State Senator Scott Wiener is trying to bolster his run for Congress with a new bill targeting PGE, a bill that would allow cities to "breakup with PGE." But does deficit-strapped SF even have the money to do this?PGE is easily pretty much the most despised utility company (or maybe even any company ?) in San Francisco and much of Northern California. That was the case well before PGE ruined the weekend before Christmas with that December 20 blackout that left hundreds of thousands without power, plus the myriad of smaller SF power outages since then. The City and County of San Francisco has several times tried to buy the power grid from PGE and run it themselves, dating back to the London Breed administration. Each of these attempts has been unsuccessful, but state Senator Scott Wiener (who happens to be running for Congress now) wants another stab at it. NBC Bay Area reports that Wiener is introducing a state-level bill in Sacramento that would allow California a cities to split from PGE and start their own public utilities, and he introduced the bill Monday morning on the steps of SF City Hall. KPIX has much of that press conference in the video above. "We are fed up with PGE, we are done," Wiener said at the press conference. "We are fed up with paying double of what our neighbors in Sacramento and Palo Alto pay for their electricity with their publicly owned utilities. We're fed up with the blackouts and the poor maintenance that have left hundreds of thousands of people without power for for days on end. We're fed up with a system that gives monopoly utilities a huge incentive to focus more on paying its shareholders than providing the best possible service for the public."According to Wiener, PGE has raised rates 40% on SF residents since 2022, and San Francisco PGE customers pay the "second highest rates in the country."Wiener's bill is called SB 875, and would allow cities to create their own public utility, or to join existing public utilities established by other cities or municipalities. The bill was just introduced today, and has had no hearings yet.Remember, SF tried to buy PGE's local power grid for $2.5 billion back in 2019, and PGE refused the offer. At that time, PGE was bankrupt and the deal may have made a lot more sense.But now the tables are somewhat turned. City Hall is now carrying a deficit of nearly $1 billion, and it sure doesn't seem like SF has $2.5 billion laying around.And of course, we already tried this back in 2019 and 2020, and it didn't work. NBC Bay Area reports that Wiener says (in NBC Bay Area's words) that "PGE is so powerful in California that his proposal didn't get a hearing." and it's unclear how or why things would go differently this time around.Related: Sunset District Businesses File Lawsuit Over December Power Outage [SFist]Image: @bilalmahmood via Twitter ...read more read less