PG&E walks back claim that S.F. Mayor Lurie meddled during blackouts to help daughter’s ‘Nutcracker’ show

PG&E’s CEO said in a public hearing Thursday that Mayor Daniel Lurie directed the utility to prioritize power to the San Francisco Opera House during a massive city blackout in December.

At the time, Lurie’s daughter was due to perform at the Opera House in “The Nutcracker,” according to a cast list, a connection first reported by the San Francisco Standard.

A company representative, though, walked back the claim Thursday evening and the mayor’s office denied the request was made.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. CEO Sumeet Singh made the remarks Thursday at a hearing of the Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety Committee about the historic blackouts, which left more than 100,000 homes and businesses without power across the city. 

During the nearly three-hour hearing, Supervisors Bilal Mahmood and Alan Wong questioned the company’s priorities. Mahmood asked Singh why the utility had prioritized power to the opera house. 

“You prioritize the opera where no one is living to restore service before you prioritize restoring service in communities,” Mahmood said, according to a transcript of the meeting.

“We did not make that decision on our own accord,” Singh replied. “We were requested by the mayor to provide temporary generation to that specific location and we responded to that and by that time we had about 90% of our customers restored.”

But PG&E said in a statement to the Chronicle Thursday evening that “the mayor did not ask or direct PG&E to restore power to the opera house.”

“It is of course true that PG&E was constantly in touch with City department of emergency management staff and city leadership throughout the process of restoring power to all parts of San Francisco, including key government, municipal and public locations,” a PG&E spokesperson, David McCulloch, said in the statement. 

McCulloch said the opera house was one of the facilities discussed, but that the mayor “did not ask or direct PG&E to prioritize power to the opera house.” McCulloch added that Singh “acknowledges that he misunderstood this information when he answered Supervisor Mahmood’s question.”

Lurie’s office denied Singh’s initial comments in a statement Thursday. 

“For days through the blackout, Mayor Lurie personally pushed PG&E to restore power across San Francisco as quickly as possible,” said spokesperson Charles Lutvak. “But to be clear, the mayor never directed any PG&E employee to provide power at any specific venue — and the San Francisco Ballet didn’t even have PG&E support until after the weekend.”

The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management said it may have played a role in PG&E’s decision to power the opera house with generators. A department spokesperson, Jackie Thornhill, said in a statement that while the agency “shared a request from the opera house with PG&E, we did not ask them to prioritize it over any of our other outstanding requests, including resources for Civic Center residents impacted by the outage.” 

PG&E called attention to “the Nutcracker” performances continuing due to the use of generators. 

“SF Outage Update,” PG&E posted on X on Dec. 21, the day of Lurie’s daughter’s scheduled performance. “The 2PM #Nutcracker performance at the #SFOpera House is ON using its backup generator. PG&E is helping secure temporary generation for the 7 PM show.”

Lutvak said the mayor’s daughter was in the 2 p.m. performance, and not the 7 p.m. He said PG&E tried to send the generator to support the later performance but could not get it set up in time. That performance went on with an opera house generator and then a PG&E generator was hooked up for the Monday performances, Lutvak said.

Mahmood, who is an ally of the mayor, criticized Singh’s responses to his questions. 

Singh “consistently gave inconsistent answers and repeatedly deflected blame instead of taking responsibility,” Mahmood said on social media Thursday evening. “After hearing those contradictions, I found it difficult to trust his claims.” 

At the hearing, Singh and other PG&E executives told supervisors that the blackout had been caused by a circuit breaker failure and fire at a substation. The blaze damaged internal cables and other electrical equipment and prompted the company to shut the station down entirely to help firefighters, which caused additional cascading outages. The same substation had failed before in 2003.

Supervisors also questioned why the estimated restoration times published by PG&E during the outage were widely inaccurate. Singh explained that the company uses an AI model that is typically accurate for small, routine outages but failed during the substation fire.