Plot here is quite thick. SF selling power to PG&E to distribute was found illegal/in violation of the Raker Act by the US Supreme Court in 1940 in United States v. City and County of San Francisco.
SF shifted to "wheeling" instead of selling power to PG&E and is tenuously in compliance now, but the current set up was never intended when the federal government ceded water and power rights from Yosemite to SF.
... that it produces about 976 GWh per year. A few different sources say that SF uses about 5-6 TWh per year. So that is slightly less than 20% of total power needs. Still, it is a good start.
The other angle that people may not realize is that SF has voted in nine separate elections to not establish a municipal utility. The people of SF demonstrably do not want to take over PG&E, given numerous opportunities.
SMUD has cheap power because 100 years ago the people of Sacramento invested a lot of money to establish that utility. What the vocal minority of SF public power people want is magical: cheaper rates without all that bothersome investment.
100% of its generation and grid stability is provided by PG&E. All it provides is the local distro and local maintenance. Also, in a low generation scenario, you are the first to be cut off to save the rest of the grid.
Please remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too. And a single fire's cost is about 3x the yearly budget of SF.
> remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too
Crazy thought—dedicate the resources to maintaining them. From what I can tell, this tolerance of power-sparked wildfires is uniquely American (and concentrated, fairly and unfairly, in California).
Also, you don’t have to put it straight on the municipal balance sheet. Stick it in a distribution subsidiary with a little outside capital. (Hell, make it a member-owned co-operative.)
Alternative: sell off that transmission to someone else. Just handle last-mile distribution. Not transmission.
Some generation PG&E owns, some is in a shared vehicle split between PG&E and a group of private investors, some is owned by other utilities (Edison) and some is just privately owned. Remember that generation was built up over 70 years. Different plants at different times with different politics ends up with different ownership arrangements. They all bid into CAISO and independently choose to produce or not based upon prices. The generators sell futures contracts and PG&E (and Edison) buy them either in 1 day cycles or 15 minute cycles (almost always some of both).
> But PG&E has charged significantly more for power the last few years. Most people easily hit 50c/kwh on their bills.
Way more than that! In prime time it's now in the ~80c/kWh these days.
I've been posting this for years and continues to be true: given the price increase trend of PG&E, within 10 years the electricity bill will be larger than the mortgage.
Yikes… that means a Tesla Model S with a 95kWH battery would cost $76 to charge. Most people around the country pay way less than that to fill a combustion SUV at the pump.
I have some doubts about San Francisco’s ability to run a provider well, given the long history of corruption in city service providers and permitting agencies.
> The angle of this that people may not realize is that San Francisco already owns the power generation (ie, the Hetch Hetchy dam).
My conclusion might be totally wrong because I'm converting from units that aren't meant to be converted, but...
If you filter down to only San Francisco County on this official-looking thingie [0], you see that it claims the city [1] has 5.126 TWh of consumption.
Your link [2] claims Hetch Hetchy Power System provides something like 395 MW of power generation capacity. I'm going to assume that that's a misprint and they meant to write MWh because that's the only thing that makes sense to me for a measure of power generation. While the last page of this PDF [3] indicates that the hydro generation component is capable of powering a bit more than twice the city's municipal demand, it seems like it's not enough to satisfy even 1/1000th of the demand of the entire city.
Perhaps I've totally fucked up my unit conversions (or relied on garbage data), but it looks like only the tiniest fraction of the city's power demands can be satisfied by the Hetch Hetchy dam. (Though, we could easily electrify way more of the Muni lines with the surplus capacity.)
I would assume 395MW is the nameplate capacity, so you would multiply it by a capacity factor and time to get the energy production in a specific interval. Capacity factor in hydro can vary a lot by season and how much they want to produce vs reservoir levels, but for a back of the envelope 100% capacity factor you have 395 MW × 8,760 hours/year = 3.46TWh/year . Capacity factor could be in the high 90s in good conditions and maximum production but I expect it's a lot lower unless it's a wet year with very few big maintenance jobs needed.
> Capacity factor could be in the high 90s in good conditions and maximum production but I expect it's a lot lower unless it's a wet year with very few big maintenance jobs needed.
Most rivers this far away from the equator don't receive the same inflows each season. For example, the spring will have very high flow due to melting snow in the mountains that feed that reservoir. I guess the winter has the lowest flow because snow melts much less in the winter.
I seriously doubt that any non-nuclear power generation in history has ever gotten to 90% capacity factor. Based on industry averages, HH is probably about 55-65% capacity. Things that effect this are: low demand periods (caused by lots of renewables), maintenance periods and low water levels at times (in winter) behind the dam.
Also, PG&E is HIGHLY regulated. Its prices, its generation and its executive compensation are all set by the state of CA. That SF wants to complain about those numbers is pretty amazing. Remember, they still don't have enough money in the tree trimming budget so that those same lines don't start fires in other parts of the state. Its the same wire that connects HH to SF. And somehow the city is going to manage that wire better?
PS The tree trimming budget is set by the state too. Why is it so low? Renewables cost money and that's one of the budgets they raided to get the funds.
to figure out roughly the maximum possible annual demand that could be served by the system? (For the purposes of this question, I'm just doing the -er- dimensional/unit/whatever analysis and ignoring production-capacity-reducing factors that you'd definitely have to factor in to get the real number.)
