On behalf of the PG&E investor relations team, welcome to our 2022 Investor Day. Starting with safety, in the case of an emergency, there are three exits out of the building. The closest exit is on the floor where you walk on this floor near where you walk or where you actually walked in, and there are two additional exits on the ground level. Before we get our day started with our Chief Executive Officer, Patti Poppe, I wanted to provide a high-level run-through of our day. The first part of the program will run until 10 A.M. We'll take a brief 10-minute break, and then we'll get started with the second half of our program, which will run through 11:30 A.M. We've left plenty of time for Q&A throughout the day, and as a reminder, this meeting is being recorded.
Now I'll hand it over to Patti Poppe, the leader of our remarkable transformation underway here at PG&E.
Thank you Matt. Wow, it is good to be in New York, and it's fun to be with all of you. Thanks for having us. I have the privilege of introducing our team, and there are a few of our team who are here with us who are not going to be presenting today, so I will start with them. I'm joined by Marlene Santos, our Chief Customer Officer. I am joined by Ajay Waghray, our Chief Information Officer, and Julius Cox, who is our Chief Human Resources Officer and also responsible for supply chain and shared services. We also on the phone have John Simon, who's our General Counsel, and we certainly can't forget our, handy dandy, trusted, greatest of all time , who is also in the house. I know many of you know Tom. Please say hello to Tom this morning.
Our presenters today, starting with Adam Wright, our Chief Operating Officer, Sumeet Singh, our Chief Risk Officer, Jason Glickman, our Chief Engineer, Carla Peterman, who is our Chief Sustainability Officer and EVP of Corporate Affairs, and of course, your favorite, Chris Foster, our Chief Financial Officer. I wanna just share with you that we are changing the culture at PG&E. I thought about how can I explain the culture change that's underway. I think the best way is, of course, in the form of a story. I have a little story for you to start our day. It was just a couple weeks ago, I had the privilege with the team to take our board of directors out to an undergrounding job.
It's a really cool one of the projects in our 10,000 mi undergrounding program, and really the first of its kind on our system and likely in the state. This was a job where we were laying two parallel conduits, six-inch conduit. This was a massive project. There was a D10 Cat dozer being pulled by two other D8 dozers to bury these two parallel conduits. No trenching. This job is 1.8 mi. We're gonna do it at about $2.4 million a mile, and it removes the risk of public safety power shutoffs for two adjacent communities. Now, for a construction project management operations geek, it was a good day. Here's what was even better than watching that project unfold before our very eyes. I had a conversation with the project manager that day.
Roger and I stood shoulder to shoulder, and we're watching. Everybody watched the work. We were pretty proud of what was happening. Roger said to me, "Patti, my spirit for our company has been reignited. I've worked here for a lot of years, and I believe again." At the same minute, he said, "We are rebuilding this company from the ground up." He also shared then about five ideas he had to make it safer, faster, cheaper. On this amazing day, he was still dissatisfied. That's the culture we're creating at PG&E, the culture where we will always be better today than we were yesterday, not because something was wrong yesterday, but because we're committed to being better even yet tomorrow. That is underway.
Adam will share with you about the culture that we are building and the fundamental capabilities that we are teaching this organization grounded in our lean operating system. Adam will have a chance to share more about that and make it real for you. Sumeet's gonna talk about the physical risk reduction that exists on our system today. We do not have to wait. Our physical risk reduction starts with our Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings, which we have expanded to 44,000 mi of line active today. We have our public safety power shutoffs, our inspection programs, our vegetation management programs, our system hardening programs. Sumeet will share the technology that underpins all of that so that we can provide a safe physical system to our customers and our communities today.
It's combined with then the long-term plan that Jason will be able to share, the power of an engineering function that this company desperately needed that can build a plan for the next decade, a plan that we can count on that both physically de-risks the system and financially de-risks the system by deploying our simple and affordable model, a tried and true, tested method for running a great premier utility. Ample capital deployed. Capital our customers are demanding. Please, they've been frustrated that we have not invested in the infrastructure. This is great capital that will make the system safe and resilient to the climate conditions and affordable because we are building the capability of cost savings, cost reduction. We are building the capability of finding efficiencies throughout the business as well as industry enviable load growth in Northern and Central California.
Yes, people are still lined up waiting to get signed up for our service. We have potential with electrification and EVs to grow load. All of those things combine to offset that capital deployment so that it is good for customers and good for investors. That simple and affordable model has a lot of runway. Chris will share more about that. We also have financial risk mitigation in the form of AB 1054. That important legislation was passed in recognition that customers and investors need to be protected from the financial risks of wildfire. That legislation has an important criteria that we are good and prudent operators. That is our opportunity, our job, and our commitment. Many of you know we posted the CAL FIRE report of the Dixie Fire yesterday on our website. We received that report this week.
As we reviewed it was clearly more of the same. We have filed extensive amounts of information about the Dixie Fire through the Judge Alsup proceedings, and as we read that report, we've just received it this week. As we read that report, it is our opinion that we continue to stand by our position that we are a prudent operator, and we acted prudently in those conditions. Nothing in that report changes our position on that. The other important financial capability that we are and financial risk that we are mitigating is that requires trust. Trust of our regulators, trust of our policymakers. Every utility has risk. Every utility has pipes and wires. The ones that you count on, the ones that regulators can count on are the utilities that have a proven method for delivering on their commitments.
Carla will share about the progress that we have made in conveying that ability and fulfilling our commitments for our policymakers and regulators. We have the opportunity to earn the trust of those people. I am frankly pleased and a little surprised by the pace of those relationships and how well they are building. People in California desperately want PG&E to be successful. A very important decision was made when we came out of bankruptcy that investor-owned utilities have a role to play in California's clean energy transition and in delivering this vital product to the people of California. We are here to demonstrate that we have the capability and the team for the time to deliver for our customers and deliver on those commitments, and that's how we will build trust by doing what we said we're gonna do reliably.
