Investor Relations for PG&E. We're excited to be here today at the New York Stock Exchange. We do, as we take safety very seriously at the company, just want to cover some safety notes here in the room and also at this moment just maybe take a quick time to silence any cell phones before we get going. So we just ask you maintain situational awareness of what may be going on around you in the room. The stock exchange does have an AED on site. Susan Hunter from the IR team is going to be responsible for getting that if we were to need it. And then we have a number of people with us who are CPR trained. David McCulloch from our team and Carla Peterman is going to be his backup if we did need to evacuate.
We ask you follow the exit signs, go down the stairs and then we'll gather on Broad Street for further directions. And the exchange also has an on-site fire marshal who will be responsible for liaising with local emergency services were that to be necessary. So with that, I think we're good for what we need to cover in the room. Are we ready, Susan, for. So we're going to go live, I think right now. All right, so welcome to everyone in the room here. Welcome to everyone on the webcast. I'm Jonathan Arnold, Vice President of Investor Relations from PG&E. We're delighted to be here at the New York Stock Exchange this afternoon. Thank you for making the journey downtown. We do need to. Just before we invite our CEO Patti Poppe onto the stage, we got to cover some forward-looking statements.
Those statements, as you know, we may make statements that cover our future outlook and future financial results today. Those statements are based on information currently available to management. Some of the factors which could affect our actual financial results you'll find detailed on the second page of our presentation. That presentation also includes a reconciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP measures. Those slides along with other relevant information can be found online at investor.PG&ECorp.com. So with that, it's my privilege to introduce Patti Poppe, PG&E's Chief Executive Officer. Over to you, Patti.
Thank you, Jonathan. Well, hello everyone. So good to be with you. We love coming to New York. It's so much fun. We have, you know, good things to share with you. I think you're going to enjoy what you hear today and we're going to get started. But I wanted to take a minute and just highlight some of the team. Some of the team is here today, some of the team is not here today. But there's a couple things to know and love about this team thing. One, this is a team that is steeped in a variety of experiences that makes us, I would suggest, unique. One, we have some people with deep experience at PG&E like Sumeet. And you'll get a chance to meet Mark Quinlan here, our SVP of Wildfire Operations.
You'll see Marlene Santos, who was at NextEra for almost 39 years and now has been at PG&E for almost 4 years. Then we have folks who are in the industry. Carla Peterman, who's here, our Chief Sustainability Officer and our EVP of Corporate Affairs who has experience inside and outside PG&E. And then you have people like Julius Cox, who's our new head of HR, and Carolyn Burke, our CFO, who have competitive experience. Jason Glickman from Bain, who has deep utility experience. I have experience in a competitive industry plus a utility landscape. So all that to say this team, John Simon, we can't forget. John Simon, our General Counsel is here with us today. But what I want you to know about this team is that it is a diverse and experienced team at the helm.
The second thing to know and love about this team is that we have a Performance Playbook. And this team is aligned around that Performance Playbook. All great programs have a playbook and we do, too. We don't want to have a winning season. We don't want to have a great game. We want to have a winning program that every single year we are in the hunt. And this is the winning team who leads it. I do have to tell you about Sumeet, though. He's not here today because he's at MIT studying more about nuclear operations. As if we need Sumeet to be smarter. But he wanted to be smarter. He's studying because we own Diablo Canyon Power Plant. He's there learning about power plant operations and nuclear operations.
So just definitely proud of the team and you'll get to see some of them in action today. So as we think about the future of PG&E, the foundation is always about safety. Physical safety for our coworkers, for our communities, as well as financial safety for our investors. We firmly believe there's no trade off between customers and investors. What's good for customers is good for investors. What's good for investors is good for customers. And it all starts with the physical and financial safety. So we're going to spend some time today just reorienting where we are on Wildfire Safety.
Where.
Where are we on safety generally? And what are the financial protections that are in place uniquely in California? You'll hear more about that. But that foundation allows us to deliver an affordable and resilient energy system for customers. Our customers are demanding that from us. And our simple, affordable model is the way that we can do that. And we're going to spend some time on that today. And all of that leads us to a decarbonized energy system. Now, I like to refer to this as the hierarchy of opportunities. Some of you might be familiar with the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And as an engineer, I'm proud of myself that I actually know that that exists. But this is the hierarchy of opportunity. And that's what we think PG&E is all about.
And I'm so excited to be able to share with you the elements that make up this hierarchy of opportunity. So we're going to first start with a physical and financial safety update. Mark Quinlan, our SVP, come on up. Mark is our SVP of Wildfire Operations and Emergency Preparedness. John Simon, our General Counsel, and Carla Peterman, our EVP of Corporate Affairs and our Chief Sustainability Officer are going to join us to talk about the physical and financial safety elements that are in place at PG&E. And we're going to start with Mark. Is that me?
That was me.
Okay.
Little hair fixing. Sorry. Okay, good. All right.
So Mark Quinlan has been at our company for many years, but he started actually at ComEd as a meter reader. And he worked at ComEd for 22 years before coming to PG&E. How many years ago?
10.
10 years ago. I had an opportunity a couple weeks ago to see Mark in action with a conference that we held with utilities from around the world. They literally came to PG&E to learn about wildfire safety and wildfire prevention, which in and of itself feels like we've come a long way for that. Mark was here when? In 2017, which I think we would think is a starting point. I had a chance to see Mark share with all of the attendees much of what he has learned, what we as a company have learned, and what is in place that is now different than what was in place in 2017. Tell us a little bit about the conference, Mark, and some of the things that you shared.
Yeah. Thanks, Patti. And thanks, everybody for being here. The conference was a really good opportunity to talk just about wildfire risk. Most of the industry conferences that we have are talking about load growth and other things that we'll cover here today, but this one was dedicated to wildfire mitigation, specifically operational mitigations. So, as Patti mentioned, very well attended nearly 50 different utilities, Chilean delegation, Canadian delegation, our partners in Hawaii, all out to learn what was going on in the industry with respect to this space. So I will say that in my opinion, our story is one of change at PG&E. And I believe all utilities, including us, have the ability to make those changes happen. And we also love to learn. We love to learn what's working, what's not working and why, so that we can all get better collectively in the industry.
That's really what the conference was really all about, was to talk about what are the lessons learned, right? What have we learned over, you know, the several years that we've been at this effort? So one of the roles that I had was to talk about the PG&E Journey. And the PG&E Journey started in October 8th, 2017. And we were that evening we were preparing for a windstorm. And so, as most utilities do, when they see some unfavorable weather coming, they start activating their staffing plans. They start opening up their local emergency centers. We were doing that. We were anticipating outages, a lot of power outages. And so the windstorm that we were anticipating turned into a firestorm, a massive firestorm that we were outmatched and not prepared to deal with because we had not seen that.
So I reflect on that day and the days that have passed since then, and I think about what we've done from that point. We really didn't have good visibility into what was coming our way that evening. I think about, you know, lessons learned from that and all the things that we've done along the way. The intent of the conference was to talk to our peers, my peers, our peers, as you know, all the wildfire mitigations. What are the most effective and the fastest to implement? How can we close the gap and increase the speed to safety? That's really based on operational mitigations. We'll get into that in a moment. Today is very different. Very different. We have put a lot of time and effort into situational awareness and expanding our ability to see into the future.
I want to talk a little bit about what that means. Since 2017, we have installed 1,555 weather stations in our footprint. We had zero weather stations in 2017 on our footprint that were owned and operated by us. Those 1,500 weather stations give our team the ability to see real live conditions on the ground every 10 minutes. And 80% of those have the ability to be toggled on to provide 30-second observations. Think about that. When we're in the middle of an event and we have the ability to look very specifically at an area and get live weather data every 30 seconds, it really helps inform operational decision making, makes it very, very effective. That coupled with big advances in our meteorology capability. Back in 2017, we knew we had a wind event, but we didn't understand the fire risk.
Now we have the ability to look forward on a 129-hour moving forward basis and understand fire conditions, the conditions of the fuel.
