Liam Denning, Columnist

San Francisco Might Divorce PG&E But Not Wildfire Costs

Taking over its power grid wouldn’t insulate the city from risk.

April 18, 2019 at 5:21 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

San Francisco isn’t the bubble it thinks it is.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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San Francisco works hard to shake off its stereotype of existing in a bubble. OK, not that hard.

Now it’s thinking of extending that splendid isolation to how it gets its power. Mayor London Breed said in an interview with Bloomberg News that she’s “pretty excited” at the prospect of the city taking over its local grid from bankrupt utility PG&E Corp. A feasibility study is due later this month — and it’s not the first one, either. San Francisco has been considering taking its grid out of PG&E’s hands, off and on, since at least the 1990s.