PG&E simply owns the wires, and overcharges for their use.
[1]: https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/hetch-hetchy-powe...
SF shifted to "wheeling" instead of selling power to PG&E and is tenuously in compliance now, but the current set up was never intended when the federal government ceded water and power rights from Yosemite to SF.
... that it produces about 976 GWh per year. A few different sources say that SF uses about 5-6 TWh per year. So that is slightly less than 20% of total power needs. Still, it is a good start.
SMUD has cheap power because 100 years ago the people of Sacramento invested a lot of money to establish that utility. What the vocal minority of SF public power people want is magical: cheaper rates without all that bothersome investment.
But PG&E has charged significantly more for power the last few years. Most people easily hit 50c/kwh on their bills.
Compare to Santa Clara, which has their own well run utility, and charges less than half PG&E rates.
My conclusion might be totally wrong because I'm converting from units that aren't meant to be converted, but...
If you filter down to only San Francisco County on this official-looking thingie [0], you see that it claims the city [1] has 5.126 TWh of consumption.
Your link [2] claims Hetch Hetchy Power System provides something like 395 MW of power generation capacity. I'm going to assume that that's a misprint and they meant to write MWh because that's the only thing that makes sense to me for a measure of power generation. While the last page of this PDF [3] indicates that the hydro generation component is capable of powering a bit more than twice the city's municipal demand, it seems like it's not enough to satisfy even 1/1000th of the demand of the entire city.
Perhaps I've totally fucked up my unit conversions (or relied on garbage data), but it looks like only the tiniest fraction of the city's power demands can be satisfied by the Hetch Hetchy dam. (Though, we could easily electrify way more of the Muni lines with the surplus capacity.)
[0] <https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...>
[1] SF City and County are -AFAICT- the same thing. It's a little weird.
[2] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/hetch-hetchy-powe...>
[3] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/sites/default/files/about-us/WeDeliver...> (found via [4]
[4] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/storage-and-deliv...>
I think the numbers you cite in [0] are in terms of total annual consumption.
This results in:
- higher cost (because SFPUC charges more for electricity generation than does PG&E)
- your PG&E bill being confusing (I've interacted with smart people who couldn't figure out how much they were paying per kWh on average)
In 2020, someone in my neighbourhood put in a request (via the official process) for traffic calming on a nearby road where cars drive dangerously fast, and often fail to stop at a marked pedestrian crossing.
In December 2024, I had a near miss on that crosswalk and contacted the city. I have followed up with them every 3-4 weeks since then.
The last I heard, they might have a public hearing about a potential road hump, in summer 2026.
It's hard to believe the city government is capable of running an electric company.
(I'm no fan of PG&E BTW. Here in SF I've paid more per kWh and had more power outages per unit time, than anywhere else I've lived.)
Thanks PG&E.
I have no personal knowledge, but thought I'd share this experience I had with the ongoing debate.
Run the transmission grid, offer to let big cities and counties take the distribution, keep whatever they don’t want.
> Dabit’s energy problems reached a new level in December when a PG&E substation fire caused a three-day power outage for the neighborhood. In addition to losing business, Dabit lost $10,000 to $15,000 worth of ingredients.
(2) Why didn't the owner immediately run to a hardware store to buy a portable (diesel?) generator to save as much food as possible? At least run one fridge and pack the most expensive ingredients into that one fridge.
Overall: My sympathy is low for the owner's situation.
If the city buys (or runs) its own (traditional) electricity utility, they will be assuming all of the wildfire risk. That is the primary cause of rises electricity rates by PG&E in the last ten years. However, if SF wants to create some power generation in the form of solar panels and batteries or wind, then sign power trade agreements with PG&E, I think that could be tenable/workable. If they spent 100M USD per year building truly reliable, green power generation, then 10 years later would look much better.
2. You don't think everyone else was thinking the same thing?
Also, you can just have sympathy for people even if it were their own mistake. It doesn't cost you anything.
Restaurants have very thin margins, they can’t afford that stuff.
Distribution shouldn’t be this expensive nor cause this many fires. If the cost of distributing power to remote, fire-prone communities isn’t politically feasible to push to them directly, the cities should be put on a separate distribution system to isolate the cost inflation.
Silicon Valley buys PG&E power and handles distribution itself. It has some of the only reasonable power rates in California [1].
[1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
Utilities are a perfect example of a wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy, justified by "efficiency". Losses are socialized, profits are privatized, just like in any public-private "partnership". Utilities are worse because their profits are usually guaranteed.
This paper was proven to be empirically incorrect by Elinor Ostrom for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics.
[1]: https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of...
It's a part of why Republicans actually have some grounds for calling Harris corrupt - Willie Brown's office when mayor of SF was notorious for being a pay-to-play situation, she worked there (and even dated him).
