Tuesday is the deadline for San Francisco to submit an official bid to state regulators if the city wants to operate its own power company.
San Francisco is offering $3.4 billion to buy PG&E’s assets, but NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit has learned PG&E will counter with a price of at least $20 billion.
In its offer, San Francisco is not including what city officials said are costs the city will bear on its own, such as creating a new station to handle getting power and delivering it to the grid.
PG&E includes those larger costs.
San Francisco said it has recorded 40 power outages so far this year. City leaders continue to ask state regulators to get to the bottom of what they call the utility’s reliability issues.
PG&E disagrees.
Last week, CEO Patti Poppe told the Climate One group that PG&E actually has less outage time this year.
Poppe also said San Francisco is vastly underestimating the cost of taking over the utility and undervaluing its assets.
“I imagine there will be a convoy of blue and white trucks driving across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, never to come back,” Poppe said. “I don’t think that’s in San Francisco’s best interest. And we’ll fight about that.”
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said the city will likely rehire many of those workers.
Chiu called Poppe’s talk of a $20 billion value “absurdly inflated,” citing the city suffering one major outage a week on average.
The California Public Utilities Commission is in the process of determining a fair and just value for a potential sale.
That process will take time, and the issue could also end up in court.