San Francisco lawmaker to propose plan to let cities break away from PG&E
Just two months ago, a massive power outage left parts of San Francisco in the dark for days, and some lawmakers are trying to make sure it never happens again.
"San Francisco has been trying to break up with PG&E for a long time," said Democratic Senator Scott Wiener. "The rates are extremely high and we know that public power can bring lower rates."
Wiener says he will announce legislation on Monday that would allow San Francisco and other cities to break away from PG&E and form publicly owned utility companies, and do it quickly.
"San Francisco has already triggered a process to break away at the California Public Utilities Commission, but it is unbelievably slow, it's taken years and years," explained Wiener. "The standards set under the law are very unfavorable to a city wanting to break away."
A professor at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas School of Business, Severin Borenstein, says he has an idea about what this could look like.
"It means trying to buy out their poles and wires to be the distributor of electricity in the city," said Borenstein. "San Francisco is already its own entity in securing its electricity from generators. What would change, potentially, is they could own the specific distribution lines."
He says it could benefit the city if they feel they can do a better job maintaining the lines, and they may be able to reduce the cost. But Borenstein explains that some of the reduction in cost could be because San Francisco and other urban areas are subsidizing the more rural areas in PG&E territory, particularly in fire-prone areas.
"If the cities opt out, or could opt out of PG&E territory, what that's going to mean is all of those wildfire costs, which are really unavoidable, that's what climate change is doing to us, will be shifting on to the remaining rate payers," said Borenstein.
Borenstein thinks it could start a domino effect of cities wanting to form their own utility companies, and other lawmakers may want to avoid it.
"I don't think the legislature is going to be very supportive of this because I think a lot of legislatures understand if we go down this road there's going to be a crisis in the areas that are left holding the bag," said Borenstein.
Alameda and Palo Alto already have city-run utilities. Wiener believes San Francisco can join them.
"Right now, PG&E, it is a publicly traded corporation," Wiener stated. "It is beholden to Wall Street and investors and its bottom line. And public power allows you to break away from that and to focus on the public interest and not on the needs of shareholders."