Right.
Those two things together, it just provides so much more visibility and allows us to prepare. I'll give you an example right now as we sit in this room back in California. We have over 600 circuits that are EPSS enabled right now because the fuel conditions dictate we need to be in that pocket posture all week. We have been monitoring a potential PSPS event that's anticipated to enter the PG&E footprint on or around Sunday into Monday. Our high resolution model, the 129 moving forward, our model can now start seeing into that and provide the team intelligence to appropriately posture the system to respond. This is how we are getting ahead of it. None of that was available in 2017. It's all available now. We look at it every single day, 365 days a year.
Wildfire season is 12 months a year in California. According to us. We have a peak season and a non-peak season and right now we're just entering peak. So we are laser focused. So that was what we were providing to our peers in the industry. If you're going to go somewhere, first invest in situational awareness and invest in operational mitigations because that's the fastest, most effective way to get where you need to be quickly.
And then, Mark, there's physical protections, our layers of protections we also have in place that were not in place.
That's right. So in 2018, after the 2017 firestorm, that's when we established our Community Wildfire Safety Program. And from that program we established the concept of layers of protection. And I know that this team has heard that before. And so what that is, these are all different programs that are designed to take away the wildfire risk.
Right.
Every day at PG&E is safer than it was the day before, and every tomorrow is going to be safer than it was today. And why is that? Because our crews and our folks back at home are working really hard, really hard. Installing underground, another day, another mile, covered conductor system, hardening poles, removing veg risk, all of these are layers of protection. But given the size and the scope of PG&E's electric transmission and distribution system, it's huge. And these programs take a little while to do, so to cover us while the system becomes more resilient. This is where the operational mitigations come into play. This is EPSS, Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings, and Public Safety Power Shutoff, our last resort option. Those two operational mitigations cover us while the system gets more and more resilient.
With respect to results, Patti, you know our performance last year, we're starting to see good results. Our CPUC reportable fire ignitions in the high fire threat areas is down 68% from 2017 levels. 68% and no catastrophic wildfires last year. So we're very pleased with that as we move into this year.
And so we're not resting on that laurels, however. And there's more. We're doing what's going to be new in 2024.
Yeah, absolutely not. We've come a long way. Got a long way to go. Working very hard, always learning. I will say that for 2024 we're looking at a new approach or expanding an approach called post-ignition layers of protection. So everything that I had mentioned earlier, all the asset work, these are pre-ignition layers of protection. These are designed to prevent the ignition from happening. But once the ignition happens, we have to have defenses in depth on the post-ignition side of the equation. So it starts with our 24/7 Hazard Awareness and Warning Center. This is a group of individuals that monitor the PG&E system and identify any threats to the business or to our coworkers. We have a group of Safety and Infrastructure Protection Team members and Public Safety Specialists.
These individuals came from the fire service, from police departments, from public agencies, and they started a new second career with PG&E to help us interact with agencies, to help us prepare to speak the fire service language. These crews are out there every day responding to events. If there's an act of fire, they're pretreating our assets. They're interacting with the agencies and really providing that direct line of contact with them. And it's proven to be very, very effective. Too, I want to touch on to close AI. A lot of buzz about AI. We have 1,000 wildfire cameras in the state of California, and of the 1,600 of them exist in our footprint. AI was enabled on all 1,000 cameras last year, and the results are tremendous. AI is picking up wildfire hits faster than the human eye can see them.
Imagine sitting there and trying to monitor 600 cameras versus AI. Doing it it's so effective that Cal Fire, the state fire department for California, is actually dispatching their crews to fires off of AI hits. They're not relying on a phone call, hey, there's a fire at this intersection or over here. They are actually dispatching right off of AI hits. And I will tell you, they have several examples where a call was never received. And they're knocking these fires down under an acre, two acres. And if left unsuppressed and waiting for a phone call, this could have been more catastrophic. So that's a very effective post ignition layer of protection that we intend to move forward and install more cameras. Finally, the last one I'll talk about is also in the area of initial attack. So we have four Black Hawk helicopters at PG&E.
We use them typically for construction activities, setting poles, setting towers in our footprint, doing construction work. But what we've done this year, we have placed 1,000-gallon tanks that could either be filled with water or fire retardant. And we have. So we've tanked two of the Black Hawks and we've made arrangements with two counties, Marin County and Butte County, to dedicate the ship for the fire season, the peak part of the fire season, for their use. So we'll make do with the two that we have left. You can have these two. They're dedicated for initial attack. So those are examples of additional things that we're doing. And we're really excited about that.
Those are all great, Mark, and I just want to thank you for staying and for seeing this through. I think it's pretty incredible to think about. It's not just PG&E. California is postured differently, both physically because of all the preparedness that we as a state do and the partnerships that we have and the work that we do. But all the work that the state is doing. But California did some pretty heavy lifting. John, you were here pre-AB 1054, pre-2017. Now, after. What are these financial protections that we're talking about for investors? What's the legal construct that makes us so confident?
I wanted Patti talk about the liability risk piece, but the lawyer loves the operator.
Yes.
What's happened here is amazing. As a PG&E, I can't overstate how gratified I am about these changes. I think the liability world in some ways is changed to that degree as well. Thinking back to 2017, I think there were a number of people in the room who were with us on this. We didn't have much at our disposal. What we had was really expensive liability insurance. That was really uncomfortable for investors. I'm sure it was for the company. Today it's totally different. Today there's an entire regime of financial protections just in monetary terms. Let's start with the $1 billion of self insurance for catastrophic wildfires. That's supplemented by $21 billion in liquidity from the wildfire fund created by AB 1054, and AB 1054 is comprehensive. It's why I think you were alluding to sort of the model California.
Well, it's a model on liability too. And I know a lot has been written about this, but maybe just to cover some of the high points. So in the law, there's a presumption that a utility is prudent if they have an approved safety certificate or an approved Wildfire Mitigation Plan, both of which we have. But then looking further at AB 1054, the California legislature did something very specific. They set a legal standard on what a reasonable utility is. And in the law it actually says it is not optimum or it's not perfection. And they did that very intentionally because the legislature was addressing the criticism of the CPUC for rejecting San Diego Gas & Electric's application for cost recovery on the 2007 wildfire. So the law reverses that problem.
And then it goes further than that because the law has several elements of what makes a reasonable utility, which is very important to us and others in California, and it should be to you. For one thing, there needs to be a relationship between what caused the fire and what the utility did. That's also trying to address the uncertainty of the earlier decisions involving SDG&E . The law says that in considering reasonableness, one should consider factors outside the utility's control. Now, this is not a minor thing either because we're talking about things like the weather conditions that no matter what the utility does, there's nothing you can do about it. And then the third piece that the legislature did was talk about reasonableness as not being an all or nothing proposition. But it's a scale of activities that a utility might make.
I think Mark did a good job outlining how we're approaching that. Then the last thing would be the liability cap. When you take all those things together, it's complete. It's why we think AB 1054, and for California, we have the model that solves the liability risk.
And that's something when you think about a known risk, AKA wildfire and known protections, that is a known and knowable construct. I think it's really important for people to understand those protections in place for investors and to remember always that our first priority, our foundation, is around physical safety of our system and use of the mechanisms. Now, Carla, you both studied PG&E when you did your PhD at Berkeley. You regulated PG&E when you were at the CPUC. And now you're part of the PG&E team. You've seen a lot since 2017 as well. What from your perspective is in place now in terms of the regulatory and legislative construct in California.
So first I got to say I love you too, Mark, because as a regulatory person, nothing gives me more comfort than knowing we have our operations intact. And I can actually go talk about that with the policymakers. And so when I think about what I was doing in 2017, I was at the CPUC and we didn't have visibility either into what the wildfire risk. And so very quickly, just like PG&E, the commission, the state had to respond. So we didn't have Wildfire Mitigation Plans. So we didn't know what good looked like or what to expect. We didn't have PSPS protocols. So knowing how to respond and what was reasonable to expect, we didn't have the clarity of SB 901, AB 1054, understanding the prudence standard. And we didn't have actually the human capability on the regulatory side to deal with this.