If so, what a boneheaded, rookie mistake by me. Thanks for the reply.
Power generation facilities are typically quoted in terms of Watts, not Watt-hours. From an era where these were fossil fuel or nuclear plants or dams that provided a pretty steady level of energy. It indicates what the generation facility/asset can produce at any given moment, although if rivers run dry hydro output can decrease.
I think the numbers you cite in [0] are in terms of total annual consumption.
The (nameplate) capacity is in watts. Its production is in watt hours. Some parties have intentionally confused these two concepts (capacity and production) to make certain power sources seem better than they are and other power sources worse than they are. The media consistently and clearly intentionally confuses these two concepts to prevent most people from learning how bad the numbers really are.
PS Capacity factor is the ratio between capacity and production. Its probably the single most important factor when comparing different generation types. Its intentionally made confusing because NPPs have 90+ cap factor and renewables have about 10ish cap factor. This makes renewables seem competitive when they are not. That's why this is always presented in a confusing manor.
PPS Its also the main reason power is so expensive in CA.
It's not really anything to do with "an era where these [...] provided a pretty steady level of energy", it's just the only way that makes sense to describe it in any case.
Demand is always instantaneous, and transmission lines from a generator need to be sized for the maximum instantaneous generation, so in terms of the size of (any kind of) generator it's the main thing you're interested in. Capacity factor brings in seasonal / daily output variation but that's a whole different thing.
You did this wrong but drew the right conclusion. Hetch Hetchy system exists but it is nowhere near the scale of powering the entire city of San Francisco.
Mmkay, so what were my core mistakes? Unit conversion failures? Order-of-magnitude errors? Sign problems (somehow)?
Both Wolfram Alpha and units(1) indicated that conversion between MW and MWh was totally nonsensical, so I presumed either that that was a typo, or that 1MW of power generation run for one hour will satisfy 1MWh of demand... assuming that either that demand is evenly spread throughout the hour, or that you can smooth over spikes with storage.
Your mistake is ignoring capacity factor. Most power generation has between 40% and 60% capacity factor. NPPs are 90+ and renewables are about 10. This is intentionally made confusing and you aren't helping because you don't understand this. I do get that this is a good faith error caused by the intention conflation of different units by PR statements.
If you move to San Francisco and get electricity (from PG&E) then you will be automatically signed up to buy your electricity from the city, instead of from PG&E. You'll still pay PG&E for delivering the electricity.
This results in:
- higher cost (because SFPUC charges more for electricity generation than does PG&E)
- your PG&E bill being confusing (I've interacted with smart people who couldn't figure out how much they were paying per kWh on average)
In 2020, someone in my neighbourhood put in a request (via the official process) for traffic calming on a nearby road where cars drive dangerously fast, and often fail to stop at a marked pedestrian crossing.
In December 2024, I had a near miss on that crosswalk and contacted the city. I have followed up with them every 3-4 weeks since then.
The last I heard, they might have a public hearing about a potential road hump, in summer 2026.
It's hard to believe the city government is capable of running an electric company.
(I'm no fan of PG&E BTW. Here in SF I've paid more per kWh and had more power outages per unit time, than anywhere else I've lived.)
On the note of PG&E, my electric bill averages to about $750 despite only running an air conditioner, several device chargers, a router, some lights and a fridge...
Are these "device chargers" for BEVs like electric submarines or something? ;-)
In the broader SF Bay Area, our recent PG&E bills for a 50 year old single-family home without air-conditioning is under $150/mo, with a couple fridges, electric clothes dryer, and a half-dozen laptop class computers. That's averaging about 8-9 kWh per day (250-280 kWh/month).
Last winter, our bill ramped up to over $400/mo for a few months, due to heating with natural gas.
Let's say your overall rate is $0.50/kWh, that would put you at 1500kWh per month. Which is....high. Even if your rate were $1/kWh, 750kWh would be a decent amount of juice for a region with an overall mild climate.
The EIA[0] says the typical annual electricity consumption for homes in "the West" (ie not just California) is 8525kWh/year, or 710kWh/month.
My PG&E bill tends to be around $500/mo and I run basically nothing out of the basics. Never turn on the A/C. Tiny house, normal usage of fridge, lights and the usual househould gadgets like washer/dryer. Near the coast so climate is cool, if we lived in the hot areas and had to run A/C I imagine it would be double at least.
The profound corruption of PG&E is an existential risk to California and Silicon Valley.
A kWh measurement would be handy. List rates for PG&E are (at the high end) ~$0.50/kWh. Sure with fees and such, I can see it higher, but throwing out a real number would be useful for the conversation on what goes into a $500 bill. There are also tiers if you are a higher consumer - all of which is hard to deduce with just a vague total bill value.
No wonder people are fleeing California in droves. There is absolutely no justification for a bill that high other than malfeasance or gross mismanagement. That is straight-up theft of your money.
For comparison, I have double that plus electric appliances and a home-lab with 6 rack servers that run 24/7 and my bill rarely tops $175 in the dead of summer. And I like the thermostat cold.
If you live in a duplex or condo I would consider if your meter is miswired (with your neighbor's meter daisy-chained to yours) and you are being double-billed. It is more common than you think and often goes undiscovered for years.
Shrinking every year. Not good. ~40% people under 40 (or ~10% of the population) live with their parents. This is an indirect tax on parents since a majority of this class has no option to evict their kids.
