very reasonable path forward to getting these (lovely, sweet, pure-hearted, well-meaning, community-oriented, positive, hard-working) people under control.
As a Camp Fire climate refugee and week+-long PG&E PSPSes running on generators, hello from hill country TX. While we have ERCOT that is only slightly better and Enron-style market pricing, energy production infrastructure has actually caught up so long as not too many gigadatacenters are built to automate spamming Youtube with fake cat videos.
Hoping this mega-mess pushes the city's effort to buy its own grid past the finish line. PG&E has been fighting it tooth and nail.
Not that it will necessarily make for fewer blackouts, but a ~50% rate discount would be nice. That's what users in Santa Clara pay IIRC, and SF even owns the hydro generator at O'Shaughnessy Dam.
> SF even owns the hydro generator at O'Shaughnessy Dam.
They own the dam, but the Federal government still owns Hetch Hetchy water and land. Permission to use Hetch Hetchy is governed by the Raker Act, which stipulates[1] that SF can only resell the electricity and water through public municipal districts, not to private utilities:
> Sec. 6. That the grantee is prohibited from ever selling or letting to any corporation or individual, except a municipality or a municipal water district or irrigation district, the right to sell or sublet the water or the electric energy sold or given to it or him by the said grantee:
> Provided, That the rights hereby granted shall not be sold, assigned, or transferred to any private person, corporation, or association, and in case of any attempt to so sell, assign, transfer, or convey, this grant shall revert to the Government of the United States.
The original plan was that SF would build both aqueducts and transmission lines to SF, branches of which could serve other municipal districts. But they only ended up building the aqueducts, and contracted with PG&E to transmit the electricity. The question is, is SF violating the Raker Act? Previous administrations have said no or demurred requests to answer the question; typically the people raising the issue want the dam removed. SF claims PG&E is acting as their agent and everything is above board. But, above board or not, I've read some old articles that suggest there's a 50+ year-old understanding or gentlemen's agreement between SF and PG&E, that PG&E would give the City of SF (if not its residents) sweetheart pricing on transmission, etc, and defend the status quo in DC so long as SF didn't attempt to buildout it's own transmission lines or otherwise cut PG&E out of the loop. But if SF did do that, PG&E would lobby DC to terminate the grants under the Raker Act. From the beginning, many cities in California, and even politicians outside California, have resented the Federal grant to San Francisco, so presumably with the right trigger a very large lobby could quickly arise and demand the Raker Act be replaced with a new deal that gave other municipalities in California a direct stake in Hetch Hetchy. It's even possible PG&E comes out on top, because who's going to transmit the electricity?
Of course, that story leaves alot of unanswered questions. But it sounds plausible to me. With CEQA, etc, there's zero chance SF could ever build out its own transmission lines today; it would take untold billions and, more importantly, decades--far longer than the Raker Act would likely survive. Currently the City of SF basically pays nothing to power its public buildings (schools, etc), MUNI buses and trains, and possibly SFO (which SF owns and operates). The budgetary and logistical upheaval that would happen if the Raker Act grant was rescinded (which, again, almost every other municipality in the state would support) is mind boggling. Even if we assume every mayor has earnestly wanted to cut PG&E out of the loop and do right by SF residents' individual power bills, what sane, term-limited administrator would invite that chaos? Plenty of mayors have broached the subject, but invariably such suggestions silently stop, so presumably it's just a negotiating tactic with PG&E that both sides are very careful not to let get out-of-hand.
[1] https://sfmuseum.org/hetch/hetchy10.html
Even if SF lost the hydro plant outright (which seems unlikely) there's still plenty of margin for SF residents to come out on top. SVP in Santa Clara doesn't own much generation, yet its rates are 60% lower.[0]
Then there's the state-wide need to increase transmission capacity because of the switch to renewables, the future politics of which are kinda unpredictable. It's hard to imagine SF getting singled out and left out in the cold, considering the state already has many large municipal utilities getting better deals for their residents.
[0] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
So cherry pick the nice dense area and leave the rest of the state with the hard to serve areas?
