Holy shit, that would be an incredible change. Frankly, the entire CA grid should be owned by the state and operated as a government agency. PG&E has consistently demonstrated that they are deeply incompetent and criminally negligent in their management of the system. The fact that they’re still allowed to operate as a for-profit concern is absolutely insane.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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That would literally save lives
I'm not particularly enamored of publicly-owned utilities, but one data point in their favor
Santa Clara uses their own power utility, and their rates are considerably lower than PG&E's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Power
Silicon Valley Power (SVP) is a not-for-profit municipal electric utility owned and operated by the City of Santa Clara, California, United States. SVP provides electricity service to approximately 55,116 residential and business customers, including large corporations such as Intel, Applied Materials, Owens Corning and NVIDIA. SVP also owns and maintains a dark fiber network named SVP Fiber Enterprise.
searches
Well, this is SVP's site, so not really an objective source, but I think it makes the point, and I've read about it elsewhere.
https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
SVP D-1 average residential rate is $0.182/kWh.
PG&E E-1 average residential rate is $0.422/kWh.
$.18/kWh isn't amazing by US standards, but it's much closer to typical US rates than California as a whole is.
I also experienced much lower rates when I was living in Sacramento, which also has a municipal electric utility SMUD.
Fuck PG&E.
One thing to keep in mind is that I'm pretty sure that PG&E services a lot of rural areas, which are less-densely-populated, and thus more expensive to provide service to.
checks
Yeah.
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_MAPS_Service%20Area%20Map.pdf
There might be government subsidy as well, but looking at PG&E's rate schedule, it's fixed across its service area.
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
That probably means that cities are partly footing the cost of providing electricity to rural areas via buying more-expensive electricity than would otherwise be necessary.
If one wants to have this subsidy in place
and one might not
then switching to a local utility would also potentially require adopting some sort of tax.
On the other hand, rural power might just be more expensive, and unreliable, because PG&E has siphoned off maintenance funds towards executive pay and shareholder value.
Why not. The TVA was one of the US's big sucess stories.
not particularly enamored of publicly-owned utilities,
I gotta ask. Why do you think adding a profit motive to a monopoly is a good thing?
its 50c/KWh with PGE where im at. And thats the tier 1 rates.
Solar is going up as fast as they can put it up. My tiny server runs 60-70c per day of usage. (60ish watts per hour * 24 hours). Its crazy.