Utilities standoff keeps S.F. public sites in dark
A homeless shelter in Dogpatch. A children’s museum in Corona Heights. A public plaza in Noe Valley. They were all supposed to be up and running by now, but they are still waiting to open.
The common problem? PG&E won’t turn on the lights. And no one can agree on why.
“PG&E needs to step up or step aside,” said Supervisor Jeff Sheehy, who accused the utility of delaying tactics because it is unhappy with the city’s aggressive push to sell its own clean energy to PG&E customers in San Francisco. The Randall Museum and Noe Valley Town Square are both in his district.
Mayor Ed Lee said he doesn’t think PG&E is purposefully delaying hooking up the power. He attributed the holdup to competition between PG&E and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission over who would power the sites. Lee said he doesn’t care who wins, so long as it gets done.
The PUC, on the other hand, is adamant that it power the three sites with Hetch Hetchy hydroelectric power because it is less expensive and cleaner than the energy PG&E sells. But the PUC needs PG&E’s cooperation because the utility owns the transmission lines that carry the electricity.
Then there’s the utility’s side. Andrea Menniti of PG&E said the PUC “slowed
down the process, in some cases by not providing necessary information in a timely manner, by changing the scope of the project and by not submitting necessary payments in a timely manner.”
In the meantime, city officials are scrambling to get the homeless shelter, children’s museum and public plaza powered.
Of the three, the Navigation Center in Dogpatch is the most politically sensitive. Lee has made the innovative homeless shelters, which provide intensive case management, storage and the ability to move in with pets or partners, a key component of his plan to deal with the homeless problem. The Dogpatch Navigation Center was scheduled to open in March.
Located at 25th and Michigan streets, it is made up of raised trailers connected by elevated walkways. It is designed to house around 70 people.
In November, the PUC submitted its application with PG&E to power the shelter. But it wasn’t until last month, after nearly five months of back-and-forth about issues like voltage and the location of electric poles, that PG&E said it needed to analyze the impact on the power grid of providing hydropower, said PUC spokesman Charles Sheehan.
The study could take several months, and the city has to pay PG&E $25,000 to do it.
“The goalposts keep moving,” Sheehan said. “Months go by and we are working with them on fuses, circuit breakers, and then then they ask us to do a system impact study out of nowhere . ... If we sent the application in in November, why tell us we need that in mid-March?”
Menniti said PG&E has “met or exceeded all deadlines” for the project and said the city has not paid the $25,000 fee.
PG&E’s demand for a service-impact study also has delayed the reopening of the Randall Museum, a natural-history and arts museum. After nearly two years of renovations, the museum also was scheduled to reopen last month. But in mid-February, PG&E informed the PUC the study would be required before it could turn on the power.
“The museum has been connected to the PG&E transmission and distribution grids for decades,” Sheehan said. “The load really hasn’t changed.”
Andres Power, a former aide to Sheehy, wrote in an April 4 email to PG&E that the Randall Museum “is caught up in what can only be described as a purposeful obstacle by PG&E to delay the opening of a city science museum for youth only because, as has long been the case, the city is choosing to use 100 percent renewable Hetch Hetchy power for this facility rather than less-green PG&E power.”
Manetti, on the other hand, blamed the delay on the PUC for not submitting the required information on a timely basis.
“PG&E will work to connect service safely and as quickly as possible, but won’t compromise any of the mandated steps that ensure safety and compliance,” she said.
Then there are the lights at the Noe Valley Town Square, which opened in January. All it would take to turn them on is connecting the lines to the electric box, Sheehan said. The Recreation and Park Department, the PUC and Sheehy, the district supervisor, have been asking for that since early March. A representative for PG&E responded to them in an email that the “schedule is currently full” and April 20 was the soonest it could do the job.
Menniti attributed the holdup “to both a change in scope of project, and delayed submission” of the city’s application to have the lights turned on.
Sheehy expressed exasperation. “If PG&E and the PUC are going to have this fight over clean power, it shouldn’t be at the expense of children and the Noe Valley community,” he said.
Sheehy linked the dispute to San Francisco’s aggressive push into PG&E’s business through CleanPowerSF and Hetch Hetchy hydropower. The city’s CleanPowerSF program launched last year and sells mostly clean energy — harnessed from sources like wind and solar — to existing PG&E customers.
The city also has begun selling its 100 percent greenhouse-gas-free Hetch Hetchy hydropower to businesses and residents in massive new developments like Hunters Point Shipyard — business for which PG&E also competed. That’s in addition to the hydropower the city already sells to municipal customers, like Muni, schools and libraries.
“One has to ask oneself if there isn’t a connection between San Francisco implementing its clean-power program and the foot-dragging by PG&E,” Sheehy said. “It seems like suddenly San Francisco is becoming a low priority for PG&E.”
Complicating matters further, the city is fighting the utility’s demand that it spend potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure upgrades to buildings that already receive Hetch Hetchy hydropower through PG&E’s transmission lines. That dispute is before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
As for what’s next with the Randall Museum and Navigation Center, Lee said his office is working to resolve the delays. The PUC estimates the studies PG&E says are necessary will delay the projects by at least three months.
Meanwhile, Randy Quezada, a spokesman for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said the Navigation Center is still scheduled to open this spring. It remains to be seen how and when that will happen.