This is the team you will see in action today. What I really wanted you to see was how we are taking these simple concepts and taking them deep and building a company that you can trust, that you can be proud of, that will serve our customers and you, our investors. With that, let's get this show on the road. Adam Wright, you're up.
You're welcome. Thank you.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Morning, Adam.
Well, thank you. I am so glad to be here this morning and appreciative of you taking time to allow us to be with you. I am super proud to be a part of this leadership team, and I have to pinch myself quite regularly that I get a chance to be a part of rebuilding one of the great companies of America. I am excited about the progress we're making, and I am extremely bullish on our future. We know that how bright that future will be will depend on how strong our culture capability becomes. When I think about, you know, company organizations or teams that have had sustainable success and have a strong culture capability, particularly from the Bay Area where we're located, the one that pops into my mind is the San Francisco 49ers.
Picture on the screen, you have Bill Walsh, one of the great coaches and managers of any sport, an inventor of a great operating system I'll touch on here in a second. Joe Montana, who before Tom Brady was arguably the greatest quarterback ever, who benefited mightily from Bill Walsh's system. Then you have some other guy who might be the first to document a case of COVID long haul. One of my earliest memories as a kid was the 1989 Super Bowl. 49ers were playing the Cincinnati Bengals, and it was a classic game. It was an epic game. It was close the whole way through. Then the fourth quarter, the 49ers fell behind 16-13.
Three minutes and 10 seconds to go, the 49ers were on the 8-yard line, and that means if you're not a football person, 8-yard line, you have a long way to go. They had the ball. I thought as an 11-year-old, they would do what all kids do. Everybody go deep, and we'll throw it as far as we can, and we'll get it all back at once. That's not what they did. They executed an 11-play, 92-yard drive. They marched down the field, scored the winning touchdown with 39 seconds to go. The drive was methodical even when they had setbacks. They had an incomplete pass, and they had a penalty. They put them behind the sticks, the chains. They didn't panic. They didn't scrap the system. They didn't scrap their program. They just went right back to executing. They just steadily marched down the field.
That was their culture. They had a culture of consistently delivering in the moment because of a reliable operating system. A system that Bill Walsh put in place that was designed around clear objectives. They had choreographed minute-by-minute practices, and they had the West Coast offense. This offense was designed to control the ball. Short, decisive passes to minimize risk. They had spacing and rhythm, formulated play calls so everyone knew exactly where to be and what to do. The system was so methodical it got nicknamed the nickel-and-dime offense. 5 yards here, 10 yards there. 5 yards. 5 yards. 10 yards. 5 yards. Just marched down the field all the way to the score. That's what their culture was about. We find ourselves in a very similar position. We have a long way to go. There's no mistaking on that, but we have a goal.
We're instilling a culture to confidently deliver on our commitments through the capability of our lean operating system. As a reminder, our lean operating system is based on four plays: visual management, operating reviews, problem-solving, standard work. Those combined provide us visibility and control that lead to predictable outcomes. Now, last year, we stood up the first two plays in earnest, visual management and operating reviews. We implemented a choreographed time architecture with daily, weekly, monthly operating reviews. Today we have 2,100 operating reviews every day that happen across the company, 15 minutes each in rhythm every single day based on visual management. What are we supposed to do? What did we do? Did we accomplish it? Yes or no? Why or why not? In rhythm every day.
Then we take a deeper dive weekly into our safety performance, wildfire, customer performance, and internal performance, and go deeper into those areas of the organization. The more we see, and we're seeing a lot of opportunity, but we know we can't get it all back at once, which takes us to problem-solving that leads to standard work. It's a methodical process. Methodical. We see a gap, we contain it, we problem solve and fix it, we put it in a standard to make sure we capture that opportunity going forward to prevent recurrence of slipping against our metrics. Nickel and dime. Control the day, save the week, deliver the month, win the year. A methodical process every single day. That's the capability that we're building. I'll give you a couple of examples.
Starting with safety, obviously, the most important thing we do is to protect the communities we serve and our coworkers who help us deliver that essential product that matters. Safety for us, in a way I think about it, the way we do one thing is arguably the way we do all things. Inherently, when we do safety well, we do better on quality, we do better on cost, and then obviously we're protecting the coworkers. Proactively, we took a hard look at what's driving our DART rate. DART rate was obviously very high for our industry. We looked at what are some of the drivers. Ergonomic injuries were about two-thirds of all of our DART, which are days away and restricted from work. Those are significant injuries.
We took a look at that and went out to the field, looked closely to the work, did some go-sees. What are some of the tasks that we do that can provide, you know, opportunity for injuries? One in particular is underground cable pulling. Our coworker is actually pulling cable out of the ground so that we can connect the pole here. That put a tremendous amount of stress on their body. We applied technology, human tech is what we use, which basically assesses where the stresses are the most prominent on our coworker. In this case, significant shoulder and arm stress. We were able to redesign and re-engineer this work to use basically a motorized mechanism to pull the cable instead of the human stress, and reduce that risk score for that task by 59%.
Proactively looking to find technology within just daily visibility. Every single morning around 6:00 A.M. or so, we get a daily safety note, and it shows who was injured yesterday, what type of work were they doing, what region were they in? It shows how many preventable [uncertain] we had. Then we have a safety message that ties any trends we're seeing to help remind our coworkers of how to be safer around those frequent injuries. Those things combined are helping reduce our DART rate by 75% over this time period. Patti will talk about later towards the end what we've accomplished in the last 110 years around safety. Clearly, problem-solving, standard work, this technique is now our standard. It's reduced that risk of injury. The things we're doing every single day are taking us even further.