There was no Office of Energy Safety. So now not only do we have all of that, but we have several reps under our belt of actually going through the process of having these plans, having them approved. So that's been the real change I've seen. And so now I would say we're in the point of somewhat of mundane but necessary regulatory execution. And so, for example, almost two weeks ago, we got a draft approval of our change order from Energy Safety. And the change order is a part of the WMP process where we can request changes to update our WMP. And we requested a change to update our WMP to align with our General Rate Case funding. And so seeing Energy Safety get to that alignment, our safety regulator aligned with our economic regulator, which is an important step.
We've also seen progress on our filing of our undergrounding plan. We have now guidance from the CPUC that's really clear on what we need to do to get cost recovery. And we're finalizing guidance with Energy Safety about what we're going to file. And then we're not seeing the state back off in terms of investment. This has been a challenging budget year for California. The governor has had to make $1 billion-dollar decisions about what not to fund. What has not changed from the initial budget put out was the investment in wildfire risk reduction. The state's investing $50 million in additional resources to CAL FIRE, 200 new firefighters. And then the budget also tees up plans for future investments over the next few years. And then highlight one recent rulemaking the CPUC just opened because I think it's so interesting how wildfire proceedings are going to evolve.
They put out a proceeding saying they want to look at their oversight of distribution and the policies that are meant to drive safety, reliability and resilience. They specifically said, we want to make sure these policies that we have are updated enough to deal with the emergent risk of climate change, wildfire equity and electrification, making sure that the policies, these general orders are harmonious. So I see that as them continue to integrate and have continuous improvement in their policies and getting ahead of any concerns.
Well, and so, Carla, something we talk about, there's a book called California Burning some of you might be familiar with. We say we're writing the next chapter and the next version is called California Learning because we have learned so much as a state and we want you to know and for you to have confidence in all of those learnings. But as we think about risk more broadly, beyond even wildfire risk, Carla, how does the commission and our regulatory body and our policymakers, how are we in California thinking about risk more broadly?
So I'd say one macro lesson is you need to take the long view on risk and identify what your risk is going to look like, not just a few years out, but a few decades out. So we just filed our Climate Vulnerability Assessment, which looks at the risk of climate change on our assets through the next 50 years. And that's giving us insight about what investments we need to be making, what policy we need to have in order to address risk, not just actually mitigate risk, but to do it affordably. And when we started addressing wildfire risk, that risk came on quick. So we had to respond in a short period of time. And now the more we learn about wildfire risk, the more we're able to identify longer term, more affordable solutions. We're learning from that and getting ahead of that with climate risk.
And so that is something that started in 2018. I was there when that proceeding was launched. And so it takes time to develop that capacity. But now we've done that. We've got the modeling to support us making better decisions.
Well, definitely much has changed, starting with the foundational functional safety of our system and the people who operate it, the legal constructs and the regulatory body of work that has been done and continues to be done. I couldn't thank the three of you more for the hard work that you have put in to help the people of California be and stay safe and protect investors as they help us invest in the infrastructure. Thank you. Why don't we thank the panel, please. This foundation of physical and financial safety enables us then to focus on affordable and resilient energy for our customers. That affordable and resilient energy system is underpinned by our Simple, Affordable Model. Our Simple, Affordable Model starts with capital deployed. We've talked about our 9% capital implementation.
We've got these key enablers, our O&M cost reductions, we've got our electric load growth, we have our other efficient financing. All of these things contributing to customer bills. Rate of change at 2%-4%. And in fact, in our General Rate Case, it was just approved for from 2023 through 2026. The average CAGR is 2%-4%. In fact closer to 2 than 4. So this plan is good and we're not making any changes to this plan today. But I want you to know that we think there is opportunity in this plan in the months and years to come. So starting with the opportunity for capital investment, we see potential. There's demand we can't express.
Our capital deployment meetings inside the company are like, you know, come on, everybody has work that they want to do for our customers and our customers are asking us to do it. There are mechanisms like SB 410, that's a live proceeding right now that would add incremental approvals for revenues to serve new capacity and new load. So that's a big opportunity and we think we could do more. But we can only do more if we know that it will allow our customers' bills to be more affordable and for it to be accretive to earnings. So we need to make sure that we deploy the right capital at the right time. So we know then with our Performance Playbook, we're seeing the O&M savings. I've shared many times with you that our capital to O&M ratio is a huge opportunity.
Uniquely for PG&E, our capital to O&M ratio is 0.85. That means we spend $0.85 on capital for every $1 we spend on expense. The average utility is $1.40 of capital for every $1 of expense. The best in breed are $2.00 of capital for every $1 of expense. That is headroom for us that is room for us to grow. We know that our processes can be more efficient. We know that we can have more savings. You're going to hear more about that actually from Carolyn and Jason here in just a couple minutes. There is potential in our O&M cost reductions, our electric load growth. You're going to hear more news.
I know everybody wants to know what's the news, what's the data center story. What we will share with you what we see in the data center front and what we see in electrification generally. So we'll talk about that some more here today. And then obviously other financing costs and financing costs going down. Carolyn will talk about our commitment to investment grade. Given we're sub-investment grade, you know that we'll continue to move in that direction and lower our financing costs. But there's other mechanisms that will help us lower those costs too, which you'll hear more about today. All that to say our winning Simple, Affordable Model can in fact be amplified. It's a winner in the plan. Our plan today is a winner.
We're excited that in the coming months and years we'll be able to get the full value of this affordable and resilient energy system for customers powered by the simple, affordable model. I know it sounds simple, sounds obvious, but I think you also know that everybody doesn't do it. We have the potential to do it. With that, I'm going to invite Carolyn. So Carolyn Burke, our CFO, and Jason Glickman, our chief engineer, are going to share with you and break down the simple, affordable model into more detail that I think you'll enjoy.
All right.
Thank you, Patti.
You're welcome, Carol.
I also just want to extend my warmest welcome to everybody here in the room and on the webcast. I am thrilled to see all of you here and I'm thrilled to be here and tell you a bit about our story. Jason and I are going to use the simple, affordable model to walk you through where we see additional opportunities for even better outcomes, stronger outcomes for both our customers and for our investors. We're going to start with customer capital investment. It's currently in our plan at growing at 9.5%. You're going to hear from us where we see opportunity to actually lift that up to 10%. How do we see that? It's in each of those key enablers that Patti walked through. We actually see headroom in each and every one of them. We see additional savings in O&M.
We see diverse load growth and we see multiple paths to efficient financing. Now there's going to be one key message that you're going to hear throughout this presentation. Patti mentioned it as well. This model does not depend on any one single element in the plan. We see upward flex in each and every one. This is part of our no big bets approach to how we manage the business. We work every possibility and every opportunity. And we embed flexibility throughout each and every element of our simple, affordable model. So let's talk about capital. Okay, now this slide should look very, very familiar to you. It is unchanged from our last earnings call. We have 9.5 rate base growth over the five-year plan. We have a $62 billion capital plan and we continue to see at least $5 billion of incremental capital opportunities.
Now we will only pull in those opportunities into our plan if they are affordable for both our customers and for our investors. What that means in very practical terms for you in particular our investors is that we will pull in capital into our plan only if it is additive to our earnings. Now I'm going to hand it over to Jason who's going to provide you with a little bit more color on our capital plan.
Thanks Carolyn. Good afternoon everyone. So the last page was a page you've seen, but I want to share a little bit of new news and some more color in terms of what sits behind that $62 billion over the next five years. First and foremost, if you look at the mix functionally, $35 billion over half in electric distribution, the next largest category in electric transmission. So between those two, almost 75% of the capital plan over the next five years is in electric T&D in the wires business. And then you see the balance of the investment throughout the remainder of our infrastructure and enablers. Importantly, this investment delivers value for customers across a broad range of value drivers. There's of course our safety investments which you heard Mark and the team talk about at length.
