It’s Our City.

It’s Our Power.

It’s Time.

The Growing Movement for Public Power in San Francisco

San Francisco is uniting behind cleaner, more reliable, and more affordable public power.

San Franciscans can secure our clean energy future and put an end to PG&E’s obstruction and extortion tactics by fully switching to public power through public ownership of the local electric grid. We are united like never before to make it happen. It’s time for the City to acquire PG&E’s electric grid in San Francisco.

What is Public Power?

  • Public power utilities are community-owned, not-forprofit electric utilities that provide safe, affordable, and reliable electricity to 49 million Americans.

  • There are more than 2,000 public power utilities across the United States, including more than 50 in California.

  • Public power currently serves the cities of Los Angeles, Sacramento, Palo Alto, and Alameda.

  • Public power utilities are operated by local governments and are directly accountable to the people they serve through local elected or appointed officials.

Does San Francisco Have Public Power?

  • The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) is a City department that has provided clean, safe, and reliable public power for more than 100 years.

  • Through Hetch Hetchy Power, the SFPUC serves San Francisco with 100% greenhouse gas-free public power, which energizes critical municipal facilities like our airport, streetlights, general hospital, public libraries, and Muni, as well as public and affordable housing sites and new developments like the Salesforce Transit Center.

  • The SFPUC also provides public power through CleanPowerSF, a community choice aggregation (CCA) program that purchases clean, renewable electricity on behalf of its 385,000 customers.

  • Together, Hetch Hetchy Power and CleanPowerSF provide more than 70% of the electricity consumed in San Francisco today.

  • The piece the SFPUC does not control is the electric grid in San Francisco. That is owned by PG&E, which operates as a monopoly middleman, driving up costs and delaying 135 public projects like schools, medical facilities, and libraries.

What are the Benefits of Public Power?

  • Affordable: Public power ensures more affordable rates because it requires no shareholder dividends, executive bonuses, or added costs for profits.

  • Clean: SFPUC’s approach to public power is more climate friendly, consistent with San Francisco’s values. Full public power gives the City a clearer, quicker path towards achieving 100 percent clean energy and providing other benefits to residents, like neighborhood electric vehicle charging stations.

  • Safe and Reliable: With full public power, SFPUC can partner with the community to explore investing more resources to make the City’s grid more resilient, with battery storage, local infrastructure, renewables, undergrounding, and modernization to provide high quality electrical services in San Francisco.

  • Accessible and Accountable: Operated with oversight from the Board of Supervisors and Mayor, the SFPUC’s public power would serve San Franciscans, not shareholders. Decisions are made in public meetings that allow residents’ voices to be heard.

Expanding Public Power in San Francisco

  • PG&E continues to make it difficult for the City to deliver its public power service today. The company has a long history of imposing unnecessary limitations and costs on San Francisco’s use of the local electric grid, throwing up roadblocks and charging exorbitant fees for basic power hookups for everything from affordable housing to new public transit projects.

  • PG&E’s obstruction has cost the City more than $35 million since 2018 in additional equipment costs, delay costs, redesign costs, lost revenue when projects are forced to become PG&E customers, and higher energy costs due to PG&E’s higher rates.

  • Now more than ever, it makes sense to control our power under a single, local, public system that will be affordable, reliable, and accountable to the public.

  • Supported by Mayor Breed and the Board of Supervisors, the City’s leaders have come together around our shared values of transparency and local control. On top of that, more than 70% of San Franciscans support switching to public power, too.

Join the Movement

• Sign up for updates on PG&E obstruction and San Francisco’s public power efforts: www.publicpowersf.org

• Follow us on social media to share and like posts: @publicpowersf

• Request a presentation to your community organization or neighborhood group: publicpower@sfwater.org

San Francisco Public Utilities Commission | March 2024

Hetch Hetchy Power and CleanPowerSF are programs of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), an enterprise department of the City and County of San Francisco.