Pg&e Outages in S.f. Leave 130k Without Electricity
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A massive PG&E outage has left 130,000 San Francisco residents without electricity, sparking a lively debate about the reliability of California's grid and the role of utility companies. Commenters weighed in on the idea of introducing competition to the electricity market, with some arguing that it's a natural monopoly, while others suggested incentivizing home storage and solar installations to boost resilience. The discussion revealed a consensus that California's grid is not as reliable as it's cracked up to be, with some pointing to the state's ambitious climate goals and redistributive taxes as contributing factors to the issue. As one commenter dryly noted, Californians have grown accustomed to grid failures, making this outage just another chapter in a familiar story.
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EDIT: *language, think of the children.
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.
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.
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.
marketing is marketing
all electricity economics in california is highly manipulated via regulatory capture.
PG&E pays 3-4 cents/kwh wholesale and marks it up 10x because...
it can.
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)
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.
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.
Or is your point that the total lack of checks and balances afforded by the Assembly presents us no additional problems over Willie Brown's current employment?
California has been dealing with the idiocies caused by that ever since.
It's also worth noting that PG&E's got a history of astroturfing. Back in the 00s there was a 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.
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
Monopolies work to enrich themselves, not to provide social benefit.
This incentive structure perfectly aligns with most of the dysfunction of PG&E.
So no, it isn't really comparable with a truly government owned public utility.
2. Their dividend yield was 0.8% in 2025, the average for utilities was 3% to 5%. Alaska's APTL was 2.4% to 3.4%
3. Their state lobbying for 2024 to 2025 was less than $4 million. Federal was $60k
4. California AB 1054 means that almost all of their liabilities will be reimbursed via the state wildfire fund. They also have insurance for anything that is not covered.
I also checked executive bonuses and while the CEOs pay is on the higher end it's not extreme. Not sure how much other executive bonuses could really add up to bolster your argument since all your other main arguments were wrong.
Back maintenance is a standard expense for a utility. Do you have some evidence that it's particularly high compared to another utility taking into account the size of the state?
Why would you make the assumption that the reasons PG&E is expensive are mostly due to corruption, excess pay or benefits to stock holders, or that the utility has a high liability debt? Is it possible that due to political propaganda over the long term that you default to the assumption that anything California does is bad so much so you don't even bother gathering evidence?
Also Hawaii has much higher electric rates than CA.
(Sources for any claims I made are available if requested)
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and-payment/rates-a...
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
Comparing time-of-use plans HE rates for the big island are as low as 12.8 cents/kWh. PG&E's cheapest TOU rates are 36 cents (winter only).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvu6oBAeJ6E
Look at youtube, tiktok. Fine that's entertainment (set aside the issue of infotainment that has already infected public education). Then look at so called "productivity apps", or language learning apps. It's one thing to waste billions of collective man-hours it's another thing to lie and tell people they are learning or being more productive when you are wasting their time.
There are no mass assembly lines in the US, city GDP has been paper GDP for a long time now. On-shoring won't work without a total collapse of every culturally-enriched city, people need to learn hardship again.
This is a luxury belief and not borne out by any sort of reality. People have been deciding where they live for millennia and it’s never been easier than today.
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 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. But I've read some old articles that suggest there's a 50+ year-old understanding (if not a gentlemen's agreement) between SF and PG&E, that PG&E would give the City of SF 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, like whether SF is really violating the Raker Act--SF claims PG&E is acting as their agent.
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
A concerning miss in proofreading or am I learning about a new fire-fighting technology today?
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.
I think there is something to be said for a semi-reliable grid encouraging resilience over time. You can't have it too unreliable, but it seems like there is a sweet spot that encourages high quality contingencies to develop.
It's a shame that, during the sunniest part of the day, grid supply is supplemented by burning fossil fuels, rather than just using the energy from that sun.