PG&E simply owns the wires, and overcharges for their use.
[1]: https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/hetch-hetchy-powe...
SF shifted to "wheeling" instead of selling power to PG&E and is tenuously in compliance now, but the current set up was never intended when the federal government ceded water and power rights from Yosemite to SF.
SMUD has cheap power because 100 years ago the people of Sacramento invested a lot of money to establish that utility. What the vocal minority of SF public power people want is magical: cheaper rates without all that bothersome investment.
But PG&E has charged significantly more for power the last few years. Most people easily hit 50c/kwh on their bills.
Compare to Santa Clara, which has their own well run utility, and charges less than half PG&E rates.
This. Lived in Santa Clara. SVP is the best utility in California.
Sounds like we have a solution! Get PG&E out of distribution. They can keep running power plants, where there is at least competition.
Crazy thought—dedicate the resources to maintaining them. From what I can tell, this tolerance of power-sparked wildfires is uniquely American (and concentrated, fairly and unfairly, in California).
Also, you don’t have to put it straight on the municipal balance sheet. Stick it in a distribution subsidiary with a little outside capital. (Hell, make it a member-owned co-operative.)
Alternative: sell off that transmission to someone else. Just handle last-mile distribution. Not transmission.
Way more than that! In prime time it's now in the ~80c/kWh these days.
I've been posting this for years and continues to be true: given the price increase trend of PG&E, within 10 years the electricity bill will be larger than the mortgage.
But, those PG&E VPs need their bonuses!
... that it produces about 976 GWh per year. A few different sources say that SF uses about 5-6 TWh per year. So that is slightly less than 20% of total power needs. Still, it is a good start.
My conclusion might be totally wrong because I'm converting from units that aren't meant to be converted, but...
If you filter down to only San Francisco County on this official-looking thingie [0], you see that it claims the city [1] has 5.126 TWh of consumption.
Your link [2] claims Hetch Hetchy Power System provides something like 395 MW of power generation capacity. I'm going to assume that that's a misprint and they meant to write MWh because that's the only thing that makes sense to me for a measure of power generation. While the last page of this PDF [3] indicates that the hydro generation component is capable of powering a bit more than twice the city's municipal demand, it seems like it's not enough to satisfy even 1/1000th of the demand of the entire city.
Perhaps I've totally fucked up my unit conversions (or relied on garbage data), but it looks like only the tiniest fraction of the city's power demands can be satisfied by the Hetch Hetchy dam. (Though, we could easily electrify way more of the Muni lines with the surplus capacity.)
[0] <https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...>
[1] SF City and County are -AFAICT- the same thing. It's a little weird.
[2] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/hetch-hetchy-powe...>
[3] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/sites/default/files/about-us/WeDeliver...> (found via [4]
[4] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/storage-and-deliv...>
Both Wolfram Alpha and units(1) indicated that conversion between MW and MWh was totally nonsensical, so I presumed either that that was a typo, or that 1MW of power generation run for one hour will satisfy 1MWh of demand... assuming that either that demand is evenly spread throughout the hour, or that you can smooth over spikes with storage.
I think the numbers you cite in [0] are in terms of total annual consumption.
Demand is always instantaneous, and transmission lines from a generator need to be sized for the maximum instantaneous generation, so in terms of the size of (any kind of) generator it's the main thing you're interested in. Capacity factor brings in seasonal / daily output variation but that's a whole different thing.
PS Capacity factor is the ratio between capacity and production. Its probably the single most important factor when comparing different generation types. Its intentionally made confusing because NPPs have 90+ cap factor and renewables have about 10ish cap factor. This makes renewables seem competitive when they are not. That's why this is always presented in a confusing manor. PPS Its also the main reason power is so expensive in CA.
395MW * 8760hr = 3,640,200 MWh
If so, what a boneheaded, rookie mistake by me. Thanks for the reply.
> Capacity factor could be in the high 90s in good conditions and maximum production but I expect it's a lot lower unless it's a wet year with very few big maintenance jobs needed.
Also, PG&E is HIGHLY regulated. Its prices, its generation and its executive compensation are all set by the state of CA. That SF wants to complain about those numbers is pretty amazing. Remember, they still don't have enough money in the tree trimming budget so that those same lines don't start fires in other parts of the state. Its the same wire that connects HH to SF. And somehow the city is going to manage that wire better?
PS The tree trimming budget is set by the state too. Why is it so low? Renewables cost money and that's one of the budgets they raided to get the funds.