Whether that be wildfire mitigation or other safety investments, there's bread and butter utility reliability improvements from our largest hometowns in San Jose to our whole service area. What we're also seeing though is growth Patti talked about, alluded to it. We're seeing a ton of growth and opportunity in capacity upgrades and new service connections over the course of this plan. We're going to connect thousands of residential customers for new housing, thousands of small businesses and commercial industrial customers who want to get onto PG&E system to power their prosperity and of course their energy needs to be clean. And so we're continuing to invest in the clean energy transition, whether that be our own battery storage at grid scale, enabling storage at the distribution level, interconnecting utility scale renewables, and of course charging and powering EVs.
And so when you look at this and you look at this mix of investment again, the important thing to note is it's balanced across customer needs and we have the ability to adapt and flex as those needs evolved. We're not making any one single big bet to enable it.
Okay, so how are we going to afford that capital? Let's talk about our first enabler in the Simple, Affordable Model O&M savings, which happens to be my favorite one. Okay. And I will specifically speak to where we see additional opportunities for above and over the 2% target. So let's start with our track record. Okay, so in 2022 and 2023 we exceeded our target of 2%. This was largely driven by top down really good business decisions. Right. Our self insurance program, how we manage our vegetation program, you can see those savings in the line item there. It's called efficiencies and insurance. But I want to draw your eyes to another line item, planning, execution and automation that's been growing. That is where we track our savings from the bottoms up, from our field operations and our planning teams.
Now let's look at where we think our long term O&M plan could grow. Thanks to the Performance Playbook and the implementation particularly of Lean and waste elimination by our field operations and by our engineering and planning teams, we are seeing more savings and we believe that that's going to power ourselves up to the 2%-3% O&M savings. I'll just remind you of what Patti mentioned earlier. Our capital to expense ratio is 0.85. Industry average is 1.4. There's plenty of room for improvement for us there as well. Now it's been a year, a little bit over a year since I've been CFO. I was three weeks into the job when we had our last analyst day. I shared with you some reflections on the adoption of Lean at PG&E based on my experience.
I was impressed that I really felt that it was being embraced by all of our coworkers. I also asked you to imagine what it would look like for 28,000 employees or coworkers to actually be armed with the Lean mindset. Well, this is what it looks like. It looks like 2%-3% of O&M savings year-over-year. This does not keep me up at night. We can get this. Now we have real examples as well. And in fact, one of our teams is working on an initiative today that will save $100 million a year. That's 1% of O&M. I think Jason's gonna kick us off on that one.
Great. All right, well, thanks, Carolyn. Well, everyone, we're gonna take a look at our Performance Playbook in action. So why don't we roll the video?
Since 2019, when we started the Wildfire Safety Inspection Program, we've been identifying a lot of risk on the system, but we wanted to really evaluate how good are we at actually preventing assets from failing in the field, in service before we can replace them.
For a long time, we've done ground inspections where we have an inspector walking from pole to pole and looking at the pole. But there might be better opportunities to rethink how we do inspections.
Virtually every functional area in electric working together, rowing to the same rhythm rather.
Than working in silos. We look at processes from end to end.
How do we address our inspections efficiencies so that we don't drive inefficiencies in our maintenance program? At the same time, we're able to.
Provide better information and better data to ensure that we are solving the right problems with the right solutions.
The biggest advantage to drone technology in our inspection program is really being able to see things that we could never see from the ground. We're able to identify really high risk conditions that are at or near failure and mitigate those in immediate fashion with the drones. Now you can get, you know, span to span, looks at all your conductor, your splices, and we're able to pinpoint things like strands that are separating on the conductor. We're able to see where the tie wires are separating on dead end structures. We can see where the cotter pins have come loose. We now have data to support whether or not a pole truly needs to be replaced or not.
We are learning so many key things that are applicable not just here in the work we're doing, but can be applied to all over our company. We have proven over the past year that if we come together and we include our leadership, we include the front line, and we think about our customers and everything that we do, anything is possible, and we can achieve breakthrough outcomes.
I've never seen us, as a company and as a PG&E family, work more interdependently than I have in the last 12 months. We're avoiding replacing poles that frankly didn't need to be replaced. But from a visual inspection, they looked like there was a potential risk that AI alone allows us significant savings that we can put back into the business to further mitigate risk.
This year, we're forecasted to save over $106 million in O&M.
Okay, well, what an amazing example of our Performance Playbook at work. I'm so proud of the team. When we look from engineering for operations around the company where we've been able to make sure we're using the right technology and the right processes to get the right work done at the right place at the right time, so that we're delivering value for customers. And I'll tell you that that's just one example. We're taking the same approach, bringing our playbook to bear across every one of our major workflow processes. So we see lots of opportunity on the road ahead. And this is a great example, as Carolyn mentioned, $100 million of savings just in this workflow. Lowering O&M, improving our O&M to capital ratio over time.
Okay, let's shift to the second enabler of the Simple, Affordable Model in electric load growth. Where we've talked about in our plan, we see a 1%-3% growth rate. We're sharing today that we see additional opportunity there over time. We see opportunity for beneficial load growth for customers. As we look out to 2040, we can see that our load growth has the opportunity to nearly double, nearly double demand for our product. And you know, when you translate that into a growth rate, into a CAGR, it's about a 4% CAGR at the high end to get that doubling over that period of time. It's driven not by any one factor, it's driven by a number of factors. Electric vehicles are about half of the growth that we anticipate over the course of that time frame.
Data centers also contribute significantly, provide a nice source of baseload load growth, and then over time, we'll layer on more building electrification, which can, like EVs, be a flexible load. Now, you'll see the range here, and I think the range is important to note in the sense that any one of these drivers, the pace and the adoption of the technology and customer behavior and policy, we know it's not going to be a straight line. It never is in a transition. But our plan doesn't rely on any one of those. Our plan works under this whole range of scenarios from a load growth perspective. So I want to take a couple minutes now and talk about each of these drivers so you can see what we see in terms of the growth opportunity. We'll start with EVs.
What you're looking at here are the number of electric vehicles that are on the road in PG&E's service area and the growth over the last few years. Today, on the road in our service area, we have 580,000 electric vehicles. Let me say that again. 580,000 electric vehicles. It outpaced our plan. Actually, our plan, what we were expecting was 525,000 by the end of last year, early this year. We now have in our service area, 25% of new cars sold are electric or battery electric. In some Bay Area counties, that's just the average. The 25% in some Bay Area counties, that number looks more like 40%. So nearly one in two new cars sold is electric. We're past the tipping point for electric vehicle adoption in those locations.
You don't get to that type of adoption without confidence that the infrastructure is there today and that we're going to continue to build the infrastructure to be there tomorrow. In fact, earlier this year, the state announced that California had achieved its goal of 10,000 DC fast charging ports a year early, a year ahead of schedule. We're very proud to have contributed to thousands of those chargers and we're continuing to do so in our work plan this year, next year, the year after, through the duration of this plan. So that's where we are today. Now, as we look forward, we see continued growth, we see continued growth for EVs. And you know, the thing that we look at is the fundamentals for our customers work, the economics work. Driving an EV versus a gasoline powered car in California, the math works for customers.
The customer experience, whether it's charging related or otherwise. When you see your neighbors driving EVs, it gets better every single day. And of course, that's underpinned by robust state policy heading towards a mandate around 100% sales of electric vehicles by 2035. But I'll note again, our plan doesn't rely on those policies coming to fruition at exactly the right point in time or on 100% of consumers complying at exactly the right point in time. We have flexibility and adaptability to however that pans out. Okay, so that's EVs. It's not old news, but we wanted to remind you of it. Now we're going to share some new news to talk about data centers. So one thing that I think is really important to remember and something we're very proud of, is we're the hometown utility for Silicon Valley.
