Plot here is quite thick. SF selling power to PG&E to distribute was found illegal/in violation of the Raker Act by the US Supreme Court in 1940 in United States v. City and County of San Francisco.

SF shifted to "wheeling" instead of selling power to PG&E and is tenuously in compliance now, but the current set up was never intended when the federal government ceded water and power rights from Yosemite to SF.

Is this at all similar to what happened with telecoms? For some reason that is what popped in to my head.

About that dam, Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Shaughnessy_Dam_(Californi...

... that it produces about 976 GWh per year. A few different sources say that SF uses about 5-6 TWh per year. So that is slightly less than 20% of total power needs. Still, it is a good start.

The other angle that people may not realize is that SF has voted in nine separate elections to not establish a municipal utility. The people of SF demonstrably do not want to take over PG&E, given numerous opportunities.

SMUD has cheap power because 100 years ago the people of Sacramento invested a lot of money to establish that utility. What the vocal minority of SF public power people want is magical: cheaper rates without all that bothersome investment.

> The angle of this that people may not realize is that San Francisco already owns the power generation (ie, the Hetch Hetchy dam).

My conclusion might be totally wrong because I'm converting from units that aren't meant to be converted, but...

If you filter down to only San Francisco County on this official-looking thingie [0], you see that it claims the city [1] has 5.126 TWh of consumption.

Your link [2] claims Hetch Hetchy Power System provides something like 395 MW of power generation capacity. I'm going to assume that that's a misprint and they meant to write MWh because that's the only thing that makes sense to me for a measure of power generation. While the last page of this PDF [3] indicates that the hydro generation component is capable of powering a bit more than twice the city's municipal demand, it seems like it's not enough to satisfy even 1/1000th of the demand of the entire city.

Perhaps I've totally fucked up my unit conversions (or relied on garbage data), but it looks like only the tiniest fraction of the city's power demands can be satisfied by the Hetch Hetchy dam. (Though, we could easily electrify way more of the Muni lines with the surplus capacity.)

[0] <https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...>

[1] SF City and County are -AFAICT- the same thing. It's a little weird.

[2] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/hetch-hetchy-powe...>

[3] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/sites/default/files/about-us/WeDeliver...> (found via [4]

[4] <https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/storage-and-deliv...>