North Korea has a stable population, people flee all the time. The comparison is apt. California's 4-walled fences are much tighter around their residents.
CA rates come in 4 tranches based on usage. Last I checked, its $0.10/kwh for the first tranch, 0.2 for the 2nd, 0.3 for the 3rd and 0.4 for the highest. I don't remember the cutoffs between the different levels. Its also possible those rates have changed in the last few years. But that's how CA does residential power bills. Most people never get into the 2nd tranche.
PS Where I live now, its $0.04/kwh and that's pretty normal in the rest of the US and in Latin America.
So its completely changed since 2022 (last time I paid a PG&E bill). And the prices are multiple times more than in 2022 too. I didn't realize it had gotten so bad.
Yes, because the city has proven to be so capable of solving the most basic civic issues it is now time the board of supervisors moves on to more advanced challenges.
Please remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too. And a single fire's cost is about 3x the yearly budget of SF.
A few months ago I attended an event where a few members of the Board of Supervisors were attending. One person identified themselves as working in this field and pointed out that the current cost plus model incentivizes the company to do all kinds of upgrades that aren't really needed. The BoS member said something like, "Look, we need to just bite the bullet on this one, we're going to overpay, but we are already legally permitted to buy it and doing so will save us a ton of money in the long run because of stuff like that".
I have no personal knowledge, but thought I'd share this experience I had with the ongoing debate.
PG&E is a profitable, publicly traded company... that issues a dividend. They tried to file for bankruptcy after the paradise fire, but they were too big to fail, so they issued new shares with gov protection. CA created a new insurance backstop for them as well. Corporations should not have government assisted (regulated) monopolies with socialized backstops. Yeah, CPUC is supposed to help, but decision makers probably have exposure. It is the same with Sempra and SDG&E and SCE. SMUD seems like a better organization, but what do I know.
SF's insane electricity prices are the sole reason I bought a Honda Civic Hybrid instead of a Tesla Model 3. They both cost 12 cents per mile here, so it was just the mild hassle of charging that tipped it out of favor. If I lived somewhere with sane electricity prices like Seattle I totally would have switched.
> Dabit’s energy problems reached a new level in December when a PG&E substation fire caused a three-day power outage for the neighborhood. In addition to losing business, Dabit lost $10,000 to $15,000 worth of ingredients.
(1) Why didn't the owner have insurance for food spoilage? Since it is rare event, it is probably very cheap. The old saying: "Buy insurance for (emergency) expenses that you cannot afford." This seems like a text book case.
(2) Why didn't the owner immediately run to a hardware store to buy a portable (diesel?) generator to save as much food as possible? At least run one fridge and pack the most expensive ingredients into that one fridge.
Overall: My sympathy is low for the owner's situation.
If the city buys (or runs) its own (traditional) electricity utility, they will be assuming all of the wildfire risk. That is the primary cause of rises electricity rates by PG&E in the last ten years. However, if SF wants to create some power generation in the form of solar panels and batteries or wind, then sign power trade agreements with PG&E, I think that could be tenable/workable. If they spent 100M USD per year building truly reliable, green power generation, then 10 years later would look much better.
1. Spoilage claims are not usually covered by insurance if the power interruption starts at the utility company instead of in your building. It's pretty rare that anyone knows to ask for that particular endorsement, and you're SoL without it.
2. You don't think everyone else was thinking the same thing?
Also, you can just have sympathy for people even if it were their own mistake. It doesn't cost you anything.
The fires have been caused by the transmission grid, not the distribution grid. SF would be taking the distribution. There is not a ton of wildfire risk from the electric utility in SF, and it would be fairly easy to manage.
Restaurants have very thin margins, they can’t afford that stuff.
PG&E is a failure. It’s wild prioritizing its reform and replacement isn’t seen as the existential threat to California Democrats’ national ambitions that it rightfully is.
Distribution shouldn’t be this expensive nor cause this many fires. If the cost of distributing power to remote, fire-prone communities isn’t politically feasible to push to them directly, the cities should be put on a separate distribution system to isolate the cost inflation.
Silicon Valley buys PG&E power and handles distribution itself. It has some of the only reasonable power rates in California [1].
Wouldn't distribution naturally be the more expensive part vs. electricity generation given the latter is centralized and scaled? Perhaps this is a fallacy, but that is the thought that crossed my mind.
In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons [1]. This was used as the justification for mass privatization of many government bodies (including utilities) in the 1980s and 1990s. PG&E was always private but it suffers from the same issues as many other privatized utilities.
Utilities are a perfect example of a wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy, justified by "efficiency". Losses are socialized, profits are privatized, just like in any public-private "partnership". Utilities are worse because their profits are usually guaranteed.
This paper was proven to be empirically incorrect by Elinor Ostrom for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics.
AIUI This relationship between PG&E and SF/CPUC has a corrupt history dating back to the 90s with Willie Brown and later even Kamala Harris.
It's a part of why Republicans actually have some grounds for calling Harris corrupt - Willie Brown's office when mayor of SF was notorious for being a pay-to-play situation, she worked there (and even dated him).
> Or, as Supervisor Aaron Peskin described it, “mind-boggling.” He said
> the “city family” that grew up under Mayor Willie Brown, continued
> working under Mayor Gavin Newsom, flourished under Mayor Ed Lee and
> stayed on under Breed “were all doing favors for one another and
> living in their own little bubble.”
