PG&E Truck in South San Francisco. Photo Credit: BrokenSphere
San Francisco desperately wants to be known as the city of tomorrow, and if it actually wants to achieve that goal, it has to leave PG&E in the past.
This is a city where billion-dollar AI companies promise to replace doctors, lawyers, programmers, artists, and eventually everything else with a chatbot that occasionally hallucinates. Waymos drive around the city with no one behind the wheel. Startup founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars to solve problems that don’t exist. But the problem with a fully online society is if the power grid fails, the whole world comes to a halt.
And in San Francisco that’s all the time. It also affects Oakland, too. This isn’t my first attempt at this article. My first attempt was much more journalistic and respectable. You’ll never read that version because my power went out in Oakland and for whatever reason it didn’t save to Google Docs, so now you’re stuck with this version.
Thanks, PG&E.
This utility company is responsible for powering one of the richest cities on Earth and has somehow become synonymous with the exact opposite of progress. At this point, losing power in the Bay Area feels less like an emergency and more like another Bay Area tradition.
Welcome to Bay to Circuit Breakers. A race to get the lights back on before we figure out robots aren’t all that efficient.
Here's a brief history of how we got here.
Long before PG&E became associated with deadly wildfires, California experienced rolling blackouts during the state's energy crisis. Electricity became something people hoped would work rather than something they assumed would work, and PG&E eventually filed for bankruptcy. It was an early warning that even the wealthiest state in America could fumble something as basic as keeping the lights on.
Then came the San Bruno pipeline explosion.
A PG&E natural gas pipeline exploded beneath a residential neighborhood, killing eight people and destroying dozens of homes. It wasn't a blackout, but it permanently changed how Californians viewed the company. PG&E stopped being the boring utility that mailed you a bill every month and became the company everyone instinctively side-eyes whenever something catches fire, explodes, or mysteriously stops working.
After investigators linked PG&E equipment to multiple catastrophic wildfires, the company began implementing Public Safety Power Shutoffs.
Think about how insane that sentence is.
California reached a point where the safest way for an electric company to provide electricity was to stop providing electricity.
Imagine if Southwest Airlines announced the safest way to fly was canceling every flight.
That's essentially what happened.
A fire and equipment failure at PG&E's Mission Street substation knocked out power to roughly 130,000 customers across San Francisco.
Traffic lights stopped working.
Businesses closed.
Elevators stalled.
Restaurants scrambled to keep thousands of dollars worth of food from spoiling.
For a few hours, the technology capital of the world was reduced to asking whether anyone had a flashlight.
The following year brought more major outages across neighborhoods including the Sunset, Castro, Richmond District, and Lower Haight as underground equipment failures and electrical issues left thousands without power.
At some point, San Franciscans stopped asking, "Why did the power go out?"
They started asking, "How long is this one going to last?"
That's probably the most depressing part.
Power outages and the sometimes deadly incidents connected to them have been normal.
So What's the Solution?
At some point, Californians have to ask whether this experiment has failed.
PG&E isn't just another private company selling shoes or burritos. It controls one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the largest state economy in America. Electricity isn't a luxury. It's what keeps hospitals open, traffic lights working, businesses running, refrigerators cold, and every billion-dollar AI startup pretending it's building the future.
So why is something this essential primarily being run to maximize shareholder returns?
Defenders of PG&E argue that private companies are more efficient than government-run utilities. Maybe. But efficient at what? Californians have watched PG&E file for bankruptcy, cause deadly disasters, pay billions in settlements, shut off power to entire communities, and repeatedly leave customers in the dark. If that's efficiency, I'd hate to see incompetence.
That's why San Francisco should seriously consider public ownership of its electrical system.
This isn't some radical fantasy. Sacramento has operated the publicly owned Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) for decades, and it consistently ranks among the nation's most reliable and best-rated electric utilities. It's not perfect, but it proves public ownership can work.
San Francisco already trusts public ownership to deliver clean drinking water through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Nobody suggests handing Hetch Hetchy over to Wall Street and hoping quarterly earnings improve water quality. Electricity is every bit as essential.
If San Francisco wants to lead the future, maybe it should start by owning the infrastructure that keeps the fucking lights on.