Great opportunity for us here for our customers more than anything is our ability to actually rationalize the right work. O&M, expect repairs can be seen sort of as temporary, not as long-lasting. We have opportunities at times based on the material, based on how close our systems are to certain residents. There's all this criteria that we can assess and decide to make a capital repair, which removes aging assets on our system. It prevents the leak recurrence. It
Give us an opportunity to make a permanent repair as opposed to what we call a band-aid fix. What you're looking at here is an old service line into a home. The blue line has a T-cap on it, and the T-cap sometimes leaks. We dig up the street, and we can cut off the material around the T-cap, what seals the T-cap together, and replace that and tighten that down and control the leak. That's a costly expensive fix. We can look at the age of the equipment, the type of material that it is, where it's located, and decide to replace an entire service on a capital basis, which again gives us that permanent repair replacing the aging assets. Huge opportunity here for us. Just in the gas area alone, we were making leak repairs around 14% of the time on expense.
We've now reduced that by 50%. Now we've increased the number of capital repairs we're making on the gas business replacing assets 50% of the time just by adding visibility into it and then putting new standards and criteria in place. Another example that we have is on productive time. Productive time for us is time spent serving customers, investing in the system, doing compliance work. Unproductive time would be time sitting around waiting for work to come to us or training. Now clearly, training is important, and that's not something that we pull back on. But we do assess whether or not we're providing over-training. What we have here on the right-hand side in the blue bars, we have our current, our proposed state. Our gray state is our current state.
The gray bars on the screen in the forklift section, for example, we took a look and said we have 362 forklifts on our system. 362 forklifts. We're training 4,800 people to operate those 362 forklifts. That's 13 people being trained for every one forklift. If we just simply reduce that to three to one we can save 3,200 hours every year and give that back to 3,800 coworkers to be redeployed back into serving our customers. There are dozens and dozens of examples of this type of waste across our system. Our lean operating system is bringing visibility to this. It allows us to problem solve and implement new standards so we can redeploy more valuable resources to serving our customers.
In the time I have left, I'll end it with this. One of the most famous images of Bill Walsh's legacy is this thing called his coaching universe. At the center, you have Bill Walsh, and orbiting the center are all these different coaches. It's a legacy of coaches and all of their accomplishments. His system and the culture and capabilities that he built were so effective that over the last 29 years, half of the Super Bowls have been won by coaches associated with him. Half. It is a picture of sustainable success. It's a universe of predictable outcomes.
If you were to correlate the implementation of his system to the growth of the NFL, you'll see that when the West Coast offense was cemented in the National Football League, the play of quarterbacks improved, therefore, the play of the league improved, therefore, the value of the league increased. The National Football League in 1989 was worth $900 million. Today, the value is $16 billion. If you run the numbers on that's a 10% CAGR. Just a coincidence. Just a coincidence. I promise, just a coincidence. We too are building, we're building a universe of sustainable success as well. At the center is culture and capability, and orbiting around are all the things that we're pursuing. All the things. More efficient end-to-end work process, more efficient deployment of capital resources, our undergrounding effort, regulatory relationships.
All the things that we're driving toward are gonna orbit around culture and capability. With that, I'll turn it over to Sumeet. He'll talk about how we're mitigating risk today.
Thank you, Adam Wright.
Nice job.
Good morning.
Morning.
While I have zero experience on a football field, I can tell you that firsthand, I've experienced the impact of the implementation of the lean operating system. Simple, extremely effective. When we applied the lean operating system for wildfire mitigation efforts last year, not only were we able to get daily visibility into the execution of the mitigations, we were also able to drive clarity on how those mitigations were applied in reducing our risk. The lean operating system is also helping us be a catalyst for culture change. Having a culture that's focused on continuous improvement, focused on being safer today than we were yesterday, being safer tomorrow than we are today. In addition to the lean operating system, we have made significant investments and have a significant focus on improving both our operational technology and our information technology systems.
A few examples. For operational technology, as part of the expansion of our Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings program, we have enabled
More than 4,300 devices that protect 100% of our high fire risk areas and beyond. Each of these devices is remotely connected to our control centers, so that we have the ability to be able to enable, disable in a remote fashion. Additionally, we have installed more than 500+ high definition cameras, 1,300+ weather stations that not only provide situational awareness to us during a public safety power shutoff event, but they also provide situational awareness to our external emergency response partners. Furthermore, we have also installed more than 1,200+ sectionalization devices. Why are they important? They help us become a lot more targeted and surgical when our customers experience outages because of EPSS and PSPS. These devices are also remotely connected to our control centers.
This vast network of our operational technology generates 8 billion-10 billion, let me just say that again, 8 billion-10 billion data points every single day. All that data feeds into our information technology system that's enabled by Palantir Foundry capabilities. We aggregate this data from the disparate systems on a daily basis so that we can do real-time analysis and drive actionable intelligence for data-driven, risk-informed operational decisions. What you'll see next in a video is how our IT and OT capabilities work in unison to unlock this amazing opportunity. Let's roll the video, please.
PG&E has more than 30,000 mi of power lines located in high fire risk areas. To put that in context, that's more than the distance.
All right. As the team is troubleshooting that back there, hopefully we can get the video to work. It's a two minute and 30-second video. If we're not able to get it to work, we will actually send that out via link to the team. Really what you're able to see from an animation standpoint is how the 8 billion-10 billion data points collected on a daily basis help inform our understanding down to the most granular level. We have about 25,500 mi of our electric distribution lines overhead traversing the high fire risk areas. Covers about 65,000 sq mi, and we have the granularity to forecast the risk at the 2 km by 2 km grid level. You got it? Take three.
