After Major Blackouts, San Francisco Lawmakers Power Up Efforts to Break With PG&E

San Francisco lawmakers escalated efforts to break up with PG&E on Monday — and replace it with a publicly owned utility.

Following massive power outages this winter that affected some residents for multiple days, state Sen. Scott Wiener and others gathered at City Hall to announce a state bill, SB 875, that would clear some of the legal hurdles cities face when exploring a public acquisition of their utility service.

“It’s just unacceptable,” Wiener said, flanked by several city supervisors. “For decades, San Francisco has been trying to get out of this toxic relationship. The city has repeatedly offered to purchase PG&E’s infrastructure here in San Francisco, and PG&E keeps refusing.”

More than 130,000 San Franciscans lost power in December 2025 after a circuit breaker sparked a fire at a PG&E substation and cut off power for up to three days for some residents. During the blackout, the company issued several incorrect updates on when power might be restored.

City officials have responded by reigniting their attempts to buy out PG&E in San Francisco and instead operate a publicly-owned utility, similar to what Sacramento and Palo Alto have done in recent years. Supporters point to utility rates up to 50% lower for consumers in those cities compared to San Francisco, where residents have faced cost hikes — despite inadequate PG&E infrastructure maintenance and service.

“Residents in my district were without power. Food was spoiling, heat wasn’t working. And PG&E left people waiting for minutes, then hours, and then days,” Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said on Monday, recalling the blackout in December.

Mahmood, who represents the Tenderloin and Nob Hill, recently participated in a public hearing where city officials grilled PG&E over the causes and responses during the outages.

“Their answers bordered on comedy,” Mahmood said at Monday’s press conference about the responses PG&E officials shared at the hearing. “It was clear after the hearing that PG&E has neither the ability nor the interest of San Franciscans in mind. It’s time to chart our own destiny and make progress towards public power.”

PG&E officials have claimed responsibility for the outages and said they are working to upgrade their communication systems. Repairs at the substation where the December fire broke out are complete. PG&E has hired the engineering firm Exponent to conduct the ongoing third-party investigation into the overall incident.

“We are bringing in another third party that’s focused specifically on how we can improve our restoration time estimates during large localized events, particularly when operating conditions are otherwise normal,” said Sumeet Singh, PG&E CEO, at the Feb. 12 hearing. “But in the meantime, we have already implemented a rapid escalation process for large-impact localized events.”

City leaders have called for a public utility option for years, but have struggled to push through the utility giant’s lobbying efforts and legal challenges.

Wiener’s bill aims to allow cities to break with companies like PG&E through a variety of reforms, including creating enforceable timelines to block excessive delays and limiting the California Public Utility Commission’s review process.

“In existing law, there is a 180-day deadline for the CPUC, which it has missed, and that is unacceptable,” Wiener said.

The bill, which will head to the state energy and utility committee sometime this spring, could face an uphill battle in the Legislature. Wiener previously put forward legislation that aimed to make all of PG&E a publicly-owned utility, but it failed to gather enough support.

PG&E, which serves 16 million people across Northern and Central California, has long caused controversy in the state over its safety record. Some state lawmakers, particularly after PG&E equipment sparked devastating wildfires in 2018 and other years, have expressed interest in a statewide takeover of power utilities like PG&E, which filed for bankruptcy in 2019.

Officials in San Francisco on Monday said, despite the setbacks in earlier attempts to reform the legal system around municipal power, they plan to push ahead.

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman plans to introduce a resolution at the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday in support of Wiener’s bill.

The board is also likely to pass two additional resolutions related to PG&E, one reaffirming the city’s support to acquire the power company’s infrastructure and another holding PG&E accountable for the recent outages.

“All across the Board of Supervisors, I think this is something that we are all in agreement on,” Supervisor Matt Dorsey said. “It’s time to municipalize these assets and have a public power system that delivers for rate payers rather than shareholders.”