Before Chris and I talk about the state of the company, let me just share a personal reflection about my first PG and E Annual Shareholder Meeting as your CEO. This is a 28th consecutive year that I've been at the podium at an annual utility meeting. So you might think that for me it's pretty routine. Well, I'll tell you that is not the case. I am absolutely thrilled to be able to lead such a storied company as PG and E and I am totally committed to leading this company back to the leading position that is held for most of its company history.
And I'm determined to make sure that our shareholders, all of you are very proud of that company. And I say help lead it back because I am just one part of a very talented team of people and we introduced a number of them here today. And that team of people I think you can be proud of that they're doing the right things for you as shareholders. We need to do 3 major things in 2012. 1st, resolve the gas related regulatory and legal issues resulting from the San Bruno tragedy.
2nd, we need to position our company for long term success. And third, we need to rebuild our relationships with customers, regulators and stakeholders. So I want to address each of these areas briefly this morning. The past couple of years have been some of the most difficult in PG and E's long history as a result of the San Bruno accident and its aftermath. In response, we've initiated sweeping changes across the company starting with a clear commitment to safety as our absolute highest priority.
And to be explicit, we mean not just employee safety, but also public safety. I believe we are one of the first utilities to include both employee and public safety measures in our incentive plans. To deliver on our commitment to safety, we brought new leadership and expertise into the company at all levels. We restructured our operations most significantly separating our gas and electric operating units creating clear accountability for each of our business units. We've conducted extensive safety testing and validation work on our gas system, which continues today.
We're in the process now of completely revamping our approach to safety processes and our culture. And we've committed 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in new resources over this year and next, so we can accelerate work that's needed to bring our operations in line with what we expect, what our regulators expect and what our customers expect. Now in the legal and regulatory arenas, we're continuing to work through a number of pipeline related proceedings. It's our desire to resolve as many of the regulatory proceedings as possible this year at the CPUC. And on the legal front, our goal is to settle the various individual claims related to the tragedy in San Bruno.
This accident had a terrible impact on many families and no one can replace with those victims' loss. What we can do and what we are absolutely committed to do is to follow through on our pledge to do the right thing and get the victims the fair compensation they're entitled to. We're making progress on that goal having reached resolution with some of the victims who suffered very serious injuries. Our hope is that we can arrive at resolution with all the victims and we're pursuing the opportunity to do that as soon as we can. Along those same lines, we recognize the impact that that tragedy had on the community as a whole.
And recently, we reached a critical agreement with the City of San Bruno, which provides for a very substantial financial contribution that will be used to benefit the citizens of the community. This was an important milestone in that it helps the city to move forward and for us it's another step in the road to resolution. So let me shift to the steps that the company is taking to position us We've also made plans to consolidate multiple parts of our gas organization in a single location to provide better opportunities for collaboration. The team is maintaining the momentum we established last year with safety and improvement efforts in gas operations. The extensive testing we're conducting on our pipeline system is continuing at an unprecedented pace.
And we're also significantly upgrading the technology we use to monitor and manage the system. For example, earlier this year, we became the 1st utility to start using a new ultra sensitive gas leak detection technology, which should allow us to dramatically increase accuracy of our gas leak surveys. We've upgraded information technology used by our field employees to improve efficiency and accuracy. We've also proposed a comprehensive multi year plan to upgrade our system known as the Pipeline Safety Enhancement Plan. The other major area in which we've been working to position PG and E for long term success is building our team.
By far, the most extensive changes have occurred in our gas leadership team headed by Nick Stavropoulos, who has decades of gas operating experience, but we've also brought in a number of veteran leaders across the company, all of whom have impressive credentials. Karen Austin, our new CIO is significantly improving our use of technology to drive better operations and service. Roger Frizzell, our new Vice President of Communications is helping us reach out more effectively with customers and the public. Ed Halpin, our new Chief Nuclear Officer is ensuring Diablo Canyon maintains its outstanding operational and safety record as we work to relicense that facility for the future. And these are just a few of the team members who are now working with our PG and E veteran talent to move the company forward and achieve a new level of performance.
Our goal is to make PG and E the best operated utility in the country, but that's going to take time and lots of hard work. To understand where we are now, we're bench marking the performance compared with the best in the industry. We're identifying the gaps between where we are today and where we want to be and we're implementing improvement plans to close the gaps between where we are today and where we have to be to deliver outstanding results for customers. And finally, let me touch on rebuilding relationships. Chris and I and many other senior leaders continue to meet as often as possible with customers, policymakers, business partners and others.
It's clear from our conversations that stakeholders want us to be successful and we are starting to get positive feedback on our direction. I will tell you that it's clear that stakeholders really appreciate what our employees do for them, but our corporate reputation still has a long way to go. Our objective is to win back customers and their trust one step at a time. In that vein, we're trying to do a better job in listening to customers and reconnecting with our communities. For example, we've proposed an economic development rate as a way to bring electric rate relief to businesses that need to preserve or create jobs in our service area.
We're working to further streamline and simplify the current multi tiered rate structure in a way that helps improve the affordability of our service. Our new Green Button program will give customers access to valuable data about their energy usage. And finally, in our communities, we're working to step up our volunteer work and our philanthropic giving to support local economic development and community vitality. Great example is our new Bright Minds Scholarships. This is a program to help students who have been active in giving back to their communities to give them the ability to go on to get higher education.
We've gotten an incredible response from all around our service area and in the next couple of weeks, we'll be announcing our first winners. These are the kind of steps that are moving us in the right direction. Ultimately though rebuilding relationships is a long term effort. The most important thing for us to do is to stay true to our word and simply continue delivering on what we say that we're going to deliver. That's what our entire team is focused on.
And now Chris is going to talk about some of the progress we're making on delivering those results. So Chris?