PG&E has more than 30,000 mi of power lines located in high fire risk areas. To put that in context, that's more than the distance around the entire world. To safely run a system of this scale, we need state-of-the-art technology to understand where we might have the highest potential risks. That's why we use advanced tools that allow us to collect 8 billion-10 billion data points every single day to help us understand key attributes of our assets, identify risk, and make real-time operational decisions. Our Fire Potential Index, or FPI, is an example of a data-driven process that is part of our daily operations. Every day, we run the FPI risk model across all high fire risk areas. The analysis includes real-time weather, like temperatures, wind speeds, and humidity levels. FPI also analyzes more advanced local data points like topography, vegetation type, and vegetation moisture.
These conditions are reviewed down to the level of 2 km x 2 km across more than 65,000 sq mi. With this data and our artificial intelligence and machine learning models, we make critical operational decisions, like enabling enhanced power line safety settings. With FPI, we can surgically identify where to enable EPSS. This pinpoints the areas where protection is needed while minimizing customer outages. When our meteorology team detects FPI conditions that meet EPSS activation triggers, EPSS is activated on select circuits. Activation triggers during winter and spring months, when wildfire risk is moderate, are dependent on FPI and other weather factors which target pockets of elevated fire risk. During summer and fall months, when there is sustained elevated wildfire risk conditions, EPSS is activated all the time except under conditions of heavy fog and rain.
Here's an example from last year when our crews found a fallen tree causing a wire down. Since EPSS was activated, power was automatically shut off in less than one-tenth of a second. This prevented a potential ignition that could have resulted in a consequential fire and shows how our data drives operational decisions that make our system safer. Advanced risk modeling and real-time insight paired with all our wildfire safety efforts allow us to ensure all our teams are effectively planning and communicating each and every day, putting the safety of our customers and our hometowns at the heart of everything we do.
I hope that gave you some insights in terms of how all this data comes together and how we're able to make operational decisions down to the specific circuit on any given day at any given time, which is how we know we're prepared. Last year, as many of you know, we implemented our EPSS program on about 45% of our high fire risk areas or 11,500 mi. What we experienced as a result of this implementation is a dramatic reduction in our CPUC reportable ignitions. 80% reduced as compared to the prior three-year average for those enabled circuits.
As a result, we expanded the EPSS program to not just cover the entirety of the high fire risk area, which is 25,500 mi, but we also have expanded it to cover the adjacent areas, and Patti mentioned this in our opening, for a total of 44,000 mi. Let's put that in context. That's a 4 x increase as compared to last year. This year alone, out of the 156 days year to date, we have implemented EPSS on at least 2/3 of those days. What have we seen? We've seen the exact results. 80% reduction on ignitions on those enabled circuits as compared to the three year average from 2018 to 2020. We know it works.
While at the same time, we have improved the outage restoration time for our customers by 40% as compared to where we were last year. We've got a target of four hours or less, and we're well below that this year to date. It's not just about EPSS. When we look at our wildfire mitigation strategy, it's multilayered, multiple layers of protection. The core elements of our wildfire mitigation strategy are based on our core resiliency programs, such as system hardening, which includes undergrounding that Jason's gonna touch on. Our weather-driven operational mitigations, EPSS and PSPS, that are very responsive to changing conditions. The multilayered approach is reducing the wildfire risk today by 90%. One clarification on this graph, because I know a lot of us like to be technical, including me.
This is illustrative, so the size of the bracket does not give you the indication on the current contributor to the risk reduction, because a lot of that risk currently is being reduced via EPSS and PSPS today. I just want to clarify that on the slide. We're not stopping there this year. We're going well beyond the 90% and looking at the additional operational mitigations, such as our smart meter partial voltage detection capability. Anchored on our stance that catastrophic wildfires shall stop and everyone and everything is always safe, our coworkers and teams are embracing our data-driven, risk-informed approach. As an example, our engineers that work in our high voltage testing labs that are certified by the state fire department are also what we call applied technical services team.
They have been hard at work designing the settings on EPSS and recreating actual field conditions to perform ignition testing on energized power lines. Through the work that team was doing, they identified an opportunity to leverage our network of 550,000 smart meters in our high fire risk areas that have something called this partial voltage sensor. When you see a fluctuation, you can detect partial voltage in real time using the smart meters. That further enhances our situational awareness and gives us the ability to be able to identify some of the low-energy faults that could be created, for example, when you have a service line that may be on the ground. That further improves the effectiveness. We are in the process of implementing and operationalizing that capability this month. We're not waiting until next year.
That's gonna be in place. What I'll leave you with is when I reflect on this example, and we talked about culture change and the story that Patti started with. I point to this story as that culture change because it was not any one of us that are here today that came up with this idea. It was our teams, our coworkers that embraced our stance, leveraging their skills, their experience, and their knowledge to help build this capability. To make our system safer for our customers and our hometowns today and into the future. With that, I'll turn it over to our colleague, Jason Glickman.
Good morning, It is wonderful to be here. As you know, for all of you, I really appreciate you coming out and spending the morning with us. We talked about how we are improving performance, taking out costs, and taking out risk in how we operate our infrastructure and in how our coworkers operate every single day. We are doing that today. I'm gonna talk about how we're engineering and re-engineering the infrastructure to improve performance, reduce costs to make it affordable for the customer, and take out risk on a permanent basis. That starts with undergrounding, and I'll talk about undergrounding, but it certainly doesn't stop with undergrounding. We step through our entire energy infrastructure to make it more resilient, cleaner, safe, affordable, reliable for customers. On undergrounding.