Why should people in the nice dense efficient area subsidize everyone else via PG&E? Pay your fair share.
They're not. Rural electricity can be had in the United States for far less than PG&E's charging. Look at Hawaii, Alasaka, TVA, etc., etc. PG&E is expensive because they have to pay for negligence, homicide, stock buybacks, dividends, executive bonuses, lobbyists, and back maintenance.
It's also worth noting that PG&E's got a history of astroturfing. Back in the 00s there was a local blogger, Greg Dewar, who ran a blog called the N Judah Chronicles. Ostensibly it was a blog about Muni and transit issues, but when muni power in SF came up for a vote boy was he hopping mad. It wasn't until someone else called him out for being on the PG&E payroll that he owned up to being paid to astroturf.
This interview with Sandeep Vaheesan on the history of public power in the US was super interesting. Relevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvu6oBAeJ6E
Most people agree that we need utilities to be monopolies. PG&E, for all intents and purposes, is an arm of the state. Perhaps it’s private in some sense but we all know it’s the government. It has to abide by all manner of government mandates, there is no competition. If you want it to go bankrupt just let it go bankrupt. Whatever replaces it will be the same thing. I don’t have a solution but all the teeth gnashing isn’t going to change the fact that electricity is a government issue and whoever runs it will work at the behest of the California government and the voters.
Pass whatever rules you want. It isn’t going to change the fundamental nature of the org, which is a reflection of the voters. This is a government problem, through and through
If - if - people who live in the boonies deserve to have the burying of their tens of thousands of line-miles subsidized by others, it's by taxpayers, not by electric users in efficiently-served areas.
most people dont decide where they live. They also cant move. Good job instigating a class war
The difference between being taxpayer-financed and user-financed is that Ellison is on the hook for 10000x as much as granny instead of 20x. If it's a public good it should be paid by the public. A six-year-old keeping the light on at night should not incur a 120% surcharge for burying the transmission lines to a mansion in St. Helena.
Follow the money. Who appoints people to regulate electricity in California? The governor. Who mentored California's current governor? Willie Brown. Who does Willie Brown work/lobby for? PG&E.
The California Assembly is one of the weakest legislative bodies in the entire nation. It's too disorganized to engage in any effective oversight or lawmaking. It's left to the people to come up with constitutional amendments to try to manage this enormous machine.
It's a beautiful state. There's literal mountains of opportunity here. It's lately all too easy to become irrationally angry at these con artists and their ruinous agendas.
Willie Brown hasn't been in the Assembly for decades and the governor directly controls the CPUC.
Please note that AB 1890 which deregulated and divested electricity markets was passed during the tenure of Pete Wilson with the help of a bunch of Republicans holding the legislature budget hostage.
California has been dealing with the idiocies caused by that ever since.
Russia bombs a power station in Ukraine, hundreds of thousands are left without electricity.
Ukraine bombs a power station in Russia, hundreds of thousands are left without electricity.
Peaceful winter weather, no major storm, hurricane, earthquake, heat, frost, catastrophic rainfall in SF. 130k people are left without electricity.
In the former two cases, the cause is that something terribly wrong is happening for years. In the latter case, likely, too.
One-off incidents don't really mean anything in the big picture.
However, I do recall back when there were grid problems in Texas a few years ago someone justifying the high prices California paid as due to their high grid reliability and solid regulatory framework (California pay 2x as much IIRC). I'm too far away to really get into the details but it'd be much more interesting to have a comparison on the reliability of the Californian grid compared to other US states and even countries. When it comes to high availability the diminishing returns to spending set in pretty quick and I get the impression there is a slow return to economic reality happening as voters are forcing governments to start paying attention to energy again, environmentalists or otherwise.
That claim would be hilarious and also wildly inaccurate, that OP apparently never heard of a PSPS. California’s grid is not particularly resilient or reliable, and certainly not in the 2016-2020 time frame. Also, the regulatory framework is awful and high prices are driven by a mix of 1- regulatory capture and disincentives to utilities saving money, 2- wildfire mitigation costs, 3- NIMBYism and the lack of ability to build anything quickly, and then a hodge podge of CA specific issues.