>
> “They all convinced each other that they were like a family, and
> family can give gifts to their children,” Peskin said, noting those
> same family members took the city’s required annual ethics training
> like everybody else and must have known what they were doing was
> wrong.
>
> “They just got too cozy over too much time, and they lost their way,”
> Peskin said. “Now I have to look at everybody going, ‘Are you a
> crook?’ It’s not the way I want to see the world.”
CPUC exists. CAISO exists. The consumer experience is still bad. What this means is that there is not enough generation. This is not a matter of whether PG&E is "privately" or "publicly" owned, because nearly all large utilities are already a weird mixture of both. Public ownership might have different incentives, but not sufficiently different to allow rates to be lowered substantially (unless it were a case of overt and massive subsidies, which would require state legislation and possibly rewriting the charters of CPUC and CAISO). The only way to lower rates is to add cheaper generation; and the way to make generation cheapest, and to bring it on line quickest, is to locate it near demand.
My electricity bill is roughly 1/3rd 'CleanPowerSF Electric Generation Charges' vs 2/3rds 'Current PG&E Electric Delivery Charges'. The big problem is that PG&E covers most of rural California so its urban customers have to cover the high costs of compensation and prevention from delivering to fire prone rural areas.
This is just very straightforwardly incorrect. Last month I paid Ava Energy $26 for electric energy generation, and PG&E $99 for delivery. Cutting the generation cost to $0 would only reduce my bill by 20%. Ava Energy says that 70% of the power I used came from solar located within my city, so it's already located quite close to demand.
> What this means is that there is not enough generation
We should generate more, but one of the major issues is how much wildfire prevention PG&E has to do, which then gets passed on to their customers. I am huge into supply side abundance, but that isnt the only driver here for costs.
Maybe, but SVP has two massive advantages: it delivers almost all of its energy to a handful of gigantic customers, not homes. Contrary to internet belief, having a customer base dominated by industry makes power cheap to deliver. Secondly, it gets a free pass from expensive things that the state makes PG&E pay for, especially rural service.
That wasn't my point. Subsidizing rural service is a state policy. If major cities increasingly divorce from PG&E, and the true cost of rural electrification starts to be charged upon actual rural people, that might not work politically.
As others have mentioned, Silicon Valley Power charges about half of PGE, and SF actually already has a power provider for businesses via Hetch Hetchy. It’s probably true that overall they might be a generation shortage but it doesn’t have to be true on a local scale. Plus PGE also needs to pay a lot of money for all the fires they started…which of course just goes back to the rate payers.
The problem in California is not generation nor is it reliability. CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far; under half the cost of Texas. It also hasn't had a blackout since 2020.
The problem is retail side. AKA PG&E, its regulation, governance and forced liabilities.
CAISO claims that and cleantechnica might parrot it, but there are blackouts ALL THE TIME in southern california.
In Palm Springs I was down with brownouts 103 times since I bought a sine wave UPS in December, and multi hour blackouts 4 times. My mother in Riverside, brother in Laguna Beach are similar.
Last week it was 3 times here over the course of three days. It's lived experience for me. Reliability collapsed two years ago
> CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far
Much lower than that provided by the TVA? Ages ago, I used to live in an area served by the TVA, and its power prices were notably cheaper than anywhere else. I'd heard that this was because a huge chunk of its power was provided by fission plants, but never investigated.
Yes, CAISO wholesale rates are much lower, but California also has the highest retail cost in the continental US, at over 28c/kWh. If any customer in the TVA paid that much for power there'd be riots.
Where does one even find wholesale rates for the various regional providers?
I -a complete ignoramous- spent like ten whole minutes poking around for wholesale rates. I could find documents about rates for several providers (including TVA) from many years back, complaints about rates increasing for many providers (but no actual mention of the new rates) and some governmental site that provided rates for a selected subset of all providers which included CAISO and one in Texas, but not TVA.
You'd think that this would be something that'd be very easy to find on -say- the DoE's website, but apparently you'd be totally wrong.
EIA doesn't carry TVA data because the TVA doesn't participate in open-market sales or report data to FERC. Wholesale power is auctioned in I(or R)SOs; TVA just sets rates directly during negotiations with power companies.
The angle of this that people may not realize is that San Francisco already owns the power generation (ie, the Hetch Hetchy dam). [1]
PG&E simply owns the wires, and overcharges for their use.
[1]: https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/hetch-hetchy-powe...
Plot here is quite thick. SF selling power to PG&E to distribute was found illegal/in violation of the Raker Act by the US Supreme Court in 1940 in United States v. City and County of San Francisco.
SF shifted to "wheeling" instead of selling power to PG&E and is tenuously in compliance now, but the current set up was never intended when the federal government ceded water and power rights from Yosemite to SF.
About that dam, Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Shaughnessy_Dam_(Californi...
... that it produces about 976 GWh per year. A few different sources say that SF uses about 5-6 TWh per year. So that is slightly less than 20% of total power needs. Still, it is a good start.
SF has other power generation besides Hetch Hetchy.
Is this at all similar to what happened with telecoms? For some reason that is what popped in to my head.
The other angle that people may not realize is that SF has voted in nine separate elections to not establish a municipal utility. The people of SF demonstrably do not want to take over PG&E, given numerous opportunities.
