The Lead - The Grid

CleanPowerSF hit 100 percent renewable two years early. The fog barely noticed.

San Francisco's community choice program started serving customers in 2016 with a quiet promise: cleaner power at competitive rates. At last public report it serves more than 380,000 accounts, and its default power mix is now fully renewable.

Filed September 24, 2026 - The Clean Energy SF desk

Read the lead story

Cut-paper collage of San Francisco Victorian rooflines with retrofit solar panels rising through scalloped fog banks, an electric-blue sun disc dissolving into the fog — Plate I: Victorian rooflines, retrofit solar, and the morning burn-off. Cut for this issue.

The Fog Report

Sec. 02

Filed - Ongoing

The roofline beat

Most of the city's housing stock was standing decades before the first solar panel. We follow the retrofit trade: permits, installers, and what a bay-window roof does to a panel layout.
Filed - Ongoing

The fog beat

Marine layer cuts rooftop output on the west side most summer mornings. We track what the fog does to generation, block by block, and how batteries change the math.
Filed - Ongoing

The wire beat

Trolley buses, the city's own hydro, and the wires above the street. We watch how San Francisco moves electrons, not just makes them.

Rooflines

Sec. 03

Cut-paper collage of a steep San Francisco street with stepped Victorian houses, a cable car with an electric-blue roof arc, and a sagging overhead wire below a scalloped fog bank — Plate II: the California Street grade, a cable car, and the wire that never stops.

The Victorian Problem

Solar on a 140-year-old roof

San Francisco's roofscape is a grid of cornices, bay windows, and parapets put up before electricity was common. Retrofitting a panel array onto a Victorian is an exercise in geometry: every bay window takes a bite out of the usable plane, and every corbelled cornice is a trip hazard for a racking crew.

It happens anyway, roof by roof. In the lead story we look at the program that bought the city's power, and at the rooftops where most of it will eventually be made.

Read the lead story

A solar panel drawn as a grid of semicircular scallop cells in two electric blues, capped by a Victorian cornice strip, with a small house silhouette for scale — Plate III: the panel as cornice. Every cell a corbel.

The Motif, Explained

Look at the edge of any bay-window cornice in this city and you will find a row of small semicircular brackets. Look at the fog pouring over Twin Peaks and you will find the same row at larger scale. This publication is built on that one shape: it is the fog, the cornice, and the arc of a grip bell, drawn over and over until the whole page reads as a single facade.

The Numbers

Sec. 04

An illustrative bar figure: five scallop-capped bars in graduated grays with the fifth electric blue, ticked baseline, thin ink frame — Figure A, illustrative and not to scale. The fifth bar is electric blue for a reason.

Filed From Public Records

What the program says about itself

These figures come from the program's own announcements and pages. They move; we hedge. The full accounting is in the lead story.

2016the year CleanPowerSF began serving San Francisco customers
380k+customer accounts at last public report
100%renewable share of the default Green mix in 2023, two years ahead of the city plan
5 MWon the order of, at Sunset Reservoir, the city's largest municipal solar installation

How This Paper Is Kept

Sec. 05

The Clean Energy SF mark: a sun disc dissolving into corbel scallops, read as fog, cornice, and grip bell arc

Clean Energy SF covers renewable power, building electrification, and the rooflines of San Francisco. We work from public documents: SFPUC program pages and announcements, city climate reports, and the program's own disclosures. When a figure moves, we say so. When we guess, we say that too.

Corrections carry the same weight as scoops. The fog burns off; the record should not.

A single continuous wire looping in three sags between thin poles, disc insulators above a row of gray scallops, one insulator electric blue — Plate IV: the filament. One wire, three sags, and the street's shadow.