Today is “National Cut Your Energy Costs Day.” For Northern Californians, this may feel a bit ironic. Just last month, Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility that serves most of the region, announced an electricity rate hike — the sixth one in 2024 alone. That’s on top of a natural gas price increase a year ago and another set for 2025.
Customers can think nostalgically about the days of cheaper energy. But readers of this publication were worried about energy prices all the way back in 1910.
At the time, it was coal prices that had us burning up. In response to a question on everyone’s mind at the time — “Why is coal so high?” — we turned to Mr. Phillips of the J.J. Moore shipping company.
He offered a litany of reasons for the increase, explaining that the coal supply from Oregon and Washington “has diminished to such a degree that there is scarcely any.” The “rate of freight” had jumped up as well, which made matters worse due to reliance on coal from Australia. “We are so far from our source of supply,” Mr. Phillips noted.
But the predominant reason for the price hikes was the fact that the region was still recovering from the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906.
“Up to the earthquake,” he noted, “prices were steady, winter and summer, but since the winter of 1907 the prices have at times soared to a height almost impossible to be reached by the rich or poor.”
Phillips mentioned that the first big increase following the quake was due to a “shortage of ships and cars to bring in a sufficient supply to meet the demand.” The complications only grew from there.
At the time, coal was used for industry, but city dwellers also used it for heating. Although Jewish arrivals in Northern California often sought success as dry-goods merchants, apparently some schlepped coal, too.
“Felix Gross knows the coal business,” according to an advertisement in 1923. “He knows your needs and advises everybody to obtain the forthcoming winter’s supply of coal now while prices are comparatively reasonable. The Felix Gross Coal Company, 480 Ninth street, is prepared to fill all orders large or small with promptness and despatch. Phone Market 792.”
While Gross was hauling sacks of coal across the city, San Francisco had also been transitioning to electricity. The city was an early adopter of electric light, and first saw electrification in 1876 in a small area. That changed dramatically by the 1920s.
“California is second in all the States of the Union in number of homes lighted with electricity,” we wrote in 1922. “There are now 752,000 residential consumers of electricity in this State, a gain of 102,000 during the year 1921.”
Before that, gas had been used for lighting. In fact, PG&E is the successor company of the San Francisco Gas Company, founded in 1852. The company made a successful pivot just as electric light came into vogue.
“First manufactured as a lighting medium, gas long ago surrendered that field to electricity, a fact that caused great consternation among gas men when electricity was first introduced,” we wrote in 1922. “Its use as a fuel, however, has increased with such enormous strides that the Pacific Gas and Electric Company today finds its facilities all but overtaxed to supply the growing demand and is constructing in San Francisco one of the two largest gas holders in the West, capable of containing 10,000,000 cubic feet of gas.”
The PG&E gas holder, also known as a gasometer, consisted of a set of tanks enclosed in a steel frame with a water seal. The inner tanks rose and fell depending on how much gas was in storage, while the steel frame remained stable.
In 1922, we described the construction as the “mammoth” gas holder in the city.
“Its size may be visualized by comparing it with the St. Francis hotel, which is 187 feet in height and occupies 45,000 square feet of ground area. Thus the new holder could comfortably include the hotel within its great shell,” we wrote.
PG&E is still with us, but the hotel-size gasometer is long gone. Coal, too, is a distant memory, though you can still see traces of the California coal mines. Out by Antioch in the East Bay, it’s possible to visit the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, now a park. Meanwhile, natural gas is being phased out across California.
It was a century ago that customers were fretting over the price of coal, but we can’t help but feel some solidarity now as we open our winter PG&E bills and ask, “Why so high?”