We get to serve the home of technology innovation for the world. We're really proud to do that. We have in our pipeline over the course of this plan now demand for 3.5 gigawatts of new data centers. 3.5 gigawatts of new data centers. We'll double click into that a bit in a minute. But I want to share with all of you why the Bay Area continues to be such a robust location for data center demand. One is history. You've got cloud services providers that have historically located there, including the global headquarters or global center for Microsoft Azure. You've got proximity to fiber. We've got three Internet exchange points right in the Bay which enables low latency and enables volume, particularly for west coast traffic. Let's also remember, you're connecting.
If you're at one of those data centers, you're connecting to a grid that is already today majority green. That's not something we have to build in the future invent from scratch. You're connecting to a grid with PG&E and the CAISO that is already majority powered by renewables. So this is the start. I don't want you to just take our word for it. Let's hear from some customers. Let's roll the video.
There is a growing trend in electrification, electric vehicle and data center driven customer needs for electric demand.
Their biggest need is for our electric grid to serve them energy when they need it and where they need it.
Prologis owns, builds and leases modern distribution facilities across the urban centers globally to provide a diverse global platform for logistics, supply chain industry. We have over 52 million sq ft in Bay Area. Prologis Energy is providing clean energy solution on the Prologis Real Estate Platform in partnership with the utilities. Globally we are seeing a high demand for data center growth from the Silicon Valley hyperscalers, many of them are also Prologis customers. We are seeing a huge demand for Prologis buildings with a lot more power.
Than what was being demanded before. Equinix is the world's leading data center provider.
Equinix operates in over 70 markets around the world with over 260 data centers and we've got 17 here in California.
Equinix has been operating in Northern California for over 20 years with over $2.
billion of capital that we're planning on.
Investing in transmission planning. We work very closely with both generation and load customers.
We're always trying to develop big picture.
Solutions to integrate renewable energy and capacity.
Requirements to serve our customers.
We are partnering with PG&E to make.
Sure, we are sharing our energy demand growth with PG&E. The utility planning can take into account the increased power and energy needs for our customers.
Our ability to work with PG&E.
to make sure we've got a reliable expanding supply of electricity to provide to our end customers.
It's been an incredible part of our business.
PG&E has been a great partner for us throughout the years.
We typically serve our large demand customers in a serial approach.
Like when we get an application, we study them.
But for data centers, because of all.
Of the increased number of applications we've.
Received, we've decided to pilot a cluster approach to group projects.
This will make sure we are ready to not only connect the customers that.
Are in active applications, but also get.
Our grid ready for the future customers.
Amazing. So that was 2 customers you heard from. There's 19 customers that are currently in our pipeline in the Bay Area to bring data centers online over the course of this 5-year time horizon. So this is what sits behind that 3.5 GW that I referenced earlier. And you heard Ashwini on the video, one of our transmission engineers talk about this idea of a cluster study. And I want to just elaborate on that a little bit because it is a new approach. It's part of bringing our Performance Playbook to bear on interconnecting large loads and data centers specifically. So typically what you would do with the data center is we would receive an application, we would learn more about that load from the customer, we would study the infrastructure required and then we work together to engineer and build it.
The second application comes in, all good goes through the third one.
Oop.
We need a different type of upgrade and then the process gets elongated with some rework. Maybe we don't have the right materials. You study this all at once and we're able to do two things. One is we can validate the demand. This process is really helping us to validate the demand over the course of this year. And it's also really accelerating time to power. Because we don't have to go back and do those rework from an engineering process perspective or a supply chain perspective, we can work with those customers to meet those timelines. Now I will note 3.5 gigawatts coming to fruition in our service area in this time frame. We don't need all of this to happen. And we, we understand, we have, as I mentioned, a history with data centers in the Bay Area.
We understand the market dynamics, and what's currently in our plan is just a few hundred megawatts. So if even a portion of this ends up coming into fruition. It is significant upside opportunity from a load growth perspective. Okay, let's shift gears to the last driver of load growth, building electrification. And what's unique about PG&E, and you see the map here of our service areas across Central and Northern California. What's unique about PG&E is our scale as an overlapping service area dual fuel utility. It's not commonplace to have millions of customers in the same locations where we serve both electricity and natural gas. And what that enables us to do from an engineering perspective, from a customer perspective, from a rates and regulatory perspective, is go find opportunities where it's beneficial to electrify today does not require new policy. And so we're already doing that.
We're already doing that. We're in our new service connections. We've got almost 85% of new service connections that are coming in electric only. We're also doing it on conversions where we've got dozens of gas distribution or transmission projects where we can actually retire that infrastructure in a safe and economical way and convert the customers over to electric. So what that's doing is it's giving us a model and a capability for how to do this in an orderly manner. Now, we're certainly aware and engaged in the policy dialogue, whether that be at the local level or the state level in terms of building electrification. We also know that those policies again are not going to move forward in a straight line. They're going to zig and zag, they're going to take different shapes, they're going to come on at different timelines.
Our plan and our ability to electrify and drive load growth and growth beneficially for our customers doesn't rely on those policies. So I want to tie together the load growth story for you and recap. You know, when you look at through 2040, we have this incredible opportunity to nearly double demand for electricity on our system over the long term. There's multiple drivers, there's multiple scenarios. Our plan does not rely on any big bets or any one of those drivers absolutely hitting the nail on the head at the right time. And I just want to provide a little more perspective where I get excited as an engineer about what this can mean for customers. You have data center demand that's going to come in. You're going to run at a very high capacity factor and be baseload. That's baseload demand.
When that comes in, then you've got electric vehicles which are the ultimate flexible load. When we think about managed charging and vehicle to grid integration bidirectional flows eventually. And then building electrification as well can be a flexible load. It's interesting. I'm sure some folks may have noticed. Earlier this week, our friends at Apple made an announcement as part of their Worldwide Developers Conference, where they announced that they're going to be including in the next release of iOS integrated features within the Home Widget to be able to manage energy, and that PG&E is the exclusive launch partner for that. Now, Apple's obviously a unique partner, and they.
We will have a lot more to say about that in the months to come, but that's an indication of the potential we see in terms of load management and being able to orchestrate all of this load in a manner that's beneficial to customers. I just want to leave you with one statistic that's an important statistic about what we see for the electric system and why this load growth can be so beneficial. Today, if you look at our wires and you look at the average day, an average spring or fall day compared to the summer peak, the difference between those two, our average demand versus peak demand is about 45%. In other words, the system on average is 45% utilized.
Think about a world where we can drive that utilization, bringing this load on, orchestrating the demand, and grow that 45%-60%, 70% or even 80%. So we're able to deliver more value for every customer dollar that's invested in the infrastructure. That's why we think it's beneficial load growth over the long term. And I'll let Carolyn say a few more words about that.
All right, thanks, Jason. That's some really cool stuff. And now let's talk about how this growing load is beneficial both to our customers in terms of affordability and to our investors in terms of capital and rate base. So we're going to use data centers as an example here. Okay. And based on location and the type of transmission upgrade, 1 gigawatt of new data center load would require capital of about $0.5 billion-$1.6 billion. Now, based on our transmission service rates and an assumed capacity factor, that equates to about $450 million of new revenue. Now, if you net out the return on capital, that results in about 1%-2% savings to our customers on their monthly bill. This is what we call good load. This is the load we like.
Now, if you look at EVs and do the same exercise, the results are even better. Adding 1 million new EVs requires capital of about $1.5 billion-$2 billion and results in 2%-3% savings on our customer's monthly bill. Cool stuff. Good stuff. So now let's go to our third enabler of our Simple, Affordable Model, efficient financing. We show this as contributing about 2% to the Simple, Affordable Model. And we're often asked what falls into this bucket? So let's look at our track record. The answer is quite a few things. Quite a few different things. As you can see, we've executed on a lot of small and a lot of large transactions over the past years to capture value from efficient financing. And as we look forward, we see a number of paths to efficient financing.
