[bunabhucan]

You said in the article "PG&E rejected this offer for being too low" but then proceed to use that as the baseline cost that drives the rest of the estimates, that doesn't make sense. If I offer someone minimum wage to do my job and they refuse, I don't start a spreadsheet to calculate my savings.

Boulder CO tried municipalization with Xcel and the gap between the city offer and Xcel position was very large. How do your figures look if you double the price and/or add in a decade tail of having to pay 25% of billing to PG&E?

The small munis you mention are in the same position as PG&E with respect to owning decades old poles and conductors with decades of life remaining. The incumbent has all the cards in this negotiation. An existing muni can do it cheaper for the obvious reasons you stated - legacy network, all the customers are close together. Buying the most profitable bits of the PG&E network at a price they would agree to would not be profitable.

[kevinburke]

This is why I adjusted SF’s offer for population and then multiplied it by 50%, then used 400 million as the base for financing.

Financing at 4% interest is not the expensive part though. Even if the price was $1 billion it would be 6 cents per kWh.

I agree it would be bad if they had to fight in court for a decade! But you have to start somewhere and as I mentioned you might get a good outcome just from threatening to do it. My hope is the CPUC would force them to accept some offer.

[bunabhucan]

In Boulders case the goal wasn't to strand rural customers with resiliency costs but to reduce emissions. Xcel moved in that direction enough that Boulder didn't need to municipalize. Owning poles and jiggling electrons would have allowed the city to do things like let homeowners access the 4% muni borrowing rate for solar loans that stay with the property via a tax lien. With the existing structure of public regulator and local monopolies, Xcel can't easily do anything "special" for Boulder without forcing poor rural places to share the costs.