San Francisco Has Been Trying to Leave PG&E for 100 Years. Will This Time Be Different?

The utility company initially offered him just $2,500, he said — which barely covered his typical electricity bill, let alone all the product and business that he lost. After more than three months of back and forth, he said he finally got PG&E to agree to something he found reasonable, but only after threatening to hire a lawyer.

Between December’s series of power outages and skyrocketing electricity bills, Dabit and other San Franciscans are growing increasingly frustrated with the utility company. Their discontent recently led the Board of Supervisors to reaffirm their commitment to cutting ties with PG&E, a process that’s been quietly underway for about five years.

While PG&E has said that a takeover would increase San Francisco electricity rates for decades, some advocates believe it might be the only way out. With the ever-increasing cost of living, would a takeover make life easier for Dabit?

Though many residents may not be aware of it, the city has been in a protracted battle over whether or not to leave PG&E since the start of the 20th century, said Josh Lappen, a researcher at the University of Notre Dame who studies utilities and energy. The last significant attempt took place in the early 2000s and failed as a ballot measure over concerns about government spending, questions about San Francisco’s ability to run a utility and significant campaigning from PG&E.

While similar ballot measures have been voted down for decades, the city may no longer have to go through voter approval. Since residents passed Proposition A in 2018, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission can now issue revenue bonds to buy clean power facilities with approval by two-thirds of the Board of Supervisors. This means that, if San Francisco and PG&E agree on a price, the city could potentially buy PG&E’s wire, poles and other physical infrastructure without putting anything on the ballot, according to John Coté, a spokesperson for San Francisco Power and Water.

The city’s latest attempt to buy the utility officially started in 2019 when it offered $2.5 billion for PG&E’s infrastructure. The company rejected the offer outright, saying the offer was too low, but in 2021, the city asked the California Public Utilities Commission to set a fair price. After years of delays, the CPUC directed San Francisco to submit its valuation and for PG&E to file its response by Oct. 20, 2026.

In April, San Francisco submitted a valuation of $3.4 billion to acquire the land, infrastructure and equipment needed for a takeover.

If San Francisco ever gets to the end of this process, Jim Lazar, an economist with a five-decade career in utility regulation and an advocate for public power, estimated that rates could go down by 15%-20% in the 10 years following purchase. Lazar said that prices would go down primarily because investor-owned utilities come with some baked-in costs that make them more expensive to run than consumer-owned utilities.

For example, being a public, nonprofit company allows consumer-owned utilities to both borrow money for construction projects at a cheaper rate and to pay less in taxes.

Consumer-owned utilities also tend to pay their executives less than investor-owned utilities, and that’s certainly the case for PG&E. The CEO of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, a consumer-owned utility, is set to earn $1.4 million in 2026. While that’s a lot, PG&E’s CEO made $19.8 million in 2025 alone. The skilled workers that maintain the grid, however, earn about the same regardless of ownership — about $79 per hour at SMUD and about $77 at PG&E.

As an investor-owned utility, PG&E also pays dividends to shareholders. While PG&E said that those dividends make up less than 1% of a typical residential bill, the incentive to generate dividends creates one more expense for ratepayers — a never-ending need to increase profits by building more infrastructure. In 2024, they built enough to pay their shareholders $1.45 billion.

While ratepayers may see gains in the long run, Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, said that the road ahead would be long, winding and costly.

And, Wara said, PG&E ratepayers outside of San Francisco, including places like Oakland and Marin, would take on the costs that San Francisco leaves behind.

Here’s why: San Francisco ratepayers heavily subsidize grid upgrades across Northern California, particularly in fire-prone areas. And PG&E increased its spending on wildfire prevention from $3.84 billion in 2019 to $6.17 billion in 2024. According to Wara, this wildfire spending was the “largest driver of rate increase for PG&E over the last decade,” and the majority of these investments happened outside of the city — where wildfires actually get started.

The investments still benefit San Franciscans by protecting them from the impacts of these natural disasters and making sure their energy gets to them safely.

“I know people that really think this is a great idea, but they tend to think about it solely from the perspective of San Francisco and the residents of San Francisco,” Wara said, referring to a takeover. “At the end of the day, the city is a regional entity that relies on energy that comes from oil refineries, electric dams and ports across the state.”

Wara said that because “electric power is this essential good that’s provided over a very large system,” more radical change — like turning all of PG&E into a public utility — would be better than cities leaving individually.

Jessica Tovar, a climate and environmental justice advocate in San Francisco, generally agreed with this take.

“I really would like to see a municipalization push that’s not solely big cities like San Francisco,” she said, “but other communities as well, because there is a lot of benefit to having control of the whole system.”

While experts and advocates agree that PG&E’s current structure does not always protect consumers, “there’s a lot less consensus among the voters on what to do than there is on the fact that something needs to be done,” Lappen said.

“These utilities really prop up daily life and any sort of change that risks increasing costs for any portion of the electorate would be really immediately and severely felt,” Lappen said.

Dabit, the Pizza Joint owner, said that while he had “heard about the government taking over PG&E, I don’t know if it’s going to be any better.”

“We just need PG&E, and whoever is providing electricity and gas to all these restaurants all over the city, to just be fair,” he said. “Just be fair, you know? We’re struggling. We really are.”