The first and foremost on my mind and the most important to me. Sorry. Is achieving investment grade. And that will include. I'll just remind you that we have a mid teens FFO to debt target out there. It also includes our pending DOE loan and other securitizations. Now let's just sit back for a minute and let's just do some math. Okay, so let's just assume that we can save 150 basis points, points on our borrowing rates. That's $15 million of savings for our customers on every $1 billion borrowed. I don't think 150 basis points is that unmanageable given the opportunities that are in front of us now. We're planning to raise $25 billion over the course of the next five years. So just for easy math, let's just assume we're able to save 150 basis points on half of that.
That results in $200 million of savings on interest cost savings directly to our customers. That equates to 2% of O&M savings. Put another way, that is equal to 1% savings to our customer bills or $0.07 of EPS for our investors. That's meaningful. Now we have a couple of examples of efficient financing that we are managing and we have one that we want to share with you. And it's a message from someone that I think many of you will know. So let's go ahead and cue the tape.
I want to thank Patti for extending the invitation for me to speak with you. I'm sorry I can't be there in person. I'm actually at an all hands meeting in D.C. with the Loan Programs Office today. The U.S. Department of Energy Loan Programs Office has several missions. The first is to provide financing to innovative technologies that may not otherwise be able to access the commercial debt markets or might be able to, but at a very high cost. The opportunities there are really across a variety of technologies. We're seeing applications that are essentially integrated resource plans. We're seeing applications for transmission reconductoring, which is a phenomenal opportunity to take advantage of our existing rights-of-way with increased capacity. We're seeing gas pipeline replacement applications, those lower greenhouse gas emissions on existing gas infrastructure.
And we're also seeing virtual power plant applications where we're able to help fund the utilities meeting the demand, flexibility associated with growing demand, reducing GHG emissions and basically disruption, displacing gas peakers and fossil generation. As the economy electrifies for the regulated utilities, the lower financing cost, which is quite a bit lower, U.S. Treasuries plus three-eighths of a point flows directly through to customers in the weighted average cost of capital. And so that can make the energy transition and the utilities capital plans more affordable for customers. The mission really is to save customers money and to use the incredible balance sheet of the government to loan money to qualified applicants to lower the overall cost of the energy transition. It's a phenomenal program and we look forward to announcing some success stories in the months to come.
Okay, that's fun to see, Lastly. All right, so let's bring us back to the Simple, Affordable Model. So the Simple, Affordable Model is quite simple and there are no changes to our plan as it relates to the Simple, Affordable Model. It works and it works quite well. What we think, what we've shared with you today is that we see additional opportunities and flexibility that make our plan even stronger. And we mean stronger in all senses of the word. More customer capital investment, better outcomes for affordability, and more earnings power for our investors. Let me say that again. We see a clear path to more capital investment, lower bills, accretive earnings while we're improving our balance sheet. So let's go to our guidance. I'm going to end here on this slide before I hand it off to Patti. We are reaffirming.
Let me go to our next slide. Okay. We are reaffirming our guidance for 2024, $1.33-$1.37 with at least 9% growth in each of 2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028. We are reaffirming our capital plan of $62 billion. And we are reaffirming our financing plan associated with that $60 billion to support that $62 billion, which includes a balance of utility debt, pay down of our parent debt of $2 billion by the end of 2026, $2.5 billion of dividends, which we will ramp up over the course of the plan, and particularly in the latter part of the plan, and then $3 billion of equity which we expect to issue through a very normal ATM program beginning next year. And it'll be ratable over the following four years.
As we have noted, we have built this plan to ensure that we have flexibility because we have significant capital needs on the system for our customers today. We want to improve our balance sheet. We want to be investment grade. We believe that end in that sentence is extremely important because it's that end that's going to allow us to rebuild our business to be stronger, consistently high performing for both you, our investors and our customers. With that, I'm going to hand it off to Patti.
Thank you, Carolyn. Thank you, Jason.
All right
, wonderful. Thank you. I mean, I love the numbers and I love you doing math live. I really appreciate that. I love them. I see CFO is doing math. It's good. You know, I want to click back out. So we clicked in pretty deeply on the Simple, Affordable Model. I think we've made the case that there's, I like to say Simple, Affordable Model amplified. We have potential to amplify that Simple, Affordable Model so that we can deliver this decarbonized energy system. I was thinking, I was kind of going back in time and thinking about when the utility industry in fact transitioned and retired coal plants. I did it myself. We retired coal plants and replaced and transitioned to natural gas and renewables.
I'm going to suggest we didn't do that because it was just a good thing to do. We did that because there was an economic equation that made that work. It made it work for customers. It made it work for the planet. It made it work for investors, that transition from coal to gas and renewables. I'm suggesting that we're entering that same era again as it relates to decarbonizing the economy. Let me give you some underpinnings to our logic here. Number one, as we look at our own service area, PG&E service area, we can see a reduction of CO2 emissions between now and 2040 of about 65%. That's predominantly driven from fuel switching, specifically gasoline to electricity. So from internal combustion engines. I think Jason Glickman made the case that electric vehicles are selling in California.
Electrification of transportation, which incidentally, transportation is the number one form of carbon emissions in California. So that transition is vitally important. And so as we make that transition, household energy spend will go down 20%. That's 20% that a customer, a family, a household can put back into the economy for other things other than energy. And that's because electricity is a more efficient fuel than gasoline. It fundamentally needs less energy to deliver the same value to customers. And so the decarbonization of the economy in California can in fact have a lower societal cost. That's an economic equation that works. That working economic equation fuels our growth. We at PG&E are looking at California and seeing us entering a golden era of electrification and decarbonization in the Golden State. I might have. And that golden era will be powered by the people and equipment of PG&E.
That's an exciting future. As we talk about the building blocks of safety, our simple, affordable model and the ultimate aspiration of a decarbonized energy system. This is a winning value proposition. It's a winning value proposition for our customers, for our communities, our hometowns, and for you, our investors. So we're so glad you're here today. We're going to now transition to the Q and A period of our program. If you can, please, Jonathan.
Thank you, everyone. So as everyone comes up, we're going to take questions in the room on the microphones. So please wait till you have the mic and state your name and firm for the webcast. And then if you're on the webcast, you can put in questions in the Q and A box and we will relay them here in the room. So we're in position.
Okay. Yes. Jonathan will hand the mic to the first question.
Hey, thanks. Nick Campanella at Barclays.
Hi, Nick.
You talked about you don't want to add capital to the plan if it's not accretive to earnings. How are you thinking about accretion to EPS? And then how can you just remind us if you added capital to the plan, how to think about that $3 billion of equity in the walk?
Yeah, I think. Let me just start with the latter part of your question. How to think about the $3 billion of equity in the walk. I'll just remind you that we have a fairly flexible financing plan, right? We have the dividends and we have the pace of the ramp up of the dividends that we could choose to do either more slowly or more quickly. And then we have the $2 billion of corporate debt that we could choose the timing of that. We've chosen that we're going to pay that off by 2026, but we could pace the timing of that differently as well. So that's how one of the methods of thinking about the flexibility in our plan to afford the bring in that $5 billion or some of that $5 billion into our capital plan. And I'm sorry, I wasn't sure about.
Your first question again,
you talked about you're not going to add capital unless it's accretive to earnings. But I was just asking, what about EPS?
Yeah, no, well, that and that and that's on EPS. It's very similarly, as we've said, we have 9% for 2025, 2026, 2027 and 2028. And we would. That is including with our current financing plan, which embeds a lot of that flexibility. And so we're committed to that. As we think about bringing in new capital, we're certainly thinking about how that EPS might grow as well.
Yes. EPS as well. Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Nick. Yeah.
Stuart Zimmer from Zimmer.
Hi, Stuart.
Hi. So we see PCG trading at about 80% of the industry average multiple, despite being the fastest growing utility in the country, I might argue the best managed utility in the country.
No argument here.
