A link to the financial community briefing materials can be found here.
"We are encouraging investors from around the world to deploy their capital in California to reimagine and rebuild our energy system to make it safer and more reliable. As we are seeing with California's current drought-fueled wildfires, we are in a war on climate change, and investment capital is one of the necessary tools in our arsenal to deliver the energy system that our hometowns deserve," said Patti Poppe, CEO of PG&E Corporation.
Outside Capital Investments Required to Support Customers and Communities
Each year, PG&E invests approximately $7.5 billion in its electric, gas and generation infrastructure. About $5 billion of that figure comes from customer rates on a yearly basis. Therefore, the company must secure an additional $2.5 billion in funding from non-customer financial sources like investors to make up the difference. Those outside investments are needed to fund accelerated risk reduction and safety improvements, reliability upgrades, and clean energy assets that help California meet its climate goals.
Recently Announced Initiative to Underground 10,000 Miles of Power Lines
PG&E recently announced a major new initiative to expand the undergrounding of electric distribution power lines in High Fire Threat Districts (HFTDs) to further harden its system and help prevent wildfires.
The new infrastructure safety initiative is a multi-year effort to underground approximately 10,000 miles of power lines, or about half the distance around the globe. PG&E's commitment represents the largest effort in the U.S. to underground power lines as a wildfire risk reduction measure and will require significant additional investor funding to realize in the coming years.
The exact number of projects or miles undergrounded each year through PG&E's new expanded undergrounding program will evolve as PG&E performs further project scoping and inspections, estimating and engineering review.
PG&E's Commitment to Community Wildfire Safety
Investors also received an update on PG&E's multi-faceted Community Wildfire Safety Program, which includes both immediate and long-term action plans to further reduce wildfire risk and keep its customers and communities safe.
Since 2018, PG&E's wildfire safety work has resulted in:
Ongoing PG&E Wildfire Mitigation and Resiliency Efforts
PG&E's ongoing safety work to enhance grid resilience and address the growing threat of severe weather and wildfires continues on a risk-based and data-driven basis, as outlined in PG&E's 2021 Wildfire Mitigation Plan.
This includes:
More informationabout PG&E's wildfire safety efforts is available at pge.com/wildfiresafety.