PG&E prepares to launch multibillion-dollar effort to bury 10,000 miles of wires

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is gearing up to launch the first wave of a sprawling, multibillion-dollar initiative to bury 10,000 miles of distribution lines in high-risk wildfire areas across its Northern and Central California service territory.

Over the next five years, the utility, known as PG&E, plans to place nearly 3,600 miles of wires underground, ramping up from just 70 miles in 2021 to 1,200 miles in 2026, Patti Poppe, CEO of parent company PG&E Corp., said Feb. 10.

"Undergrounding is a strong long-term solution for PG&E to reduce wildfire risk in certain parts of our service area," Poppe said on an earnings call with investment analysts.

The utility intends to propose implementing its effort over the next five years in upcoming regulatory filings, including its 2022 wildfire mitigation plan to be submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission on Feb. 25.

"Our update later this month will reflect the minimal impact to customers relative to our previous filings," Poppe added.

The utility seeks to more than double its undergrounding activities to 175 miles in 2022, at a targeted cost of $3.75 million per mile, while reducing that cost by roughly 33% over the next five years through economies of scale.

In July 2021, PG&E first introduced its vision for burying distribution lines as the long-term solution to eliminating the kind of power line-triggered wildfires that devastated communities and forced a $58 billion bankruptcy restructuring. At the time, the utility estimated a total price tag for the 10-year, 10,000-mile undergrounding initiative at $15 billion to $20 billion or more.

In addition to burying wires, PG&E plans to install more microgrids to replace overhead power lines in remote areas exposed to high wildfire risks, building on a project completed in Briceburg, Calif., near Yosemite National Park, in 2021. That project relied on a combination of solar power, lithium-ion batteries and propane-fueled generators to create a community microgrid instead of rebuilding distribution lines destroyed in a 2019 blaze.

"We can eliminate the trade-off between being safe and having power. That's the future," Poppe said Feb. 10.

Undergrounding, microgrids, vegetation management and other measures are aimed at reducing the impact of wildfire-related outages across the utility's service territory. In 2021, more than 80,000 customers were impacted by public safety power shutoffs, down from 653,000 in 2020 and approximately 2 million in 2019.

Overall, PG&E expects to increase capital expenditures to $53 billion between 2022 and 2026, from $35 billion in the previous five years.

Expanded efforts to reduce wildfire risks come as a federal judge overseeing the utility's five-year felony probation, which ended in late January, cautioned that PG&E remains a "continuing menace" despite some safety progress.

But Poppe asserted that a new chapter at PG&E has begun.

"We're a safer company because of the improvements we've made in the past five years," the CEO said.