Thank you, Tony, and good morning, everybody. As you can tell from Tony's remarks, we've made substantial changes at PG and E since last year's Annual Shareholders Meeting. And thanks to those changes and the dedication of the 20,000 employees at PG and E, we are making significant progress across many different key areas of our company. Today, I'd like to share 3 areas where we are making a difference as we look to position this company for long term future success. Those areas are safety, reliability and affordability.
So let's begin with safety. Our goal is to have the safest operations in the country. Our customers won't accept anything less and neither will we. Nowhere is that commitment more visible right now than in the operations of our gas piece of our business. We've now strength tested more than 250 miles of our transmission pipelines.
The majority of this using a technique called hydro testing. Now hydro testing is a methodology where we take the pipe out of service, we remove the gas out of the line, we clean it And then we put water into the system and we operate it at a pressure much greater than what we would normally operate that pipe, so that we can identify and repair any weaknesses in the pipe. Through 2014, we're going to hydro test more than 7 80 miles of our transmission pipeline. We expect to be the 1st utility in the country to be able to complete such an extensive amount of hydro testing on vintage pipe. In addition, our engineers are reconfirming the calculations for the safe operating pressures of our pipe.
We've now validated the maximum allowable operating pressure on more than 3,000 miles of our transmission pipeline, including 100% of the pipe located in densely populated neighborhoods. As a result, we now have a state of the art electronic database for these records that is the most extensive in this For example, utilities across the country face the challenge of equipment failures that potentially dislodge manhole covers and create a safety situation. Last year, we became one of the first companies in the country to install new locking manhole covers that are designed to keep the public safe. By the end of 2012, we will have installed almost 1500 of these safety devices. And then finally on safety, safety is the cornerstone of our operations of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Facility.
In 2011, we completed another very strong year, including a refueling outage that had first decile performance in terms of safety. In addition, we're making progress in our seismic studies in the area around Diablo Canyon and we continue to incorporate valuable lessons learned from the tragedy at Fukushima. Our pledge is that we will continue to operate Diablo Canyon as one of the safest nuclear facilities in the United States. Now I know that that's easier said than done, but our commitment to safety goes well beyond words. This year, as Tony mentioned, PG and E has introduced a new set of public safety measures.
These have specific targets that we can use to monitor and that others can keep track of. We are one of the only companies in the country that has a public safety dashboard that we report on externally. By including metrics on public and employee safety in goals that we measure, by upgrading our gas and electric infrastructure and by strengthening our partnership with emergency responders. We are sending a powerful message to our customers, to our employees, to our shareholders and our stakeholders that safety comes first at PG and E. Now turning to reliability.
In 2011, we continued to make progress towards 1st quartile electric reliability service. In fact, in 2011, it was the 3rd straight year that we had record performance in terms of reliability at PG and E in both the low number of outages that occurred and much shorter duration of those outages. Now a number of programs drove these improvements, in particular, our work around upgrading the worst performing electric circuits in our system. We prioritize those circuits that have a disproportionate number of outages and significantly reduce those outages by improving the infrastructure from anywhere from including and putting in overhead line reclosers to adding bird guards, which right now I know 4 baby peregrine falcons up on the building next door that are very happy about that last part. And for our customers, this has led to a 50% improvement in reliability in each of these circuits and we expect to see similar results again this year.
Thanks to these and the many other investments that we make electric system, we expect to deliver record setting reliability performance again in 2012. Now reliability is one of the 2 things that our customers tell us is the most important to them and the other one is affordability. In this difficult economy, with high unemployment throughout a lot of our service territory, it's important that we do all that we can to help our customers manage their energy costs. So in addition to the initiatives that Tony mentioned, we continue to offer rate relief in terms of our care and our reach programs for our customers. We work with our businesses and our residential customers on energy efficiency options.
And we even offer rebates and discounts to those customers who switch to energy efficiency appliances or who use less gas during the winter season. But we also realize that when it comes to managing energy usage, information is power. For more of our customers than ever before, that information is now provided to them by our smart meters. We've installed more than 9,000,000 smart meter devices throughout our service territory, giving our customers the ability to view and manage their energy usage in a timely manner and reduce their bills accordingly. Now we realize that our customers also want choice.
So for our customers who don't want the smart meter, we're now also pleased to be able to offer an opt out option. And so far with 9,000,000 smart meters installed, about 27,000 of our customers have taken advantage of this choice and opted to retain their traditional meter. We also recognize that renewable energy and the environment remain important to many of our customers. Right now, about 20% of the power that we deliver to our customers is from renewable energy resources. And if you include the entire hydro system that we have, that goes up to 40%.
Add to that the power supplied by Diablo Canyon and nearly 60% of all of the energy that we supply to our customers today is carbon free. Now for those customers who want even more renewable energy, just a few weeks ago, we proposed a new program that would offer our customers a way to support 100% renewable resources through our green option, which we hope to begin to offer soon as the PUC gives us the green light, no pun intended. So I'd like to close my remarks this year as I did at our last meeting with a word about trust. Serving our customers and providing gas and electric service is a privilege. It's one that comes with enormous responsibility.
Our job is to prove to our customers that they can count on us to provide safe, reliable and affordable gas and electric service. That's the only way that we're going to be able to earn back their trust. Thanks to the work of the 20,000 men and women of PG and E, we're making progress. Our systems today are safer. They're more reliable and we're able to offer our customers many more choices and a much better experience dealing with PG and E.
Our commitment to our customers, our employees, to you, our shareholders is that we will not stop working until we have the safest and most reliable utility in this country. And even then, we still won't stop working. We're not going to become the utility we aspire to be overnight, but we are on the right path. We are positioning this company for long term success. We are building a better PG and E.