San Francisco considers taking over PG&E’s electric business

Sfpuc pge report graphic 13may2019

The City and County of San Francisco is a small step closer to taking over the electric half of Pacific Gas and Electric’s utility operations. A report produced by the City’s local public utilities commission, at the request of mayor London Breed, airs many grievances with PG&E, extolls the benefits of a municipally owned electric utility and glosses over the hard questions of how and how much.

San Francisco’s options, according to the report, range from continuing to arm wrestle with PG&E, to building some limited extensions of existing city-owned electric distribution lines, to simply taking over PG&E assets and operations…

The City can completely remove its reliance on PG&E for local electricity services through purchasing PG&E’s electric delivery assets and maintenance inventories in and near San Francisco, and operating them as a public, not for profit service. The City will pay PG&E a fair price for the assets that reflects asset condition. In this option, the City will also offer jobs to PG&E’s union and other employees who currently operate the grid.

This option would also involve bundling in the City’s limited municipal electric system and customers from the City’s community choice aggregator, one of many such county and regional-level agencies created in California to serve as a middle man between investor-owned utilities, such as PG&E, and electric customers.

The three biggest questions – how to convince PG&E to sell, how much would it cost and how would it be paid for – are left hanging. Presumably, the federal bankruptcy judge in charge of PG&E’s restructuring will have something to say about it all. The price of a buyout is described as “dependent on fair market value analysis; could be a few billion dollars initially”. The report is even more opaque about what happens after “initially”.

The money “would be revenue bond‐funded by the SFPUC using its borrowing authority”. That means that the City would repay bond obligations with the revenue collected from electric customers, after it pays its own expenses. The report estimates that gross revenue would be in the $500 million to $750 million range, but doesn’t try to figure out how much of that would be available to pay back the “few billion dollars” it would have to borrow.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of revenue bonds: those that are backed by taxpayer money and those that aren’t. If the former, any shortfall in revenue (or cost overruns) would come out of the City’s budget. If the latter, the bondholders could, ultimately, be stiffed. Which might seem like a fine thing to some, except that the greater risk is offset by higher interest rates on the money that’s borrowed, which in turn will be paid by electric customers through higher rates. Although it would technically be a not-for-profit business, it would have to generate a sufficient surplus – a profit in everything but name – to make those payments.

This is the second time in as many years that the City and County of San Francisco has looked at operating a major utility. Last year, the City floated a proposal to build and operate a citywide fiber to the premise broadband system, that would have cost a couple of billion dollars. That project was shelved shortly after Breed won the mayor’s job in a special election.