Every valve on the San Joaquin Pipelines, which carry Hetch Hetchy water across the Central Valley toward the Bay Area, is still operated locally, according to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission's 10-year capital plan adopted on February 10, 2026. The plan funds a project to design, procure and build remote supervisory control, run from the Moccasin System Coordination Center.
A network-wide control upgrade
The valve project is one of several digital commitments in the US$12,559.0 million plan. Water SCADA System Improvements cover automation, monitoring and control of the Regional Water System. Communications upgrades on the 167-mile Hetch Hetchy system replace aging equipment with digital systems that support SCADA and cyber security. The new Southeast biosolids digesters, forecast for May 11, 2029, include advanced process controls.
Protecting the meters it already has
In the city, SFPUC already reads water use every hour. Meter transmission units are in place for nearly all of San Francisco's 178,000 water accounts, served by 81 data collectors and measuring use at 100 times the precision of manual reads. The plan funds an AMI Refresh and Renewal project because, without timely replacement, transmission unit failures are expected to "increase significantly". The scope is a refresh of the existing Aclara system rather than a new one.
Planning by model
The same shift shows up in how the plan was built. In the 2025 planning cycle, dynamic scenario modeling tested capital options against rates, and risk scoring helped reduce US$15.9 billion of initial proposals to the adopted plan.
What the report adds
How these control investments fit beside flood, coastal and nutrient projects, which milestones fall before 2030, and what could slow them are covered in the full report. The full report, Water Utility of the Future: San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, is available for USD 499. For a free overview, read the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Utility Snapshot.