The Facts

In a now-recanted statement, PG&E CEO Sumeet Singh told a Feb. 12 Board of Supervisors committee hearing that Mayor Daniel Lurie requested temporary power for the War Memorial Opera House during the December blackout; Singh later walked it back and called it a misunderstanding.

PG&E says the Dec. 20 outage peaked at about 130,000 customers affected citywide.

That same meeting advanced a resolution reaffirming San Francisco’s effort to acquire PG&E’s local grid assets, alongside other accountability measures.

The Context

The City has been laying groundwork for a possible public-power takeover for years, including a CEQA scoping step for the Power Assets Acquisition Project and a CPUC valuation to set a fair price for PG&E’s local equipment.

The GrowSF Take

The opera-house angle makes for easy outrage, but it distracts from the core failure: PG&E’s infrastructure and operational readiness left tens of thousands of people in the dark.

City leaders should focus this moment on measurable outcomes: hardening and redundancy for key SF substations, clear restoration priorities for residents, and transparent performance standards with real consequences when PG&E falls short. If PG&E can’t meet those standards, SF should be ready to pursue alternatives—but the yardstick must be reliability, not theater.