SMUD has cheap power because 100 years ago the people of Sacramento invested a lot of money to establish that utility. What the vocal minority of SF public power people want is magical: cheaper rates without all that bothersome investment.
> people of SF demonstrably do not want to take over PG&E
But PG&E has charged significantly more for power the last few years. Most people easily hit 50c/kwh on their bills.
Compare to Santa Clara, which has their own well run utility, and charges less than half PG&E rates.
https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
>Compare to Santa Clara, which has their own well run utility, and charges less than half PG&E rates.
This. Lived in Santa Clara. SVP is the best utility in California.
100% of its generation and grid stability is provided by PG&E. All it provides is the local distro and local maintenance. Also, in a low generation scenario, you are the first to be cut off to save the rest of the grid.
> 100% of its generation and grid stability is provided by PG&E. All it provides is the local distro and local maintenance
Sounds like we have a solution! Get PG&E out of distribution. They can keep running power plants, where there is at least competition.
Please remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too. And a single fire's cost is about 3x the yearly budget of SF.
> remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too
Crazy thought—dedicate the resources to maintaining them. From what I can tell, this tolerance of power-sparked wildfires is uniquely American (and concentrated, fairly and unfairly, in California).
Also, you don’t have to put it straight on the municipal balance sheet. Stick it in a distribution subsidiary with a little outside capital. (Hell, make it a member-owned co-operative.)
Alternative: sell off that transmission to someone else. Just handle last-mile distribution. Not transmission.
[dead]
I thought PG&E bought their generation wholesale (~ 3-4c/kwh)
https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/prices
Some generation PG&E owns, some is in a shared vehicle split between PG&E and a group of private investors, some is owned by other utilities (Edison) and some is just privately owned. Remember that generation was built up over 70 years. Different plants at different times with different politics ends up with different ownership arrangements. They all bid into CAISO and independently choose to produce or not based upon prices. The generators sell futures contracts and PG&E (and Edison) buy them either in 1 day cycles or 15 minute cycles (almost always some of both).
> But PG&E has charged significantly more for power the last few years. Most people easily hit 50c/kwh on their bills.
Way more than that! In prime time it's now in the ~80c/kWh these days.
I've been posting this for years and continues to be true: given the price increase trend of PG&E, within 10 years the electricity bill will be larger than the mortgage.
But, those PG&E VPs need their bonuses!
Yikes… that means a Tesla Model S with a 95kWH battery would cost $76 to charge. Most people around the country pay way less than that to fill a combustion SUV at the pump.
I have some doubts about San Francisco’s ability to run a provider well, given the long history of corruption in city service providers and permitting agencies.
Airport is run well.
> The angle of this that people may not realize is that San Francisco already owns the power generation (ie, the Hetch Hetchy dam).
My conclusion might be totally wrong because I'm converting from units that aren't meant to be converted, but...
If you filter down to only San Francisco County on this official-looking thingie [0], you see that it claims the city [1] has 5.126 TWh of consumption.
Your link [2] claims Hetch Hetchy Power System provides something like 395 MW of power generation capacity. I'm going to assume that that's a misprint and they meant to write MWh because that's the only thing that makes sense to me for a measure of power generation. While the last page of this PDF [3] indicates that the hydro generation component is capable of powering a bit more than twice the city's municipal demand, it seems like it's not enough to satisfy even 1/1000th of the demand of the entire city.
Perhaps I've totally fucked up my unit conversions (or relied on garbage data), but it looks like only the tiniest fraction of the city's power demands can be satisfied by the Hetch Hetchy dam. (Though, we could easily electrify way more of the Muni lines with the surplus capacity.)
[0] <https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...>
[1] SF City and County are -AFAICT- the same thing. It's a little weird.
[2] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/hetch-hetchy-powe...>
[3] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/sites/default/files/about-us/WeDeliver...> (found via [4]
[4] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/storage-and-deliv...>
I would assume 395MW is the nameplate capacity, so you would multiply it by a capacity factor and time to get the energy production in a specific interval. Capacity factor in hydro can vary a lot by season and how much they want to produce vs reservoir levels, but for a back of the envelope 100% capacity factor you have 395 MW × 8,760 hours/year = 3.46TWh/year . Capacity factor could be in the high 90s in good conditions and maximum production but I expect it's a lot lower unless it's a wet year with very few big maintenance jobs needed.
I seriously doubt that any non-nuclear power generation in history has ever gotten to 90% capacity factor. Based on industry averages, HH is probably about 55-65% capacity. Things that effect this are: low demand periods (caused by lots of renewables), maintenance periods and low water levels at times (in winter) behind the dam.
Also, PG&E is HIGHLY regulated. Its prices, its generation and its executive compensation are all set by the state of CA. That SF wants to complain about those numbers is pretty amazing. Remember, they still don't have enough money in the tree trimming budget so that those same lines don't start fires in other parts of the state. Its the same wire that connects HH to SF. And somehow the city is going to manage that wire better?
PS The tree trimming budget is set by the state too. Why is it so low? Renewables cost money and that's one of the budgets they raided to get the funds.
It generates ~1 TWh per year or about 20% of SFs power. Power generation capacity is always in watts but it also doesn't run at 100% all the time.
Ah. So I should have done something like
to figure out roughly the maximum possible annual demand that could be served by the system? (For the purposes of this question, I'm just doing the -er- dimensional/unit/whatever analysis and ignoring production-capacity-reducing factors that you'd definitely have to factor in to get the real number.)If so, what a boneheaded, rookie mistake by me. Thanks for the reply.
