SF Officials Call for CPUC Probe of December PG&E Blackout

Nearly three months after a fire at a Mission substation plunged 137,000 San Francisco residents into darkness during the holiday season, Mayor Daniel Lurie and City Attorney David Chiu have formally demanded that state regulators investigate PG&E's handling of the crisis.

In a March 12 letter to PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe, Lurie, Chiu, and two other senior city officials declared "deep concern" about the reliability and safety of the utility's services. The letter calls on the California Public Utilities Commission to open a probe into the Dec. 20 blackout, which knocked out power to more than 130,000 homes and businesses at its peak. The city's own estimate puts the human toll even higher: "several hundred thousand people" went without power for "several hours to several days," with certain neighborhoods grappling with persistent outages stretching into weeks.

The timing compounded the damage. The letter explicitly notes the economic toll on the city's businesses, pointing out that the outage struck when "stores and restaurants would have been filled with shoppers and diners."

PG&E responded diplomatically. "We appreciate the letter that city leaders provided this week regarding the outage that took place last December in San Francisco," a company spokesperson said. "We remain committed to working in partnership with the City, and will support any actions directed by the CPUC for the benefit of the customers we are privileged to serve."

The regulatory picture, however, is murky. The CPUC announced in December that its staff had initiated an investigation into the substation fire and blackouts. But the city attorney's office says there has been no indication that the probe has meaningfully advanced. CPUC spokesperson Terrie Prosper told the Chronicle that the commission's "staff investigation into the PG&E December 2025 outages remains in progress." That framing matters: CPUC staff investigations typically lay the groundwork for a more formal and public proceeding by the full commission, the kind of exhaustive regulatory scrutiny San Francisco officials are now explicitly demanding.

San Francisco supervisors had already put PG&E on notice, grilling the company's leaders at a public hearing in February. The March 12 letter escalates that pressure by going directly to Poppe and invoking a pattern of failures the city argues stretches back decades. City leaders sought in the letter to connect the December blackout to a string of major outages and substation fires going back as far as 30 years, framing the Mission substation fire not as an isolated incident but as the latest chapter in a long history of infrastructure failures.

The contentious relationship between City Hall and PG&E has also fueled a parallel effort: San Francisco is still pursuing a years-old plan to purchase PG&E's local power lines and take municipal control of electricity distribution. That effort, however, faces what observers have described as a long and difficult path to success.

Whether the CPUC escalates its staff review into a formal public investigation will be the key test of whether regulatory accountability follows the political pressure building at City Hall.