Editor’s note: San Francisco is a city of promises. Elimination of street deaths by 2024. Net-zero emissions by 2040. And a promise to be “transit first” – from 50 years ago. Our city often fails to keep its promises.
As SF celebrates Climate Week, we are debuting an investigative series that delves into the city’s electric future. We’re supposed to have a more affordable, livable city with less pollution, congestion, and street mayhem. But many obstacles are in the way, and many competing interests.
Power lights up our homes and businesses, but it also animates struggles between officials’ promises and their self-interest, and between government and private corporations over control of our energy future. In the first part of her series, Kristi Coale digs into the long and troubled relationship between San Francisco and PG&E.
We’d love your feedback. Email hello@thefrisc.com with the subject line ELECTRIC, or find us on social media. Thanks for reading.
In January 2022, the city of San Francisco turned an empty lot at Candlestick Point into a secure site for people living in their campers and RVs. The safe parking site, as it’s known, was supposed to host 150 vehicles, which means 200 people or more, including working families, could be off the streets, with easy access to toilets, showers, and support services.
The site has been open more than two years, but San Francisco’s main power provider, Pacific Gas & Electric, still hasn’t hooked it up to the grid. In January, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) installed solar-powered battery generators for power. But it has had to cap the number of vehicles at 39.
Before the generators, residents hadn’t been able to heat or light their RVs or use their kitchens, says HSH spokesperson Emily Cohen. The city brought in meals and mobile showers. Laundry had to be sent out.
With SF desperate to get people off the streets, the RV site was an idea with promise a couple years ago. But the curtailed capacity, plus a fruitless two-year search for at least one more site in town, have blunted the momentum.
It’s just one example of the complicated, frustrating interplay between San Francisco and PG&E, which has provided power to the city for more than 100 years. That frustration has boiled over into state legislation and a fight to force PG&E to account for cumbersome requirements of equipment, cancellations of service applications, and disputes over the level of electricity service needed. These issues have caused delays on city projects from homeless sites to affordable housing, from electric bus yards to street lights.
It’s not just SF’s time that PG&E is wasting, city officials say. It’s also money. Delays hooking up affordable housing, for example, mean delays in collecting rent. Sometimes, in the face of holdups, SF gives up. It agrees to buy power at PG&E’s retail rate, usually reserved for private customers, which puts city projects onto a faster track.
Officials including the head of the city’s homelessness agency, city supervisors, and Mayor London Breed say this is intentional: that the utility firm straps projects with extra requirements, which take longer – unless the city wants to pay extra.
“These delays are costing the city and the county of San Francisco almost $35 million additional on top of what we’re already paying,” said Breed at a March 1 rally. “This is criminal. This is neglect. This is dysfunctional.”
PG&E reported $24 billion in revenue and $2.2 billion in profit in 2023. Its CEO Patti Poppe made $17 million, mostly from special compensation, not salary, according to the Chronicle.
Since November 2018, PG&E has delayed more than 150 projects – some for two years and others more than five – according to the SF Public Utilities Commission. Some problems have made it into press reports, but until now, there has yet to be a robust accounting of recent incidents and delayed projects that span nearly every aspect of life in San Francisco.
PG&E did not respond to The Frisc‘s multiple requests for comment for this story. In the past, the firm has cited supply chain problems, staffing shortages, the difficulties of an aging grid, and even increased demand from the cannabis industry to explain delays across Northern California.
The future we’ve been promised requires electric cooperation, not constant tension. But the past is hard to escape.
A century of uneasy coexistence
Everyone has heard of PG&E. But not many know it has shared power for more than a century with San Francisco’s own public quasi-utility company. It’s an uneasy division of labor that has only intensified with PG&E’s bankruptcy and its grim role in starting wildfires and the San Bruno pipeline explosion, all turning Northern California’s predominant utility into one of the least liked in the country.
A century ago, however, SF had no choice but to lean on PG&E. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire, the city built the Hetch Hetchy system for drinking water and hydroelectric power. As well as the dam and eponymous reservoir in Yosemite National Park, the system includes power lines running from the Sierras to the Bay Area, all run by the SF Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC). The lines were supposed to stretch to the city, but SF ran out of money in the mid-1920s and only reached the South Bay town of Newark.
So it cut a deal with PG&E, which had a substation there. SFPUC would pay PG&E to transmit Hetch Hetchy power through its grid the rest of the way to city agencies, buildings, and other parts of the “municipal load.” A key point in the system is the Martin Substation at the SF-Brisbane border, near the Cow Palace.