You know, we filed in February with the California Public Utilities Commission an updated general rate case where we talked about and laid out the trajectory of our undergrounding program over the next several years and how we're gonna scale. It starts with 175 mi + this year. We're on target to hit that, and then it approximately doubles every year from there on out. We've been intentional about laying out that trajectory of doubling every couple of years. That doubling lets us bring scale in materials, it lets us bring scale and build up the workforce, and it attracts the global supply chain to participate in this program. We've done a number of things in the last six months since we last saw you that helped give us confidence in building up that trajectory.
First of all, we onboarded Jacobs, the global engineering firm, as our program management partner. Jacobs has experience across a wide array of industries. In utilities, they've led some of the largest undergrounding programs in the world, both at the distribution and the transmission level, including the SuedLink project in Germany, which is traversing hundreds of miles to bring renewable energy into Germany's population centers, as well as underground power and telecommunications infrastructure in Australia and elsewhere. We're delighted to have the Jacobs team on board, bringing not just that utility experience, but their experience from other industries that we can apply to undergrounding. Secondly, we formed a stakeholder advisory group.
This is comprised of a variety of state and local and community stakeholders, ranging from the Firefighters Association to Caltrans to tribal leaders, environmental groups, community groups, all coming together to provide input and feedback and really shape the undergrounding program together. Together, we're designing which miles will get done when and where, how we engage with the community, how we work through environmental and permitting issues, and make sure that this program can scale and reduce risk at the pace it needs to reduce. We're meeting on a every other monthly or quarterly basis, and it's been a really active collaboration and dialogue shaping the program so far. Sumeet talked about our Foundry platform and bringing analytics to bear.
We have brought together for every segment of our system, we look at hundreds of attributes of those circuits in terms of the asset health today, in terms of the load growth we expect they'll experience. As we think about undergrounding, we look at geology, we look at topography and slope, we look at soils, we look at river and water crossings, we look at land rights, you name it. By doing that, we've been able to segment this 10,000 mi into relatively easier, average, relatively harder mileage, the cost that goes with that, and build a portfolio where we can ramp that trajectory over time and drive down cost over time. I'll note on construction methods, we're bringing to bear. Patti mentioned the train of dozers at that project that we went and looked at a few weeks ago.
We're bringing to bear construction equipment and methods that in many cases are new to PG&E and new to utilities or haven't been used at this scale, but they have been used in other industries. You think about the application of horizontal directional drilling and boring and what that's done for the cost of production in shale gas over the last decade plus. The nature of the miles we're undergrounding in predominantly rural areas, many times along rural highways, sometimes private land, give us the flexibility to use construction methods that have not traditionally been used in utility undergrounding. It's things like rock wheels, boring, like I mentioned, tillers that tear up the earth like a zipper, lay down the conduit, and close it right back up. We're deploying those at scale. Helps us get more productive and get confidence in the ramp of that mileage over time.
In terms of cost, we filed, when we filed in February, an average unit cost of $3.75 million per mile capital cost, unit cost for undergrounding. As Patti mentioned, we've got projects today where we're well below that threshold, in some cases $2 million-$2.5 million a mile. That experience with specific projects we're able to achieve those unit costs today, coupled with a deep understanding of what drives the cost of undergrounding, is what gives us confidence in moving from $3.75 million today down to $2.5 million and stepping down from there over the next several years. As we look at what drives the cost of undergrounding upfront, roughly two-thirds of it is variable construction cost. It's construction labor, it's materials, it's those types of things.
Trenching, it's taking all the soil that we've churned up from the earth and doing something with it. That's what drives the cost. We are actively working for each of those components of the cost structure to bring the cost down. Couple of examples I'll share today. One, we're looking at all of our engineering standards and our specs for how we work in the field. We're looking at the 500 different materials categories that comprise undergrounding overall and saying, "Do we need a custom spec or can we do something standard in the industry that has multiple suppliers?" That creates opportunity. We've moved from, in some cases, digging a 36 in trench to a 30 in trench. Sounds like, well, 6 in, how much can that matter? That adds up. That adds up in terms of construction cost every foot, every mile, and across the system.
Changing that standard and looking methodically at every one of those standards where we can just churn out the miles helps us bring the cost down. Second example. You know, traditionally, given the scale of our undergrounding work to date, we typically hand out mileage a mile or two at a time to a contractor. You've got a chunk of work on Highway 70. You've got this, you've got that. When we can go bundle that and have more forward visibility in the whole portfolio, I talked a minute ago about being able to segment that whole portfolio and really understand it and lay it out over the next three, five, and 10 years. We can then package that work up in a scope of work and put it out to bid 10 mi, 20 mi, 50 mi, 100 mi at a time. Contractors love that.
Our labor partners love that, right? It gives them the forward visibility. It gives them the stability for their workforce. It gives them the ability to procure materials and equipment and lock them up for the time they need them. We've already started using this bundled approach this year as we head towards our 175 mi target, and we've seen an immediate 10% cost reduction in those contracts simply by virtue of packaging up more work at once and handing it over to contract partners. We see this pattern repeating. I could go on and on about what we're doing to drive down the cost, but the mere scale of the program is inviting innovation that we're confident is gonna help to drive the cost curve down over time.
Now I'll note this is just the upfront unit cost, capital cost of undergrounding, which is one part of the economics. It is a critical part of the economics, and it's a part of the economics I think we're all gonna be talking about for a very long time. The overall argument for undergrounding from an economic perspective is not just about that upfront capital cost. It is a trade of annual or semiannual O&M expense, particularly vegetation management, where we spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars a year in turning that into permanent capital upgrades, and Carla will talk a bit in her section about what that means for customer bills. Undergrounding is a perfect plain vanilla utility O&M to capital conversion. It's not the only one.
