After a blackout caused 130,000 PG&E customers in San Francisco to lose power last month, several supervisors demanded that the private utility company be held accountable during Tuesday’s board meeting.
December’s power outages also renewed the supervisors’ interest in the effort for San Francisco to acquire PG&E’s assets in the city to create a public power system independent of the energy giant.
On Dec. 20, a third of San Francisco went dark. While power was gradually restored for many, some residents and businesses in the Richmond and Sunset districts were without power for up to three days.
“Traffic lights went dark and caused chaos at busy intersections,” said Sunset District Supervisor Alan Wong at the meeting. “Small businesses on Irving Street had to throw away everything in the refrigerators during one of the busiest weeks of the year.”
Parts of the Richmond and Sunset districts also experienced additional outages last month.
“Families lost heat in the middle of winter,” said Wong. “Seniors were stranded in their homes. One of my constituents, a 95-year-old man, who relies on a ventilator, had to be rushed to the hospital at 2 a.m.”
While the root causes the Dec. 20 outage are still under investigation, PG&E said that a fire at its substation on Mission and Eighth streets contributed to the outage.
“A piece of equipment at our Mission substation failed, which resulted in a fire and approximately 130,000 customers losing power,” said Sarah Yoell, a local governmental relations representative for PG&E, at the meeting. “Since that time, there have been pockets of customers in the Richmond and the Sunset districts that have experienced additional outages.”
Wong called for a formal hearing into the Dec. 20 outage, a request that has been co-sponsored by supervisors Bilal Mahmood, Connie Chan, Stephen Sherrill, Myrna Melgar, Matt Dorsey and Danny Sauter.
“Our residents deserve answers,” Wong said. “They deserve to know why a substation fire near Mission and 18th cascaded into an outage affecting the entire western half of the city. They deserve to know what additional compensation is available.”
PG&E provided some compensation to those affected. Residential customers who lost power will get a $200 credit, and businesses that were impacted by the outage will get a $2,500 credit.
Supervisors Chan and Dorsey also introduced resolutions in response to the outage. One of them urges Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety to withhold PG&E’s safety certification until all its infrastructure and equipment have been properly inspected and maintained. Safety certifications are designed to encourage energy and utility companies to prioritize mitigating fire risk, according to the office.
“PG&E’s ongoing, preventable disasters and failure to upgrade and improve its infrastructure prove the company cannot deliver electricity to our residents in a safe, reliable and affordable manner,” Chan said. “Therefore we’re urging the governor to halt the issuance of their safety certificate for 2026 so that PG&E can be held accountable for these failures.”
Chan and Dorsey blamed negligence for the severity of the outage, since PG&E has previously been held liable for not properly maintaining its equipment. The company pleaded guilty to causing the 2018 Camp Fire that burned the town of Paradise and killed 85 people, admitting that its aging power lines sparked the blaze.
“These blackouts are the result of neglected infrastructure maintenance by PG&E, a private company more interested in profit and raises for executives that outweigh their concerns for investment in safety and reliability,” Chan said.
Yoell showed up to Tuesday’s meeting to respond to the allegations and calls for a hearing. She urged the supervisors not to make assumptions on the cause of the problem until the investigation is completed.
“As a cause of the equipment failure is still unknown, we respectfully ask the board to refrain from drawing any conclusions until the investigation results are available,” she told the board.
PG&E has hired a third party to conduct an investigation into the root causes of the Dec. 20 outage, and the preliminary results are expected next month. She also urged the board to wait to hold a formal hearing until the results are released.
“We are proud of our ongoing investments to enhance the system that serves San Francisco,” Yoell said. “We are continuing to make additional investments, and we remain committed to working closely with the city to learn from this outage as we strengthen resilience and build a future ready utility.”
But several members of the Board appear to have little hope in PG&E’s future in San Francisco.
“PG&E is an investor-owned utility accountable to shareholders before ratepayers, and until that changes, we can expect more of the same,” Dorsey said. “These outages underscore why San Francisco must continue to move forward in realizing the public power system we should have had more than a century ago.”
The outages have renewed interest in the effort to have the city operate its own utilities, a switch that the city has been exploring for several years.
In 2019, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission released a report detailing the city’s options for electrical services at the request of former Mayor London Breed. The request stemmed from concerns over PG&E’s safety, reliability, and the company filing for bankruptcy.
The report determined that a city-owned electric grid could have the potential for long-term cost savings and increased affordability, safety, reliability and environmental benefits.
Chan and Dorsey are sponsoring another resolution to reaffirm the city’s commitment to acquiring PG&E’s local infrastructure. Wong is also going to submit a letter of inquiry to the Public Utilities Commission, requesting an analysis into the cost, logistics and practicality of acquiring and operating a publicly owned utility electric grid.
“This is about doing our due diligence,” Wong said. “This inquiry will help us understand what’s within the city’s power to do and what our options are moving this forward.”