Until 2015, the division of labor went like this: power from Hetch Hetchy went to city agencies and entities at a cheaper rate. PG&E, which generated power at plants like the ones now shuttered along SF’s bay shore, served residential and business customers at higher rates. (Today, those rates are 30 to 40 percent higher.)
But PG&E has always chafed against this setup, pushing to have some city buildings or projects categorized at the higher rate. When the long-term agreement expired in 2015, SFPUC used federal law to bypass PG&E for some transmission services.
But the city still pays PG&E tens of millions of dollars each year for access, and they continue to fight over the rates PG&E can charge for city-run projects.
Inappropriate loads
With utility deregulation in the 1990s, California created more room for cities to choose energy providers, a program called Community Choice Aggregation (CCA). San Francisco launched its CCA – CleanPowerSF – in 2016. It’s run by SFPUC and has contracts with several renewable energy providers to generate electricity for customers, almost all of which comes from outside San Francisco.
Between Hetch Hetchy Power and CleanPowerSF contracts, the SFPUC accounts for about 80 percent of the city’s electricity demand. But PG&E still owns the transmission wires and provides connections, and once the old access agreement with PG&E ended in 2015, PG&E began to “impose arbitrary technical requirements,” according to a 2018 Board of Supervisors resolution.
In short, the utility is using its leverage over the system, insisting certain sites need more equipment, and forcing the city to revise costs and redraw plans.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is hearing arguments in the dispute. A decision is due sometime this year, but in December 2022, it made a limited ruling in SF’s favor: a small number of projects could move ahead with less expensive “secondary” service, instead of PG&E’s insistence on “primary” service, which is more for electricity loads large enough to run a hospital – and requires equipment that takes up to 800 square feet of space, roughly the footprint of three school buses.
However, the ruling doesn’t affect a broader set of small projects known as “unmetered loads,” such as street lights and traffic signals. Without “secondary” service, the city can either pay more for PG&E retail service or purchase large-scale equipment that can cost more than $1 billion – as estimated by the SFPUC – to get primary service for these smaller sites. (There is a separate temporary agreement with PG&E to continue secondary service for these sites, pending a FERC ruling.)
Details of some of these disputes have been reported here and there – an affordable housing project that goes unoccupied, a subway route that can’t open – but other egregious examples are only now coming to light, revealing a deeper pattern of delay that helps explain how PG&E forces SF agencies into paying more money to get power sooner.
Essential services, delayed
At the Candlestick RV site, PG&E’s hook-up delay has been “very frustrating,” HSH executive director Shireen McSpadden said at a meeting last December. “If it’s not a priority, then we don’t have a lot of other solutions.”
In San Francisco’s 2022 street count, more than 30 percent of the city’s 4,397 unsheltered people were reported living out of their cars. In several locations, including streets bordering San Francisco State University and Bernal Heights Park, the city has begun to enforce limits after years of leniency. Vehicles – even ones that don’t run – have to leave.
HSH says some of the RV dwellers near SF State have moved into homes. But the city’s stock of affordable housing is limited. Like all housing, it’s already expensive to build and subject to delays, and PG&E only makes it worse.
Between 2018 and 2022, PG&E took an average of eight times longer than its counterpart Southern California Edison to connect affordable housing projects to the grid. The data emerged when California lawmakers were pushing legislation to hold utilities accountable to connect new housing in a timely manner. The Powering Up Californians Act passed in 2023 and sets deadlines for power connections.
There’s no advocacy or mechanism in place that would force PG&E to comply with our deadline.
Bhavin khatri, SFMTA zero emission program manager, who runs a pilot charging program with 24 plug-in electric buses
SF has begun to reform its housing process to make way for 82,000 new homes, and more than half need to be affordable to meet state mandates. Affordable homes developer Mission Housing had to postpone moving people into buildings that were otherwise ready because there was no electricity. This included a four-unit building for seniors that wound up waiting two years for power.
“It’s not just me, it’s every affordable housing project that’s negatively affected by PG&E and its inability to put affordable housing” ahead of their profits, Mission Housing executive director Sam Moss tells The Frisc.
(PG&E’s track record also spurred an April Fool’s joke: Local housing advocate Ali Sapirman announced on social media that she was PG&E’s new affordable housing connectivity director.)
