[FrankWilhoit]

CPUC exists. CAISO exists. The consumer experience is still bad. What this means is that there is not enough generation. This is not a matter of whether PG&E is "privately" or "publicly" owned, because nearly all large utilities are already a weird mixture of both. Public ownership might have different incentives, but not sufficiently different to allow rates to be lowered substantially (unless it were a case of overt and massive subsidies, which would require state legislation and possibly rewriting the charters of CPUC and CAISO). The only way to lower rates is to add cheaper generation; and the way to make generation cheapest, and to bring it on line quickest, is to locate it near demand.

[laurencerowe]

My electricity bill is roughly 1/3rd 'CleanPowerSF Electric Generation Charges' vs 2/3rds 'Current PG&E Electric Delivery Charges'. The big problem is that PG&E covers most of rural California so its urban customers have to cover the high costs of compensation and prevention from delivering to fire prone rural areas.

[plorkyeran]

This is just very straightforwardly incorrect. Last month I paid Ava Energy $26 for electric energy generation, and PG&E $99 for delivery. Cutting the generation cost to $0 would only reduce my bill by 20%. Ava Energy says that 70% of the power I used came from solar located within my city, so it's already located quite close to demand.

[thebigman433]

> What this means is that there is not enough generation

We should generate more, but one of the major issues is how much wildfire prevention PG&E has to do, which then gets passed on to their customers. I am huge into supply side abundance, but that isnt the only driver here for costs.

[mirashii]

> CPUC exists. CAISO exists. The consumer experience is still bad. What this means is that there is not enough generation

The existence of CPUC and CAISO says nothing of their efficacy. Jumping all the way past any question of their efficacy is egregious.

[Atotalnoob]

PGE charged me more for the same electric usage than SVP.

There is definitely greed on PGEs part.

[jeffbee]

Maybe, but SVP has two massive advantages: it delivers almost all of its energy to a handful of gigantic customers, not homes. Contrary to internet belief, having a customer base dominated by industry makes power cheap to deliver. Secondly, it gets a free pass from expensive things that the state makes PG&E pay for, especially rural service.

[toast0]

There's very little rural in San Francisco city/county, so a hypothetical sf electric utility wouldn't have to spend a lot on that either.

[jeffbee]

That wasn't my point. Subsidizing rural service is a state policy. If major cities increasingly divorce from PG&E, and the true cost of rural electrification starts to be charged upon actual rural people, that might not work politically.

[pmalynin]

As others have mentioned, Silicon Valley Power charges about half of PGE, and SF actually already has a power provider for businesses via Hetch Hetchy. It’s probably true that overall they might be a generation shortage but it doesn’t have to be true on a local scale. Plus PGE also needs to pay a lot of money for all the fires they started…which of course just goes back to the rate payers.

[FrankWilhoit]

Also, too: the primary reason to worry about inadequate generation is not cost, but reliability.

[bryanlarsen]

The problem in California is not generation nor is it reliability. CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far; under half the cost of Texas. It also hasn't had a blackout since 2020.

The problem is retail side. AKA PG&E, its regulation, governance and forced liabilities.

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...

[Xorakios]

CAISO claims that and cleantechnica might parrot it, but there are blackouts ALL THE TIME in southern california.

In Palm Springs I was down with brownouts 103 times since I bought a sine wave UPS in December, and multi hour blackouts 4 times. My mother in Riverside, brother in Laguna Beach are similar.

Last week it was 3 times here over the course of three days. It's lived experience for me. Reliability collapsed two years ago

[bryanlarsen]

And none of those made the national news, which would have happened if the blackout was due to grid generation problems.

Your problem is local grid distribution. Local distribution has lots of single points of failure, unlike the state grid.

[simoncion]

> CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far

Much lower than that provided by the TVA? Ages ago, I used to live in an area served by the TVA, and its power prices were notably cheaper than anywhere else. I'd heard that this was because a huge chunk of its power was provided by fission plants, but never investigated.

[stonogo]

Yes, CAISO wholesale rates are much lower, but California also has the highest retail cost in the continental US, at over 28c/kWh. If any customer in the TVA paid that much for power there'd be riots.

[simoncion]

Where does one even find wholesale rates for the various regional providers?

I -a complete ignoramous- spent like ten whole minutes poking around for wholesale rates. I could find documents about rates for several providers (including TVA) from many years back, complaints about rates increasing for many providers (but no actual mention of the new rates) and some governmental site that provided rates for a selected subset of all providers which included CAISO and one in Texas, but not TVA.

You'd think that this would be something that'd be very easy to find on -say- the DoE's website, but apparently you'd be totally wrong.

[stonogo]

EIA doesn't carry TVA data because the TVA doesn't participate in open-market sales or report data to FERC. Wholesale power is auctioned in I(or R)SOs; TVA just sets rates directly during negotiations with power companies.