You know, when we look at our portfolio and our system, we see tons of runway for these types of opportunities as we re-engineer the energy system. I think we've shared previously with you all that our ratio of O&M to capital, sorry, capital to O&M is 0.9, right? So $0.90 of capital for every $1 of expense. That is not the optimal utility model I think we all know. Industry average is about 1.4. Lots of runway, and I'll give you some examples of how beyond undergrounding we're applying day-to-day bread and butter engineering that helps create permanent solutions for customers, helps us not be in their front yards and in their neighborhoods and tearing up their streets as frequently, creates permanent solutions, and reduces cost over time. First example.
We have, in many parts of our system, our gas pipeline system, it will traverse between higher density areas and lower density areas. We had an agricultural customer in the Central Valley where they were served by a distribution main, a gas distribution main that was due for a strength test. Routine strength testing, maintenance work for safety purposes. That strength test across this section of pipe was gonna cost about a million dollar. Our team, as part of our standard engineering process, looked at that and said, "Is there another way? Can we reroute how we serve this customer?" What they were able to do was avoid that million dollar strength test, which was gonna happen as O&M that year and have to be repeated, and replace it with a million dollar capital upgrade. Permanent solution, spread the cost out for customers, long-term fix. Second example.
Adam and I were out visiting with some coworkers in the field in a Bay Area suburb back in February or March. We spent some time in the ballroom with the team, and then we got out there to the job. The job was a conductor replacement in a neighborhood, in a residential neighborhood. One PG&E truck, one crew doing that work. We looked down the street, there was another PG&E truck about a block and a half away. We said, "Huh, that's interesting. Wonder what our coworkers there are doing." We had rolled a second truck to go replace signage. That truck roll cost hundreds of dollar. If we had known in advance and bundled that work, we could have avoided that truck roll, saved hundreds of dollar, packaged it into one job.
As we look across the system and we get that more forward-looking visibility, I talked about the forward-looking visibility on undergrounding. We're going to extend that forward-looking visibility of the work we're doing on our system across the board. We can bundle those jobs up. If there's something we need to do that's urgent from a safety perspective, we get it done. We're not worrying about the accounting. We just get it done. Where we can take routine maintenance or maintenance that's not as urgent and package it up and do work on a pole and a transformer and a conductor all at once and put it into one capital job, that is good for customers. We are not in their front yards or neighborhoods as often. I know they love our blue trucks, but they don't love them that much.
It's an opportunity for you as investors as well. The third example is that as we look forward and we look towards the future, you know, we've got over 300,000 electric vehicles on our system today. We are the largest market for electric vehicles in the country. It's growing rapidly. I had to check the stats on this because my numbers were outdated just by looking back a few months ago. 300,000+ today. That's gonna grow to 3 million+, as we talked about in our climate report released this week. A question I often get, you know, is will the grid be ready? I say, "Darn straight it's gonna be ready," because we're using our analytics platform to go look at what is the patterns of where those EVs are gonna show up. What's the customer propensity to buy?
How are they gonna charge? How can we influence their charging behavior with the right rate schedule? We also look ahead and say, you know, gosh, for this part of our service territory, climate change is gonna raise the temperature a few degrees and increase air conditioning load over the next couple decades. We package up looking at the health of the assets in a given area, the EV load, the air conditioning load, and other needs and say, maybe we were scheduled to do a maintenance job in that area in the next few years. Well, instead of just doing a patch job, we can do a permanent upgrade that serves that need in the future.
Again, as we re-engineer the system, we're looking out not just a year or two or three or four, we're looking out 10+ years, 20, 30, 40 years over the life of these assets and doing the things that are optimal for our customers, and doing those things that are optimal for customers translate into things that are optimal for you as investors and improve that ratio. With that, I will close, and I'd like to invite Adam and Sumeet up for a panel discussion.
Back towards the middle.
Yeah.
I've never known this group to be quiet.
Hi Great. Paul Fremont with Mizuho. My question relates to the Old Fire. I guess you had EPSS in place, and the conditions were not ripe to implement it. Have your protocols changed subsequent to the Old Fire?
Yep Paul, thanks for that question. I'll take that. Maybe we can go to that slide that actually has our criteria of EPSS. It got flashed in the video itself. I think the team's got it up.
I think it's got it.
Yep Perfect. Thank you. The posture, Paul, that we actually have for EPSS is on the shoulder months, right, which is spring and winter timeframe, where we see elevated risk for short periods of time. We actually have what we call an inclusionary criteria in place, which is based on a Fire Potential Index. In that instance of Old Fire, the Fire Potential Index was at an R2, right? Meaning that the fuel moistures were pretty high, where the fire was not gonna become catastrophic. The fire was 570 acres, no structures impacted, no serious injuries, no fatalities. The reason why we did an EIR is because it got picked up via the media and also CAL FIRE collected, you know, the equipment itself. That was the operating posture for EPSS criteria there.
The operating posture that we are in today, because we're in the summer and kind of fall time period where we see the fire risk increase, is we enable 100% of our EPSS circuits, which covers the 44,000 mi, and it's an exclusionary criteria where we only take out those circuits with heavy fog and rain. That's the current posture we plan to run until the duration of the peak fire season.
Ryan Levine with Citigroup. On the undergrounding packages and different classifications of bundles, what or how many are there different classifications or bundles that you're looking to bid out? And is there a certain type of package that you're prioritizing from the undergrounding perspective?
You're saying in terms of.
The 10,000 mi.
10,000 mi..
Yeah.
How big are the chunks?
Yeah.
You know, I would say we're still working through that overall across the 10,000, but I think the magnitude I referenced where you think about 10 mi, 20 mi, 50 mi at a time is representative. I think it's important to note also that, you know, Jacobs is our PMO partner at the center right now. As we scale across the life cycle of engineering and construction, we'll use a range of partners, national, local, and certainly our own workforce will play an integral role in that. But we think about kind of 10 mi at a time for any given kind of contract is a reasonable scale to be thinking about. Then the second part, sorry.