There are problems for new market-rate housing as well. Corey Smith of Housing Action Coalition, which advocates for housing for all income levels, says developers tell him PG&E wants them to finish projects before requesting a grid connection. But developers, who may have several projects at various stages, want to queue them up for PG&E’s service before they’re done. This creates a problem, especially with PG&E’s staffing shortages, he says. “When you have someone whose power is out and someone who needs new electricity service, PG&E seems to prioritize existing customers,” says Smith.
Waiting for the (electric) bus
As part of its zero-emission pledge by 2040, SF has plans for plug-in public transit. PG&E isn’t helping, according to officials.
One crucial step is to modernize six bus yards to provide electric charging, which requires PG&E hooking up the yards to its grid. To save time, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency would like to apply for connections for all yards at once, says SFMTA zero emission program manager Bhavin Khatri.
He already knows roughly how much power the bus chargers will need. But Khatri says PG&E won’t let SFMTA into the application queue until it has more specific plans, which aren’t ready.
As it stands, SFMTA expects a wait of at least three years for a grid connection from the time it files each application — that’s how long it took PG&E to connect a small experimental charging program, says Khatri.
The pilot has chargers for 24 buses at two different yards. By 2040, the agency plans to have more than 1,000 buses charging across five yards. Khatri is most concerned with competing demands for PG&E’s attention. California has mandated all new vehicles in the state be zero emissions by 2035. This will likely pit municipal customers like SFMTA and the affordable housing agency against private customers with electric vehicles, who bring in more money. “There’s no advocacy or mechanism in place that would force PG&E to comply with our deadline,” says Khatri.
SFMTA isn’t just in charge of transit. The group also oversees streets and traffic. There’s mounting pressure to protect pedestrians and bicyclists – not just to save lives like the family killed last month by an out of control driver, but to encourage more people to leave their cars behind. (After that tragedy, Mayor Breed and her rivals weighed in on street safety.)
Some of PG&E’s most troubling delays are with upgrades to street lights and traffic signals. For instance, the agency requested PG&E connect street lights in dozens of locations along Taraval Street as part of the L-Taraval improvement project.
The street is part of the city’s High Injury Network, the 12 percent of streets where most collisions happen. According to city data, there have been 22 collisions along Taraval in the last two years. Among those struck by cars were two bicyclists and six pedestrians, including an 80-year-old woman killed last September.
In its February report to the Board of Supervisors, the SFPUC noted delays in the street light work along Taraval – first due to PG&E not responding, and then because it asked the agency for a redesign of the project.
SFMTA originally applied for this service in March 2019 and said it needed completion by October 2023. “Pedestrian and traffic safety is at risk as PG&E delays the energization of these streetlights,” the SFPUC report reads.
Another expensive SF toilet
Among PG&E’s demands and delays, perhaps the most egregious example is a sidewalk bathroom near Galileo High School that SFMTA wanted to build to give its 49 Van Ness line bus drivers some relief.
To power a light bulb and hand dryer, PG&E said it needed to build out 600 square feet for equipment – at a cost of $500,000 or more, according to the SFPUC. The SFPUC pushed back, says Barbara Hale, assistant general manager of power and enterprise, and PG&E dropped its demand. A small victory, but Hale says the consistent obstruction across dozens and dozens of projects is a pattern with a purpose.
“PG&E is doing what it can to make it uneconomic for SF to operate a public power program,” says Hale. “They’ve added all these upfront project costs and delays to make it infeasible or difficult for our city projects to move forward.”
At Candlestick Point, SFPUC has caved and “released” the safe parking site to PG&E at the higher retail rate to finally get power and accommodate more vehicles. HSH’s Cohen says the department is expecting electricity this summer but doesn’t yet have an exact date.
Same situation on Taraval Street: the city has released street lights to PG&E, as of February, essentially upping the cost of safer streets.
For decades, some San Franciscans have advocated for a full takeover of the city’s power infrastructure. If the city were to buy PG&E’s grid and run 100 percent public power, all these problems would be solved, they say. But as we’ll see in the next story in this series, PG&E isn’t the only local entity held in low public esteem these days. San Francisco residents have consistently given low marks to City Hall and the people who work there.
Ayla Burnett contributed research to this story.
This series is supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Correction 4/25/24: This story previously had an incorrect title for the SFPUC’s Barbara Hale. Hale is assistant general manager of power and enterprise.