San Francisco's top officials are once again pressing California's utility regulators to take a hard, public look at Pacific Gas and Electric Co., arguing that the city keeps losing power far too often.
In a letter dated Thursday, Oct. 8, Mayor Daniel Lurie, City Attorney David Chiu, Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager Dennis Herrera asked California Public Utilities Commission President John Reynolds to open a formal proceeding into PG&E's operations in the city, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
A count of 40 outages
The city says it has logged at least 40 large unplanned outages since January, each hitting at least 1,000 customer accounts for more than 15 minutes. The San Francisco Standard reported that more than a quarter of them affected the west side, where the December blackout lasted longest. Two outages earlier this week knocked out power to thousands of customers in separate neighborhoods, according to the Chronicle.
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.
Back to December
The push traces back to the Dec. 20, 2025 fire at PG&E's Mission Substation, which cut power to roughly 130,000 customer accounts, some for several days. City leaders first asked for a CPUC investigation in a March letter to PG&E CEO Patti Poppe, the Standard reported at the time.
The CPUC has said its staff investigation is ongoing but has kept it private. In a June reply to Chiu, Reynolds said the commission's Safety and Enforcement Division had inspected sites, reviewed evidence and sent data requests, and that the active probe limited what it could discuss, according to the Chronicle. The Standard said this is at least the third time the city has publicly asked for the investigation to be made public.
"An open and transparent investigation is even more critical now than it was when we sent our letter in March," the officials wrote, citing the pattern of outages and two fires in a week. The city wants a proceeding that covers the December disaster, the repeated outages and the broader condition of PG&E's grid, and it wants its own staff and consultants to take part.
Bigger questions
The Standard reported the letter also criticizes PG&E's plan to sell a deactivated substation near the one that burned, which the city had hoped to acquire as backup capacity. The dispute adds to long-running interest in San Francisco buying PG&E's local grid to form a public utility, an idea Lurie has treated cautiously.