Prioritizing.
Yeah.
Prioritizing.
How are we prioritizing across? We're prioritizing for a couple of things. You know, we're really first and foremost risk, right? First and foremost, it's how do we buy down the most risk permanently as efficiently and effectively as possible? The way we think about that is, you know, we're going and looking at mileage. First of all, say the 10,000 mi in totality are the highest risk miles in our high fire threat districts.
That's how we pick them. Then within those 10,000 mi, we might go say, "I've got a chunk of work here that's highly executable and high risk. I've got another chunk of work that's adjacent to it. It makes sense to combine those two into one package." It's a combination of risk reduction, scaling the program, and executability, you know, when you think about very practical things like mobilizing a crew, permitting and factors like that.
Thank you.
Yeah. Steve Fleishman at Wolfe. So maybe with the football analogy, Adam, first of all, you know, what yard line do you think you're at right now? Which side of the field too? Then maybe more importantly, like, you can't really afford a fumble or an interception at the. To some degree. Just in thinking about EPSS and the 80% ignition reduction, how do we think about the 20% that of still some ignitions and just is there a way to, you know, kind of. What's the risk of those, the fact that there's still some?
Thanks, Steve. I'll start with sort of what yard line we think we are, give you my two cents on the 20%, and then let Sumeet obviously add any color there. I'd say we're on the 25-yard line, going a long way is where I'd put us. I feel really, really good about the offense we're running. I feel really good about our understanding of the defense we're playing against, to stick with the analogy. I think we sort of have a good picture of the lay of the land. I think we know what plays are gonna work. I think we have the right talent on the field with the right experience and expertise to match up well against the things we're facing. If we're doing prop bets, I would bet we're gonna score on the opening drive.
It's gonna take a while, and it's gonna be multi-play, but we're gonna possess the ball and score on the opening drive. I would say on the 20%. Well, debatable if we can afford a mistake. There are gonna be mistakes. I mean, let's make no mistake about it. We're rebuilding literally one of the great companies of America. It is a big company with a big remit and a very important part of the economy of California, and I think in the industry as a whole. This is not going to be easy. There are going to be challenges that we're gonna face. We're gonna have headwinds. We're gonna have things go against us. The good teams are the ones that stick to it. They know how to execute. They believe in their system.
They line up, they play the next play, they put it on the line, and they play the next play, and we're gonna execute our way down the field. I have no doubt about that whatsoever. On the 20% ignition, we're gonna have ignitions. All utilities across the country have ignitions. The utility I used to run in Iowa had ignitions. The idea is to try to prevent the ignitions from becoming catastrophic wildfires. I think the way the numbers are playing out, along with our partnerships with, you know, response teams, our CPT team internally, but then also we have, you know, first responder relationships. The way we're, you know, strategically placing, you know, resources to be able to respond quickly is gonna play a big role in helping those 20% not become catastrophic. We're gonna have ignitions.
The idea is to try to prevent the ones that become catastrophic. Sumeet, anything to add?
No I think Adam, you covered that well, and we're not stopping, you know, Steve, at EPSS, right? This is, you know, where I talk about the additional operational mitigations. The smart meter partial voltage technology is gonna add to that and further reduce that 20%. We're also looking at additional type of devices that actually have the down conductor smart algorithms that actually give us the ability to automatically detect and shut off low energy type of faults. So, you know, our technical engineering teams that I mentioned are hard at work. They continue to work every single day and come up with innovative solutions, and it's a very rapid implementation for us as the teams identify and do the ideation, prove it out in the laboratory, which is basically emulated just like a field condition.
We have the ability to scale that pretty quickly and deploy it across our high fire risk area. That's the additional aspect I would add.
Hey guys Thank you for taking my question. It's Michael Lapides from Goldman Sachs. Just real quick on the undergrounding initiative, but also thinking about the broader macro environment. Is this work that gets outsourced? Meaning, do you use third party? You mentioned Jacobs as a program manager, but do you also use third party labor to actually do the construction work? And how do you refresh, how do you keep on top of just the broader labor inflationary trends that are playing out, especially in parts of the Western U.S. and especially for kind of craft labor? How does that kind of flow into your analytical process of making sure you've got good cost data?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. I'll open it up, and then Adam and Sumeet can comment further. One, I would say, we see a role, as I mentioned, you know, Jacobs is playing this role helping us stand up the program and bringing really some of the expertise to bear around what are the success factors and risk factors in programs like this and making sure that we're systematic about mitigating them. That's really the most important role they're playing with their global experience, not only in utilities, but in other industries. As we think about that whole life cycle, of engineering all the way through construction, we see a role for PG&E.
Badged coworkers. We still see a role for contractors. What we're doing right now is we really kind of segment and sequence out the work, building a very clear model for the labor needs, material needs, and other needs we think we're gonna have and how we ramp that. We feel like in the near to medium term, there is so much opportunity for us to drive efficiencies on the labor side and the material side and whatnot that I mentioned, that we can more than overwhelm the near-term inflationary pressures that we're seeing. Again, with that part of that steady ramp is recognizing that we're gonna build a workforce. You know, this is gonna be the equivalent of 2,500 folks working in the field at its peak. Having that workforce dedicated takes time to build.
We're not daunted by it, and we've got Adam's got 14,000 folks in operations today, right? It's not a scale that we can't handle, but it's a scale we're gonna build towards.
Sure. We have time just for one more question.
Thanks. Good morning, guys. It's Constantin Lednev from Guggenheim Partners. On your targets for the CapEx to expense ratios, are you seeing more kind of year one available improvements, or is it a more linear path to that 2026 goal? How does undergrounding play a factor into that? Is that incremental or is that kind of embedded into that 2026 target?