One of those specific issues is that California electricity prices include what amounts to a redistributive tax, in the form of programs like CARE and FERA - probably about a third of households in the state are eligible for CARE which provides a 30% or more discount on normal prices. While there are low-income discount programs for other states none of them have nearly the reach of the CA programs.
Have been in California for 10+ years and I've never seen anyone describing California's electricity infra as reliable. It shows the same kind of failure that's too familiar to many Americans: a vital service is managed by a corporation that has no incentive for better services, and market forces do not work due to the nature of the service. (If the power at your home in SF goes out all the time, it's not like you can find another provider - the best you can do is move to, say, Nevada, which is not realistic for most people.)
I lived in California until 2018; I think I missed the beginning of the premptive outages during high winds/fire danger, but the grid sections I lived in were much more reliable where I live now, near Seattle with PSE as the utility power supplier. I was also out of CA in the post-Enron rolling blackout era.
The PNW has a more challenging environment with respect to trees pulling down lines than suburban California; I expect two nines of utility power availability here; some years will get three nines. When I was in California, many years had no outages and I don't remember any years where I had less than 99.9% availability. Even when I did eventually decide to get a UPS, it was just because one day there were several brief interruptions.
Obviously, local conditions vary, and I managed to avoid the two recent periods of larger scale grid instability, but at least in my bubble, nobody talked about grid reliability, because it was just there. Plenty of complaints about rates and how long it would take to get service changes.
A substation outage isn't a grid issue.
The same substation went up about a decade ago, I'd be pretty cautious about calling problems with PG&E infrastructure "one off".
California's rates were rationalized, in part, because California is taking steps to increase reliability. It's been decades seen we've seen rolling blackouts at the hands of Enron. Long-term plans to increase intra-state transmission capacity are in place and are currently being executed (you're welcome to dig them up on the ISO's site). The weather related preemptive power cuts have been pared back dramatically since their introduction. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people without power for days versus hundreds or thousands for hours.
Let's not forget that the "grid problems" you're referring to cost some ratepayers tens of thousands of dollars because that's the sort of retail electric plan that was legal in Texas.
But also please don't lump all Californians one group. PG&E rate payers are extorted for some of the highest electric rates in the nation (as are SDG&E and most IOU rate payers). Folks with access to municipal power in California pay far less.
> Firefighters were using specialized carbon monoxide equipment to extinguish the flames on the first floor of the four-story building,
A concerning miss in proofreading or am I learning about a new fire-fighting technology today?
Waymo fleet halts in San Francisco during power outages https://twitter.com/breaking911/status/2002568542835876194
Related:
Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams https://missionlocal.org/2025/12/sf-waymo-halts-service-blac...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342412)
I wonder if anyone in the emergency operations center has offered up the idea that there should be more than one entity providing power...
Dunno, I think it's quite reasonable to class electricity as a natural monopoly. What's less reasonable is regulatory capture. Landline telephones were insanely reliable in their heyday because they were required to be so. PG&E is reckless because they're allowed to be reckless.
Edit: For non-Americans, landline telephones were highly regulated up until '82 with AT&T having a government sanctioned monopoly.
Sure, and I would be lying if the libertarian bacon-wrapping of what I said was more than an litmus test and karma play, but the concept of good governance on a company like PG&E is so far out of the realm of possibility since citizen's united (and the public warping of perspective to agree with it) I don't see a very reasonable path forward to getting these (lovely, sweet, pure-hearted, well-meaning, community-oriented, positive, hard-working) people under control.
EDIT: *language, think of the children.
As a Camp Fire climate refugee and week+-long PG&E PSPSes running on generators, hello from hill country TX. While we have ERCOT that is only slightly better and Enron-style market pricing, energy production infrastructure has actually caught up so long as not too many gigadatacenters are built to automate spamming Youtube with fake cat videos.
https://archive.ph/oWr3M