Power generation facilities are typically quoted in terms of Watts, not Watt-hours. From an era where these were fossil fuel or nuclear plants or dams that provided a pretty steady level of energy. It indicates what the generation facility/asset can produce at any given moment, although if rivers run dry hydro output can decrease.
I think the numbers you cite in [0] are in terms of total annual consumption.
The (nameplate) capacity is in watts. Its production is in watt hours. Some parties have intentionally confused these two concepts (capacity and production) to make certain power sources seem better than they are and other power sources worse than they are. The media consistently and clearly intentionally confuses these two concepts to prevent most people from learning how bad the numbers really are.
PS Capacity factor is the ratio between capacity and production. Its probably the single most important factor when comparing different generation types. Its intentionally made confusing because NPPs have 90+ cap factor and renewables have about 10ish cap factor. This makes renewables seem competitive when they are not. That's why this is always presented in a confusing manor. PPS Its also the main reason power is so expensive in CA.
It's not really anything to do with "an era where these [...] provided a pretty steady level of energy", it's just the only way that makes sense to describe it in any case.
Demand is always instantaneous, and transmission lines from a generator need to be sized for the maximum instantaneous generation, so in terms of the size of (any kind of) generator it's the main thing you're interested in. Capacity factor brings in seasonal / daily output variation but that's a whole different thing.
You did this wrong but drew the right conclusion. Hetch Hetchy system exists but it is nowhere near the scale of powering the entire city of San Francisco.
Mmkay, so what were my core mistakes? Unit conversion failures? Order-of-magnitude errors? Sign problems (somehow)?
Both Wolfram Alpha and units(1) indicated that conversion between MW and MWh was totally nonsensical, so I presumed either that that was a typo, or that 1MW of power generation run for one hour will satisfy 1MWh of demand... assuming that either that demand is evenly spread throughout the hour, or that you can smooth over spikes with storage.
Your mistake is ignoring capacity factor. Most power generation has between 40% and 60% capacity factor. NPPs are 90+ and renewables are about 10. This is intentionally made confusing and you aren't helping because you don't understand this. I do get that this is a good faith error caused by the intention conflation of different units by PR statements.
If you move to San Francisco and get electricity (from PG&E) then you will be automatically signed up to buy your electricity from the city, instead of from PG&E. You'll still pay PG&E for delivering the electricity.
This results in:
- higher cost (because SFPUC charges more for electricity generation than does PG&E)
- your PG&E bill being confusing (I've interacted with smart people who couldn't figure out how much they were paying per kWh on average)
In 2020, someone in my neighbourhood put in a request (via the official process) for traffic calming on a nearby road where cars drive dangerously fast, and often fail to stop at a marked pedestrian crossing.
In December 2024, I had a near miss on that crosswalk and contacted the city. I have followed up with them every 3-4 weeks since then.
The last I heard, they might have a public hearing about a potential road hump, in summer 2026.
It's hard to believe the city government is capable of running an electric company.
(I'm no fan of PG&E BTW. Here in SF I've paid more per kWh and had more power outages per unit time, than anywhere else I've lived.)
On the note of PG&E, my electric bill averages to about $750 despite only running an air conditioner, several device chargers, a router, some lights and a fridge...
Thanks PG&E.
Are these "device chargers" for BEVs like electric submarines or something? ;-)
In the broader SF Bay Area, our recent PG&E bills for a 50 year old single-family home without air-conditioning is under $150/mo, with a couple fridges, electric clothes dryer, and a half-dozen laptop class computers. That's averaging about 8-9 kWh per day (250-280 kWh/month).
Last winter, our bill ramped up to over $400/mo for a few months, due to heating with natural gas.
How many kWh monthly?
Let's say your overall rate is $0.50/kWh, that would put you at 1500kWh per month. Which is....high. Even if your rate were $1/kWh, 750kWh would be a decent amount of juice for a region with an overall mild climate.
The EIA[0] says the typical annual electricity consumption for homes in "the West" (ie not just California) is 8525kWh/year, or 710kWh/month.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
> Let's say your overall rate is $0.50/kWh
It's way higher than that with PG&E.
My PG&E bill tends to be around $500/mo and I run basically nothing out of the basics. Never turn on the A/C. Tiny house, normal usage of fridge, lights and the usual househould gadgets like washer/dryer. Near the coast so climate is cool, if we lived in the hot areas and had to run A/C I imagine it would be double at least.
The profound corruption of PG&E is an existential risk to California and Silicon Valley.
A kWh measurement would be handy. List rates for PG&E are (at the high end) ~$0.50/kWh. Sure with fees and such, I can see it higher, but throwing out a real number would be useful for the conversation on what goes into a $500 bill. There are also tiers if you are a higher consumer - all of which is hard to deduce with just a vague total bill value.
No wonder people are fleeing California in droves. There is absolutely no justification for a bill that high other than malfeasance or gross mismanagement. That is straight-up theft of your money.
For comparison, I have double that plus electric appliances and a home-lab with 6 rack servers that run 24/7 and my bill rarely tops $175 in the dead of summer. And I like the thermostat cold.
If you live in a duplex or condo I would consider if your meter is miswired (with your neighbor's meter daisy-chained to yours) and you are being double-billed. It is more common than you think and often goes undiscovered for years.
