San Francisco Asks State Regulators for a Public Investigation of PG&E After 40 Major Outages

San Francisco is once again pressing California's utility regulator to take a hard, public look at how Pacific Gas and Electric Co. keeps the lights on in the city.

The request

Mayor Daniel Lurie, City Attorney David Chiu, Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager Dennis Herrera sent a letter dated Oct. 8 to California Public Utilities Commission President John Reynolds. They asked the commission to open a formal public proceeding into PG&E's operations in San Francisco, and to let city staff and consultants take part, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Why now

The city says it has counted at least 40 large unplanned outages since January, each hitting at least 1,000 customer accounts and lasting more than 15 minutes. According to the Standard, more than a quarter of them affected the west side, where power stayed off longest after the December blackout. Two more outages earlier this week hit thousands of customers in separate parts of the city.

The letter also points to two recent fires involving PG&E equipment: one near Mission and First streets in September that snarled the morning commute, and an underground electrical fire downtown last week that led to a shelter-in-place order and street closures.

"An open and transparent investigation is even more critical now than it was when we sent our letter in March," the letter says, as quoted by the Standard.

The December blackout

The push grows out of the Dec. 20, 2025, fire at PG&E's Mission Substation, which the city says cut power to about 130,000 customer accounts, some for several days, during the holiday season. The CPUC has said its staff opened an investigation after the fire, and it confirmed to the Standard that the probe is ongoing, but it has been conducted privately. The Standard reported this is at least the third time the city has publicly asked for it to be made public.

The bigger fight

The letter also raises PG&E's plan to sell the substation that caught fire, which the city says it wants to acquire. The blackout has added momentum to San Francisco's long-running study of buying PG&E's local grid to form a public power utility, an idea state Sen. Scott Wiener and Rep. Nancy Pelosi have backed, though Lurie has stayed cautious about whether it's workable, the Standard reported.