And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on why and to the extent you think it might relate to perceived fire risk. It's funny because while Warren Buffett criticized the company for fire risk, it seems to us that it is actually the very best prepared and most technologically advanced utility in dealing with fire risk in the country. So much so that when utility CEOs come to visit with me at Zimmer headquarters, like today, when the head of Arizona Public Service came to sit down with us and talk about fire risk in Arizona, he actually cited things that they're copying off of PG&E's paper, like they've recently implemented PSPS for this summer. They are in the midst of rolling out weather stations. We heard about how you have 1,555 built so far.
They talked about how they're implementing and putting cameras in place, much in the same way that you have. You know, this sets aside the fact that California has AB 1054, which provides, you know, financial support in case things does happen. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how well PG&E is prepared for fire when we see other states starting to feel it. Obviously, Warren Buffett is complaining because he got hurt hard with his ownership of PacifiCorp. We saw Hawaiian Electric, you know, deal with the consequences of the island of Maui basically burning down. We've seen Xcel deal with two fires, and now it's not just California, but people are seeing other states have to deal with fire risk.
I'm curious for you to address that and how PCG stands relative to the rest of the country's utilities and why you think this stock would have to go up 25% just to trade on top of the average, even though it's probably the fastest growing utility in the country.
So, Stuart, thank you and certainly thank you for your ownership over the years. We, you know, a couple things. One, I've been pretty clear. I think Warren got it wrong. I don't think his letter reflected the current state of California, which is why I invited these incredible people to join me today to make sure you knew that. We believe that we have a construct in place and we have the physical protections and the financial protections that change the game for investors and PCG. We feel strongly about that. We feel, we know. And you know, when you run an operation, you're going to be the first to know. And I think our commitment to self insurance reflects our recognition that our system is safer than it's ever been before. And that's in the best interest of customers. Our self insurance program.
And we're going to reflect the cost of that insurance to our customers much better than a commercial insurance company is going to. So we know the risk has been reduced at PG&E. We know that we have the systems in place and we know that California is a partner in that readiness and in that safety posture. All that to say we took a stand as a leadership team when I took over the helm and we gathered and built this new leadership team. We took a stand that catastrophic wildfire shall stop. And we didn't just take that stand for. We didn't say as a result of PG&E equipment, we didn't say in Northern and Central California, we said catastrophic wildfire shall stop. So it is the cause of our lives to make sure that every utility knows.
When Mark hosts this event with all of these people and I went to it and I met all these people from utilities, I do think they're learning that this risk exists in other places. We're humbled and we definitely are not finished. We're not done yet. There's more that we want to do. Just as Mark said, the system's never been safer than it is today and it's going to be safer tomorrow. Still, all of that's true now. The valuation is up to investors. I think I have a fundamental belief about this, that performance is power. As we perform, people will come to understand what has actually happened at PG&E and the tremendous turnaround that is on track and picking up steam.
So, you know, we just feel like our job is to run the business and that's what we're going to do. We'll let the valuation stand on its own.
Thank you.
Yeah. Is there a question?
Hi, good afternoon. Jeremy Tonet, J.P. Morgan. Just wanted to touch base, I guess, you know, the path to investment grade could offer some notable savings there. And just wondering if you could frame a bit more, I guess, how you see the path or timeline to that. And is the focus more on FFO to debt or is it wildfire risk mitigation? Seems like that's, you know, pretty well advanced given everything discussed here. So just wondering how you see, you know, what's most important here in the need to pay down the $2 billion upstairs at the Holdco. Is that really pressing here or just curious for your thoughts on this.
So I'll hit some high points and then turn it to Carolyn, number one. You know, the rating agencies first of all have been very clear that certainly wildfire risk is something they've got an eye on. So they're watching, you know, another season as Mark described, we've had significant improvement. We can point to those things. But they also want to make sure that we do have the cost structure. That's right. And we have the management in place and the governance in place. And so we're continually ticking off each of those boxes. And again, same answer, performance is power. When we perform, we have the power to influence those ratings. We have the ability to help our rating agencies be confident and comfortable in putting their name on our performance. But, Carolyn, I know you spend a lot of time on this.
No, that's right. I mean, Mari, our treasurer and myself, we have ongoing discussions with the rating agencies. As you know, we're one notch below investment grade with Moody's and with Fitch and two notches below with S&P. But we've seen good, and we're in positive outlook with both Fitch and on Moody's. And so we're extremely focused on the simple, affordable model which, as Patti said, is getting those O&M reduction and focusing on our FFO to debt metric. I think it is the qualitative measure still. It is the wildfire risk, but it is also improvements in our financial metrics.
That's very helpful. Thanks. One quick follow up, if I could just with regards to any incremental thoughts you might share as far as national wildfire policy, the potential for that to come through? Anything you could share?
Yeah.
You know, John, I'll tip it to you on national wildfire policy. What are your thoughts about that?
There's a lot of discussion about it. I think it's a good thing that that's happening. We like what we have. And so we've been advocating as part of those discussions that 1054, AB 1054 should be the model. Devil's in the details. I think it's good that people are talking about it. Additional financial backstop is a good thing. But it's important to us that 1054 be the model. And I think discussions are ongoing. And there's several different groups who are looking at this. EEI is looking at this. Michael Wara at Stanford just published a proposal with the Brookings Institution. Interestingly, all the different pieces are pulling elements out of AB 1054. They have very similar concepts, but as I said, the devil's sort of in the details and they're not that far along at this point.
Our intention would be we're sticking with AB 1054 until something's better. We're not going to sign on for a change that is not superior. We're very clear in the benefits that it provides and we're experiencing how those benefits materialize for investors and for our customers. We're definitely involved in helping and talking and making sure and sharing. John has spent countless hours with his peers helping them understand some of the nuances based on our experience. Yeah.
Yep.
Hi, Steve Fleischmann at Wolfe. So a couple questions on the load growth information and thanks for kind of connecting that with the investment opportunity too. But just, just on the data centers, I think you said you have a couple hundred MW in your plan, but there's potentially 3.5 GW. Could you give more color on kind of what are the obstacles? How much of that is in your control in terms of connecting people quicker that want it. And so things that you can do versus, you know, not sure if that demand is really committed yet or not. Like how much of that is in your control.
Yeah, you want to go ahead, Jason? Why don't you take that all pile on?
Yeah. Thanks, Steve. Well, one, I would say the nature of the process that we've undertaken here, where we're looking holistically across all the applications around the greater Bay Area and the nature of the information we're gathering, part of what we're trying to do is make sure that we can focus on the levers we can control. You know, so we have, we know the sites that folks are looking at from a land and permitting perspective. We're looking at, you know, what are their electrical needs and what that would require in terms of long lead time, materials. So this process, that this cluster study process is actually intended for us to get more of that forward visibility is one that I would say.
I think the second piece to note, that's what we're seeing in the pipeline, that demand, what customers are signaling to us is that they would expect that to materialize over the course of the next 5 to 6 to 7 years. So it's not like it's all at once. And so what we'll really be working hard with them in collaboration is to understand what it means in terms of, in particular the transmission system in those areas. And we'll get a better view of that over the course of this year.
Yeah, I don't have anything.
Just on the kind of 1%-3% low growth and then the 2%-4%, maybe just over this year, the next 5 years, kind of. How should we see that load growth progress? Does it kind of start at 1 and then start accelerating higher or any thoughts on that?
I would say over that, over the timeframe, we do see acceleration. We're not going to get too hung up on month to month or quarter to quarter, even on a normalized basis, because we know there will be fits and starts as we get new technology in place and these data centers come online. But we do see some acceleration, particularly towards the back half of this decade, into the early 2030s. But that will start to come on. We think that range will start to progressively kind of ratchet up over the next couple of years and then accelerate through the back half of the decade.
Well, and I think one of the things that's interesting about this load growth and the forecast, and I love how Jason shared this, grid utilization rates. There's capacity to add new load without having to do the upfront investment today. That, that, that gives us time to get those plans in place, to build, to buy, to procure that equipment and meet their needs over time. But as we look at that load growth, at the same time that we're talking about doubling the load growth, we're also looking at only a 13% increase in peak because of the dynamism of electric vehicles. And we think that's very exciting. This app with Apple was a great indication that how load and supply are going to be managed in ways that never were before.