> No wonder people are fleeing California in droves
“Fleeing” is hyperbole. Population is roughly flat [1].
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/CA/PST045224
Both can be true.
There could be people fleeing that have lived there for some time, while being supplanted with newcomers. That would have a net zero effect.
I’m not sure why that counts as a useful definition of fleeing within the context of economic conditions.
Shrinking every year. Not good. ~40% people under 40 (or ~10% of the population) live with their parents. This is an indirect tax on parents since a majority of this class has no option to evict their kids.
North Korea has a stable population, people flee all the time. The comparison is apt. California's 4-walled fences are much tighter around their residents.
> North Korea has a stable population
How could you possibly know this.
What rates are you being charged?
CA rates come in 4 tranches based on usage. Last I checked, its $0.10/kwh for the first tranch, 0.2 for the 2nd, 0.3 for the 3rd and 0.4 for the highest. I don't remember the cutoffs between the different levels. Its also possible those rates have changed in the last few years. But that's how CA does residential power bills. Most people never get into the 2nd tranche.
PS Where I live now, its $0.04/kwh and that's pretty normal in the rest of the US and in Latin America.
That is not at all how PG&E billing works. You can see the current rates and billing structure at https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid....
So its completely changed since 2022 (last time I paid a PG&E bill). And the prices are multiple times more than in 2022 too. I didn't realize it had gotten so bad.
> Last I checked, its $0.10/kwh for the first tranch,...
That is completely wrong.
Yes, because the city has proven to be so capable of solving the most basic civic issues it is now time the board of supervisors moves on to more advanced challenges.
Please remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too. And a single fire's cost is about 3x the yearly budget of SF.
A few months ago I attended an event where a few members of the Board of Supervisors were attending. One person identified themselves as working in this field and pointed out that the current cost plus model incentivizes the company to do all kinds of upgrades that aren't really needed. The BoS member said something like, "Look, we need to just bite the bullet on this one, we're going to overpay, but we are already legally permitted to buy it and doing so will save us a ton of money in the long run because of stuff like that".
I have no personal knowledge, but thought I'd share this experience I had with the ongoing debate.
PG&E is a profitable, publicly traded company... that issues a dividend. They tried to file for bankruptcy after the paradise fire, but they were too big to fail, so they issued new shares with gov protection. CA created a new insurance backstop for them as well. Corporations should not have government assisted (regulated) monopolies with socialized backstops. Yeah, CPUC is supposed to help, but decision makers probably have exposure. It is the same with Sempra and SDG&E and SCE. SMUD seems like a better organization, but what do I know.
The state should have instead pushed them into liquidation and bought the assets.
Run the transmission grid, offer to let big cities and counties take the distribution, keep whatever they don’t want.
SF's insane electricity prices are the sole reason I bought a Honda Civic Hybrid instead of a Tesla Model 3. They both cost 12 cents per mile here, so it was just the mild hassle of charging that tipped it out of favor. If I lived somewhere with sane electricity prices like Seattle I totally would have switched.
This part bothers me:
(1) Why didn't the owner have insurance for food spoilage? Since it is rare event, it is probably very cheap. The old saying: "Buy insurance for (emergency) expenses that you cannot afford." This seems like a text book case.(2) Why didn't the owner immediately run to a hardware store to buy a portable (diesel?) generator to save as much food as possible? At least run one fridge and pack the most expensive ingredients into that one fridge.
Overall: My sympathy is low for the owner's situation.
If the city buys (or runs) its own (traditional) electricity utility, they will be assuming all of the wildfire risk. That is the primary cause of rises electricity rates by PG&E in the last ten years. However, if SF wants to create some power generation in the form of solar panels and batteries or wind, then sign power trade agreements with PG&E, I think that could be tenable/workable. If they spent 100M USD per year building truly reliable, green power generation, then 10 years later would look much better.
1. Spoilage claims are not usually covered by insurance if the power interruption starts at the utility company instead of in your building. It's pretty rare that anyone knows to ask for that particular endorsement, and you're SoL without it.
2. You don't think everyone else was thinking the same thing?
Also, you can just have sympathy for people even if it were their own mistake. It doesn't cost you anything.
The fires have been caused by the transmission grid, not the distribution grid. SF would be taking the distribution. There is not a ton of wildfire risk from the electric utility in SF, and it would be fairly easy to manage.
Restaurants have very thin margins, they can’t afford that stuff.
Great idea. I am sure MORE government intervention will make this so much better. If I lived in San Francisco still I’d be getting a generator.
PG&E is a failure. It’s wild prioritizing its reform and replacement isn’t seen as the existential threat to California Democrats’ national ambitions that it rightfully is.
Distribution shouldn’t be this expensive nor cause this many fires. If the cost of distributing power to remote, fire-prone communities isn’t politically feasible to push to them directly, the cities should be put on a separate distribution system to isolate the cost inflation.
Silicon Valley buys PG&E power and handles distribution itself. It has some of the only reasonable power rates in California [1].
[1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
Wouldn't distribution naturally be the more expensive part vs. electricity generation given the latter is centralized and scaled? Perhaps this is a fallacy, but that is the thought that crossed my mind.
> Wouldn't distribution naturally be the more expensive
I don’t know. What I do know is California spends more on distribution than anyone else in the country. That signals there is a better way to do this.
sdg&e next please
In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons [1]. This was used as the justification for mass privatization of many government bodies (including utilities) in the 1980s and 1990s. PG&E was always private but it suffers from the same issues as many other privatized utilities.
