Breaking Up With PG&E

San Francisco is stuck in a broken relationship. We’re being gaslit, shortchanged and repeatedly let down – and we’ve had enough.

I’m talking, of course, about our relationship with our electric utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). For years, PG&E has been overcharging us with rates double what public utilities charge in places like Sacramento and Palo Alto.

After recent blackouts left a third of the City without power for hours or days, I decided to renew my yearslong fight to help San Francisco break up with PG&E. In mid-February, I introduced a new bill – Senate Bill 875 – to help us break up and move on to form our own publicly owned utility in San Francisco. SB-875 will fix the broken state process that has long impeded San Francisco’s effort to acquire PG&E’s assets and form a publicly owned utility responsive to San Franciscans, not Wall Street.

PG&E has harmed San Francisco countless times, but the December 2025 blackouts reached a whole new level. From the poor maintenance that caused a substation to catch fire, to the delayed response, to the repeated failures to communicate what was going on, the blackouts felt like the last straw in a situation that’s been dysfunctional for a long time.

We are fed up with blackouts from poor maintenance that leave hundreds of thousands of people without power for days on end. We are fed up with paying double what our neighbors in Sacramento and Palo Alto, both of which have public utilities, pay for their electricity. And we’re fed up with a system that gives monopoly utilities a huge incentive to focus more on paying shareholders than providing high-quality, low-cost service to the public.

We recently got a taste of what it would look like to have our electricity rates set by people who are accountable to the public instead of investors. Last month, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which oversees an aspect of our electric system, voted to lower the rates it charges on power generation by 20-25% to offset the 15-25% rate increases PG&E is charging on power transmission.

The result was that overall rates for electricity actually fell for some customers. That’s what decisions can look like all the time under a public ownership model, and that’s the future I’m fighting for in San Francisco.

For decades, there have been attempts to get San Francisco out of this toxic relationship and form our own publicly owned utility. In 2019 and 2020, the City even offered to buy the transmission infrastructure from PG&E for $2.5 billion. PG&E twice refused the offer.

In July 2021, San Francisco filed a petition with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to determine a fair price for PG&E’s assets. Despite a legal requirement that the CPUC wrap up its proceeding in 18 months, PG&E has abused this broken process with more than 100 obstructionist filings to drag out the proceeding for four and half years and counting.

We’ve had enough.

The rules for how cities like San Francisco can break up with PG&E were rigged decades ago by PG&E and other investor-owned utilities.

In 1992, they rewrote the rules at the CPUC so that cities have a much higher bar to clear in court before they can move forward with the eminent domain process. PG&E has also abused ambiguities in the process to force delay after delay into the CPUC process by expanding the scope of the CPUC’s review to include more and more irrelevant information.

It’s time to fix this broken process so we can move on from this broken relationship.

SB-875 un-rigs the process to allow cities like San Francisco to break up with PG&E. It will return the legal standard to the pre-1992 policy so that cities that choose to do so can move forward with eminent domain of monopoly utility assets. It will block the endless delay tactics by narrowing the scope of the CPUC’s review of the purchase agreement and set up timelines that are actually enforceable so that the CPUC can’t continue to blow past them.

I have been fighting this fight for a long time.

On the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, I was part of the effort to set up CleanPowerSF, which is the public program San Francisco uses to buy our own clean energy generating capacity. Creating CleanPowerSF was a massive fight with PG&E, and I was proud to be part of the veto-proof majority on the Board to create it. CleanPowerSF set the stage for our City to create its own public utility. All we have to do now is purchase PG&E’s infrastructure.

As your senator, in 2020, I authored legislation to turn PG&E as a whole into a publicly owned utility. PG&E aggressively opposed that bill and was able to kill it.

But you can’t give up when it really counts, and I’m energized for the next round of this fight. San Franciscans deserve more affordable clean energy and better service from their utility. We deserve to be in a healthy relationship, and I’ll keep fighting until San Franciscans get the affordable and reliable clean energy – and respectful treatment – we deserve.

Scott Wiener represents San Francisco and northern San Mateo County in the California State Senate. He chairs the Senate Budget Committee and is a member of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus. He previously chaired the Senate Housing Committee and the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus. He can be reached at 415-557-1300.