The Facts

Several weeks ago, a fire at PG&E’s Mission substation near Eighth and Mission (Dec. 20, 2025) helped trigger a citywide blackout that peaked around 130,000 customers. PG&E says the last ~3,800 customers were restored early Dec. 23, per its outage update.

Then the lights went out again: the Sunset had a brief Christmas Eve outage and the Outer Richmond/Sea Cliff saw another outage Jan. 2, with residents telling The Standard it was their sixth since Dec. 20 in that follow-up.

The Context

PG&E's 2024 reliability report shows customers experienced an average of 276.4 minutes (4.6 hours) of outages per year, with an average of 1.8 separate outages. While PG&E claims San Francisco has service "almost twice as reliable as the national average" after $3 billion in grid investments, the December 20 outage has renewed calls for public utilities similar to those in Palo Alto and Sacramento.

While the grid may be more reliable than average, it's gotten harder to understand what you're paying for. Many customers are on time-of-use rates, where prices depend on when you use power (and on season). Many plans also apply a baseline "Tier 1 vs Tier 2" step-up via the Baseline Allowance.

And the CPUC is shifting more costs into a monthly fixed charge through an income-tiered "flat rate", and newer solar exports are compensated under the Net Billing Tariff rather than full retail rates, meaning selling power back to grid is worth way less than before.

The GrowSF Take

After repeated outages, it’s rational for families and small businesses to look at solar + whole-home batteries. But with rising fixed fees, lower per‑kWh savings, and weaker sell-back credits, backup power increasingly looks like paying for independence—not a simple ROI.

If we’re serious about resilience, we should also be serious about incentives: PG&E and regulators should be less punitive to households that invest their own money to reduce demand on the grid (solar + storage), not redesign rates so that “opting out” gets hit with higher fixed charges and lower export value.

SF should demand reliability upgrades and clear outage-communication standards, and pursue neighborhood-scale resilience (microgrids) for critical corridors and services.