There wasn't, number one, a resource, a demand on the grid that was so flexible as electric vehicles. I tell people all the time when they ask me, is the grid ready? Not only is the grid ready, the grid needs these EVs. It's the best thing that's ever happened to the grid is this electrification of transportation. Just as an example, Oakland Public School district just electrified their entire fleet of buses. That fleet of buses is not operating at 6:00 P.M. on an August night. Right. That's a perfect resource. We can use those batteries as a vehicle to grid resource. I was just last week at our San Ramon center with our distributed energy resource management team and they're going through all their plans about what are we doing to enable and digitize the way we operate the grid. Mark's team was there in full force.
This is the team who operates our distribution and transmission system, and they are deploying new technologies to make new load and load management possible. We've got use cases in place right now, for example, on our new distributed energy resource management system for what we call a flex load. So I think some of you have heard me tell the story that Tesla wanted a 3.8-MW supercharger. And we said in our old process, the answer which we originally gave, which is why it's our old process, was yeah, okay, we'll get that powered up for you in four years. Now, Tesla did not like that answer. We are privileged to serve Tesla and all their super Superchargers. And so we worked together and figured out that 360 days of the year we could give them 3.8 MW.
But those handful of days, handful of hours on those handful of days, we needed a flex arrangement. We had no way of offering that, modeling it, forecasting it before. But using these new digital tools, we can forecast that, we can plan that, and then we can operate that with the customer so that we don't overload the system on those handful of hours. The rest of the year they can have full and charging. So the idea that we can have a dynamic grid is just going to be a very exciting part of serving this load in the most economic way that benefits customers, both the customer who's electrifying and all the other customers on the grid.
Patti, I just want to hit one more thing about that project because there are other buses that have electrified. The Oakland school district is the first one to have VGI enabled buses in the country. So they're actually going to be participating in a program with us this year to actually have those batteries serve the grid. And so it's. We've been talking about this for years, but we're actually actualizing it now for the first time in the country.
Thank you, Carla. That was a great ad.
Okay, go ahead,
Shar from Guggenheim. Just on the 9%-10% bucket with potential opportunities which are now showing any sense on kind of timing there. So is it the front end of the current plan, back end of the current plan, and can the balance sheet absorb that? So as we're thinking about that $3 billion number.
Yeah, I mean, that is the whole question. When we will bring in that new capital, when we can do it affordably for customers. And you can see a lot of this load is good for customers. When we can have a balance sheet that is healthy, that can absorb that new investment and it's accretive to earnings. And so that's what we're working. And so we're working this plan every single day to bring that value to you. I don't know. Carolyn, you want to add anything else?
Yeah, no, I don't think I have anything else to add, Char. I mean, I think that's, that is our plan and that's how we're thinking about it.
It's exciting. I think it's exciting. This is a wonderful era in California in the sector. But I think for us in particular positioned where we are to serve the innovation capital of the world and to the adoption rates of EVs, we're going to see and we are experiencing the clean energy transition first. And I can assure you, I know you're hearing lots of things in the national news and what have you. California is not afraid to do hard things. California is not afraid to innovate. California has taken a stand. We've experienced the effects of climate change. The state has taken a stand that we are going to decarbonize the economy and we get to power that.
Got it.
Just lastly, just on the efficient financing, obviously you guys are talking about future partnerships. Is that still referencing PacGen? What else could you be referencing and any kind of updates on your strategy there?
No, it's not necessarily. It is referencing a number of different partnerships that we're open to. Anything that we can do that will allow us to do more work for our customers affordably, we are going to look at. And so that includes a whole array of different types of partnerships.
Hi, Ryan Levine with Citi. In terms of the 3.5 GW of data center outlook, how has that evolved in recent months and quarters and in terms of number of clusters, is there any color you could provide around how segmented that is? If there's any big bets that you're aware of too?
Yeah, I'll speak to that. So we've seen like the industry an acceleration certainly you know, we've historically I referenced in our plan that our plan was in the low hundreds of megawatts. Going forward, that's historically what we've seen. 2023, we saw that jump up to almost a gigawatt, 800 MW. And then we added another 2.7 GW through this cluster study where we invited applications so we could get a holistic view of the demand. I think we showed it on the slide. But these tend to be in particular because of local regulations in California for backup generation, where for local air quality, there's a 99 MW cap for the backup generation. So on average, you could think about this in 100 MW increments. It varies by customer, but that's a reasonable way to think about it.
In the materials, you can see there is a range, but there's a lot that are just under that 100 MW threshold. You know, one of the things that was really important for us to do, and maybe some of you noticed D.V. Rao is in the house. D.V. has joined the PG&E team. Some of you may remember or know D.V., I consider him a financial wizard. And he does very good analytics. And he and Carolyn are working together and did a lot of hard work with some of our analysts to figure out what is good load. So when Carolyn talked about what is good load, I think there have been a lot of questions about that. Is this data center good load or not?
And so when we look at that, these applications, it gave us courage and enthusiasm to reach out to these data centers and help them know that we're open for business. There were rumors on the street that PG&E was out of power and who's going to build something in California and all these things. Well, when you sit down with the team and you're not just looking at applications because an application reflects what they think you might be able to do. When we sit down with them and say here's what we actually can do, and when we know what good load looks like and we invite good load, it showed up. And I think that's, that's the thing that makes us pretty bullish, that we will find ways of building this into our system because it will benefit our customers and our investors.
One follow up, Patti, you had highlighted automation and digitalization as an opportunity. Where is PG&E in that journey in terms of automating its system? And where do you see the biggest opportunities?
Yeah. So for automation specifically, we know that the digital grid is going to be a lot more automated, but we see automation. We in fact ran a hackathon on automation two years ago and had our back office teams automating all sorts of forms and work that they do, and they had contests and they gave away a waste can as a trophy. We're like figuring out how to automate work. So there's simple things that are available in Microsoft BI tools that people can learn to utilize and automate standard work. But automating the grid, I don't know. Mark, if you want to talk about what's the grid of the future look like versus manual operator. Grid operator, what do you think?
Well, I think you had hit it on it a little earlier when you mentioned the DERMS potential. So, we're just starting to step into the space. Transmission has always been a two-way power flow generation. A market system that's kind of governed and overseen by the California Independent System Operator sends pricing signals for generators to come on and off. So flows are always moving around on the transmission system. Way more complex than transmission. And distribution, where I see distribution going, is equally or more complex than transmission because of all the virtual power plants, Vvehicle-to-grid integration , all these flexible loads and that DERMS system that's going to have to be able to control that so that we don't have too much generation or not enough. There's voltage concerns, there's impacts.
When distribution is all of a sudden having a push, upward flow push into the transmission system, it's going to impact transmission planning. Right. So it's an exciting time to be in the industry. To Patti's point, we're going to have to rely on technology to help us get home here. And we're starting to see that in wildfire space. I mentioned the AI, and there's probably some similarities there that we can learn from.
I mean I was with one of Mark's supervisors and managers in fact that he promoted years ago who's on this distributed energy resource management team and she's like Patti, we finally can get off paper switching orders. We're going to see that we can do this digitally with our crews in the field with their digital tools and our digital tools. So it's just I can't express to you enough first of all how exciting it is, but what a big change this is and we get to lead it. There couldn't be anything more exciting than that in our opinion. Thank you, Ryan. Oh, all right. I'm getting the. We're out of time. I guess the webcast has left, but it's over. I guess I'll let Jonathan give his. Okay, my closing comment. Thank you, Jonathan. He got me all fired up.
Okay.
Thank you for being here and thank you to our viewers on the webcast. We're excited, as you can tell. For those of you who are here at the NYSE, we're going to be around and we'll be happy to take additional questions. Thank you for signing on and thank you for being here for our update today. Thank you.