Utilities are a perfect example of a wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy, justified by "efficiency". Losses are socialized, profits are privatized, just like in any public-private "partnership". Utilities are worse because their profits are usually guaranteed.
This paper was proven to be empirically incorrect by Elinor Ostrom for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics.
[1]: https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of...
rising costs or inept management.
AIUI This relationship between PG&E and SF/CPUC has a corrupt history dating back to the 90s with Willie Brown and later even Kamala Harris.
It's a part of why Republicans actually have some grounds for calling Harris corrupt - Willie Brown's office when mayor of SF was notorious for being a pay-to-play situation, she worked there (and even dated him).
from: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/S-...It's trivial to find articles about the conflicts of interests between Brown and PG&E, I think even to this day he still represents their interests.
CPUC exists. CAISO exists. The consumer experience is still bad. What this means is that there is not enough generation. This is not a matter of whether PG&E is "privately" or "publicly" owned, because nearly all large utilities are already a weird mixture of both. Public ownership might have different incentives, but not sufficiently different to allow rates to be lowered substantially (unless it were a case of overt and massive subsidies, which would require state legislation and possibly rewriting the charters of CPUC and CAISO). The only way to lower rates is to add cheaper generation; and the way to make generation cheapest, and to bring it on line quickest, is to locate it near demand.
My electricity bill is roughly 1/3rd 'CleanPowerSF Electric Generation Charges' vs 2/3rds 'Current PG&E Electric Delivery Charges'. The big problem is that PG&E covers most of rural California so its urban customers have to cover the high costs of compensation and prevention from delivering to fire prone rural areas.
This is just very straightforwardly incorrect. Last month I paid Ava Energy $26 for electric energy generation, and PG&E $99 for delivery. Cutting the generation cost to $0 would only reduce my bill by 20%. Ava Energy says that 70% of the power I used came from solar located within my city, so it's already located quite close to demand.
> What this means is that there is not enough generation
We should generate more, but one of the major issues is how much wildfire prevention PG&E has to do, which then gets passed on to their customers. I am huge into supply side abundance, but that isnt the only driver here for costs.
> CPUC exists. CAISO exists. The consumer experience is still bad. What this means is that there is not enough generation
The existence of CPUC and CAISO says nothing of their efficacy. Jumping all the way past any question of their efficacy is egregious.
PGE charged me more for the same electric usage than SVP.
There is definitely greed on PGEs part.
Maybe, but SVP has two massive advantages: it delivers almost all of its energy to a handful of gigantic customers, not homes. Contrary to internet belief, having a customer base dominated by industry makes power cheap to deliver. Secondly, it gets a free pass from expensive things that the state makes PG&E pay for, especially rural service.
There's very little rural in San Francisco city/county, so a hypothetical sf electric utility wouldn't have to spend a lot on that either.
That wasn't my point. Subsidizing rural service is a state policy. If major cities increasingly divorce from PG&E, and the true cost of rural electrification starts to be charged upon actual rural people, that might not work politically.
As others have mentioned, Silicon Valley Power charges about half of PGE, and SF actually already has a power provider for businesses via Hetch Hetchy. It’s probably true that overall they might be a generation shortage but it doesn’t have to be true on a local scale. Plus PGE also needs to pay a lot of money for all the fires they started…which of course just goes back to the rate payers.
Also, too: the primary reason to worry about inadequate generation is not cost, but reliability.
The problem in California is not generation nor is it reliability. CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far; under half the cost of Texas. It also hasn't had a blackout since 2020.
The problem is retail side. AKA PG&E, its regulation, governance and forced liabilities.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
CAISO claims that and cleantechnica might parrot it, but there are blackouts ALL THE TIME in southern california.
In Palm Springs I was down with brownouts 103 times since I bought a sine wave UPS in December, and multi hour blackouts 4 times. My mother in Riverside, brother in Laguna Beach are similar.
Last week it was 3 times here over the course of three days. It's lived experience for me. Reliability collapsed two years ago
And none of those made the national news, which would have happened if the blackout was due to grid generation problems.
Your problem is local grid distribution. Local distribution has lots of single points of failure, unlike the state grid.
> CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far
Much lower than that provided by the TVA? Ages ago, I used to live in an area served by the TVA, and its power prices were notably cheaper than anywhere else. I'd heard that this was because a huge chunk of its power was provided by fission plants, but never investigated.
Yes, CAISO wholesale rates are much lower, but California also has the highest retail cost in the continental US, at over 28c/kWh. If any customer in the TVA paid that much for power there'd be riots.
Where does one even find wholesale rates for the various regional providers?
I -a complete ignoramous- spent like ten whole minutes poking around for wholesale rates. I could find documents about rates for several providers (including TVA) from many years back, complaints about rates increasing for many providers (but no actual mention of the new rates) and some governmental site that provided rates for a selected subset of all providers which included CAISO and one in Texas, but not TVA.
You'd think that this would be something that'd be very easy to find on -say- the DoE's website, but apparently you'd be totally wrong.
EIA doesn't carry TVA data because the TVA doesn't participate in open-market sales or report data to FERC. Wholesale power is auctioned in I(or R)SOs; TVA just sets rates directly during negotiations with power companies.