> Or, as Supervisor Aaron Peskin described it, “mind-boggling.” He said
> the “city family” that grew up under Mayor Willie Brown, continued
> working under Mayor Gavin Newsom, flourished under Mayor Ed Lee and
> stayed on under Breed “were all doing favors for one another and
> living in their own little bubble.”
>
> “They all convinced each other that they were like a family, and
> family can give gifts to their children,” Peskin said, noting those
> same family members took the city’s required annual ethics training
> like everybody else and must have known what they were doing was
> wrong.
>
> “They just got too cozy over too much time, and they lost their way,”
> Peskin said. “Now I have to look at everybody going, ‘Are you a
> crook?’ It’s not the way I want to see the world.”
It's trivial to find articles about the conflicts of interests between Brown and PG&E, I think even to this day he still represents their interests.
In the broader SF Bay Area, our recent PG&E bills for a 50 year old single-family home without air-conditioning is under $150/mo, with a couple fridges, electric clothes dryer, and a half-dozen laptop class computers. That's averaging about 8-9 kWh per day (250-280 kWh/month).
Last winter, our bill ramped up to over $400/mo for a few months, due to heating with natural gas.
Let's say your overall rate is $0.50/kWh, that would put you at 1500kWh per month. Which is....high. Even if your rate were $1/kWh, 750kWh would be a decent amount of juice for a region with an overall mild climate.
The EIA[0] says the typical annual electricity consumption for homes in "the West" (ie not just California) is 8525kWh/year, or 710kWh/month.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
For comparison, I have double that plus electric appliances and a home-lab with 6 rack servers that run 24/7 and my bill rarely tops $175 in the dead of summer. And I like the thermostat cold.
If you live in a duplex or condo I would consider if your meter is miswired (with your neighbor's meter daisy-chained to yours) and you are being double-billed. It is more common than you think and often goes undiscovered for years.
“Fleeing” is hyperbole. Population is roughly flat [1].
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/CA/PST045224
PS Where I live now, its $0.04/kwh and that's pretty normal in the rest of the US and in Latin America.
We should generate more, but one of the major issues is how much wildfire prevention PG&E has to do, which then gets passed on to their customers. I am huge into supply side abundance, but that isnt the only driver here for costs.
The existence of CPUC and CAISO says nothing of their efficacy. Jumping all the way past any question of their efficacy is egregious.
There is definitely greed on PGEs part.
The problem is retail side. AKA PG&E, its regulation, governance and forced liabilities.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
> Capacity factor could be in the high 90s in good conditions and maximum production but I expect it's a lot lower unless it's a wet year with very few big maintenance jobs needed.
Also, PG&E is HIGHLY regulated. Its prices, its generation and its executive compensation are all set by the state of CA. That SF wants to complain about those numbers is pretty amazing. Remember, they still don't have enough money in the tree trimming budget so that those same lines don't start fires in other parts of the state. Its the same wire that connects HH to SF. And somehow the city is going to manage that wire better?
PS The tree trimming budget is set by the state too. Why is it so low? Renewables cost money and that's one of the budgets they raided to get the funds.
395MW * 8760hr = 3,640,200 MWh
If so, what a boneheaded, rookie mistake by me. Thanks for the reply.
PS Capacity factor is the ratio between capacity and production. Its probably the single most important factor when comparing different generation types. Its intentionally made confusing because NPPs have 90+ cap factor and renewables have about 10ish cap factor. This makes renewables seem competitive when they are not. That's why this is always presented in a confusing manor. PPS Its also the main reason power is so expensive in CA.
Demand is always instantaneous, and transmission lines from a generator need to be sized for the maximum instantaneous generation, so in terms of the size of (any kind of) generator it's the main thing you're interested in. Capacity factor brings in seasonal / daily output variation but that's a whole different thing.
Both Wolfram Alpha and units(1) indicated that conversion between MW and MWh was totally nonsensical, so I presumed either that that was a typo, or that 1MW of power generation run for one hour will satisfy 1MWh of demand... assuming that either that demand is evenly spread throughout the hour, or that you can smooth over spikes with storage.
There could be people fleeing that have lived there for some time, while being supplanted with newcomers. That would have a net zero effect.
This. Lived in Santa Clara. SVP is the best utility in California.
Sounds like we have a solution! Get PG&E out of distribution. They can keep running power plants, where there is at least competition.
Much lower than that provided by the TVA? Ages ago, I used to live in an area served by the TVA, and its power prices were notably cheaper than anywhere else. I'd heard that this was because a huge chunk of its power was provided by fission plants, but never investigated.
I -a complete ignoramous- spent like ten whole minutes poking around for wholesale rates. I could find documents about rates for several providers (including TVA) from many years back, complaints about rates increasing for many providers (but no actual mention of the new rates) and some governmental site that provided rates for a selected subset of all providers which included CAISO and one in Texas, but not TVA.
You'd think that this would be something that'd be very easy to find on -say- the DoE's website, but apparently you'd be totally wrong.