(The Center Square) – A new bill introduced in the California Legislature would make it easier for cities up and down the state to transition away from services provided by the state’s biggest investor-owned utility, Pacific Gas & Electric.
Senate Bill 875 aims to give California’s cities the chance to withdraw from electrical services from PG&E and institute publicly-owned utility services.
“In San Francisco, we have wanted to break up with PG&E for a very long time so that we can have our own public power system to provide electricity at a lower cost and with greater reliability,” state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco and the bill’s author, told The Center Square in an exclusive interview. “We’ve had a lot of problems with PG&E. It’s too big. It’s two-thirds of the state, and it’s had so many problems with all the wildfires and all the other issues.”
Wiener said he had concerns about the quality of maintenance on the company’s infrastructure, which he said caused mass blackouts in San Francisco in 2025 that lasted for days.
The high cost of electrical and gas service from PG&E is another incentive for cities to transition to providing utility service to residents by creating public power entities, Wiener added.
“PG&E has put poison pills into the law to make it hard, sometimes impossible, for cities to do that,” Wiener told The Center Square.
According to Wiener, California has eminent domain laws that allow public entities to purchase private property for a fair market valuation. However, to do it for a utility, it’s a much higher barrier, Wiener said.
“PG&E intentionally put that into the law to protect itself from eminent domain,” Wiener said. “We have to level the playing field so that eminent domain for utilities is the same as any other eminent domain and we’re not giving utilities any kind of special treatment.”
While PG&E didn’t make any company officials available for an interview on Tuesday, a spokesperson sent a written response via email to The Center Square detailing the company’s efforts to lower costs for California customers, who see some of the highest utility rates in the country, according to research from the Public Policy Institute of California.
“PG&E has had the privilege of serving the residents of Northern and Central California for more than 100 years, and we remain committed to serving them for many years to come,” Lynsey Paulo, marketing and communications director for PG&E, wrote to The Center Square in an email on Tuesday. “Government takeovers of parts of our grid would not make customer energy bills less expensive.”
San Francisco underpriced PG&E’s electric system value, Paulo wrote, with estimations from the city valuing San Francisco utility assets at $2 billion to $3 billion.
“Not only is that a lowball amount, but the California Public Utilities Commission has been clear that the City and County of San Francisco would have to pay far more than the value of the assets, which means a takeover will drive up customer rates, not lower them,” Paulo wrote.
PG&E and other investor-owned utilities like Southern California Edison have tried to lower customers’ utility costs in recent years, lowering per-kilowatt-hour rates for customers before instituting a base services charge on customers bills, starting this year. That base services charge is meant to help offset the cost of higher electricity rates, although some lawmakers expressed concern that ratepayers who try to conserve energy by using less electricity and gas will subsidize higher energy customers’ bills, The Center Square previously reported.
PG&E told The Center Square that residential electric prices are 13% lower today than they were in January 2024, ensuring that an average customer with an average energy usage is paying $25 less a month.
A January 2025 report from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office determined that the California Legislature faced difficult decisions related to electricity rates as high rates strain the state’s residents and undermine the state’s long-term climate goals, which include reducing greenhouse gas emissions, among other statewide environmental efforts.
Members of the Legislature’s energy and utilities committees were unavailable on Tuesday to comment on SB 875.
