San Francisco: City's $3.4 Billion Offer for PG&E Assets Collides With Utility's $20 Billion Valuation
San Francisco — The City and County of San Francisco, California, reached a key milestone on October 20: the city submitted its formal offer to state regulators that day to advance its plan to take over Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) power assets and create a municipal utility. The city offered $3.4 billion, while PG&E insists its assets are worth at least $20 billion — a figure City Attorney David Chiu called “absurdly inflated” — leaving the two valuations nearly six times apart.
The two sides also differ on cost scope: the city's offer does not include the cost of facilities such as new receiving stations, while PG&E's valuation does. The city is pressing the takeover on reliability grounds, saying San Francisco has already had 40 outages this year; Chiu said there has been on average one major outage a week and has asked state regulators to investigate PG&E's performance. PG&E CEO Patti Poppe pushed back last week, saying outage time this year is actually down, and warned that “you can imagine the company's trucks leaving San Francisco and never coming back”; Chiu responded that the city would rehire most frontline workers.
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is determining a “fair and reasonable” value for a possible acquisition, a process expected to take considerable time, and the dispute may ultimately end up in court. (GSM, based on The San Francisco Focal)
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 / A. Hornung
- 2026-10-20San Francisco: City's $3.4 Billion Offer for PG&E Assets Collides With Utility's $20 Billion ValuationThis story
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