I'll offer a comment or two, and then I know Chris will hit this in more detail during his section. Undergrounding's embedded. There are absolutely near-term opportunities which Chris will hit on, and we see it playing out over time. You know, the examples I cited where it was individual projects we're re-engineering, that's good bread-and-butter engineering from our coworkers at the front line, you know, from the bottom up. When we give them a plan that's a stable plan for here's what we're trying to achieve with our infrastructure and our assets over time, that long-term engineered capital plan, they'll go deliver those solutions. We see it building over time, and I'll let Chris comment further about how that shows up financially.
All right. With that, we're gonna take a quick 10-minute break. We will start promptly at 10:15 A.M. Thank you.
Thank you.
Good morning, everybody. I have to say I'm a little bit jealous because of the run and show. I did not get to like fist bump or hug anybody as I came on stage, but Chris is gonna follow me, so we'll give each other some mutual love there. Oh, it's good to be with you today. I just came upon my one-year anniversary at PG&E. I feel as good or better about my decision to come to the company as I did the day that I signed on to join the team. I really enjoy working with this group of folks. I can see the progress that we've made over the year, and excited to talk to you about what we're gonna be doing going forward. Core to our success is trust.
Trust is one of our key virtues at PG&E, and we earn trust with our customers and policymakers by transparently and collaboratively leaning in to solve problems. Our goals are California's goals. We all wanna have clean, affordable, safe, clean energy. Our announcement this week of industry-leading carbon goals is a key example of our climate leadership and PG&E leading in to solve not only California problems, but world problems. Give you a little bit of overview of our goals. Our plan is that by 2050, we will be climate positive. What that means is we will remove and reduce more greenhouse gases than we emit. We will also help our customers reduce their carbon footprint. By 2040, our operations across our system will be net zero. That net zero emissions target is five years earlier than the California goal of carbon neutrality.
To be on that pathway, we have several strategies planned from now until 2030. By 2030, we have a series of commitments. For our direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, what are called Scope 1 and 2, we will reduce them by half. Our Scope 3 emissions, value chain emissions, will reduce by a quarter. Our 2030 greenhouse gas reductions will be the equivalent of taking 3.2 million cars off the road for a year. We are one of only a very few number of energy companies that have made commitments around Scope 3. We're also making commitments around Scope 4. This is the emerging term to refer to the emissions that come from our customers. This is helping our customers get electric vehicles, enabling that fueling, helping with energy efficiency. There are plans.
There's a lot to say about this, so I'm gonna stay there. We have plans to back up these goals, and we are relying on our lean operating system to give us visibility into progress. As Jason shared, we are re-engineering our system to meet our clean energy goals. As my dad said, "Plan your work and work your plan." We got a whole bunch of plans that are supporting this work, and again, enabled by the lean operating system. For example, we make a commitment to green the power supply. We are committing to have 70% of our energy in 2030 be renewable and be RPS eligible. That is supported by energy storage. We have contracted for 3,300 MW of energy storage to be connected to our system by 2024, and a third of that is already delivering power right now to our grid.
Those of you who know my background know that at the Public Utilities Commission, I was lead commissioner for energy storage for six years. During that time, I had the opportunity to lead on the adoption of the first set of energy storage targets for utilities. At that time, there were 33 MW of utility scale energy storage online in California, and people thought the goal of 1.325 MW of energy storage was bold and audacious. I heard someone literally fell out of their chair when we made the announcement. Here we sit, and I'm telling you that PG&E alone will be doing 3 x the state target in that time period. It is the true example that if we set a goal, we create a plan that anything is possible.
Some of you may have seen our announcement last week about the ribbon cutting at Moss Landing. This is the largest energy storage site for utility scale storage in the world. We're not just stopping with storage and clean energy, we're also including our customers in being a part of the supply. Aggressive targets around demand response, around energy efficiency. This goal is flexible to a range of resources and is not dependent on what happens with state conversations around Diablo Canyon. We are on track to retire Diablo Canyon, but if the state determines it's needed for reliability, we are willing to be a partner with the state and explore that option. As a dual-fuel utility, the largest in the nation, we believe we can be a role model in gas in service of a triple bottom line.
We know that we're gonna continue to invest in our gas system. It is a top-tier gas system, and it's gonna stay that way. Even as we invest in the safety and reliability, we know that under any greenhouse gas scenario, the volume of the gas needs to go down. It needs to become greener. We also know our gas system needs to be affordable and reliable for hard-to-electrify customers. As our climate strategy shares, we're gonna be investing in renewable natural gas as just one of the key solutions to help with that transition. Most important, or at least as important as having it clean, is it being affordable. We are committed to this plan being affordable. Clean can be cheaper. We're excited, for example, to help our customers lower their total energy spend by investing in electric vehicles.
Even as we implement our 2030 commitments, we believe that PG&E rates will keep within sustainable bill growth. We look forward to sharing with you our progress on our climate strategy over the days and years to come. Now, we just don't have alignment with the state on clean energy. We're aligned on our commitment to do climate adaptation and address wildfire risk, and you've heard about this from my colleagues as well. We are excited about the work we're doing on undergrounding and excited that we're seeing the interest in undergrounding from our policymakers and our customers. Our latest polling shows that 83% of customers support undergrounding in high fire threat areas, and policymakers are taking notice. This legislative session, we had competing underground bills. That's a good thing.
We're engaging with the legislature on the current undergrounding bill, and there's a lot in there to like, SB 884. There's an opportunity for a 10-year plan. There's the opportunity for improved permitting. Now we know we have common areas of concern, like the limits on ROE. We are making progress with getting that addressed and look forward to seeing amendments. It is still early on in the legislative session, but we're doing a nice job engaging with our legislators and educating them. To be clear, we do not need legislation to execute our undergrounding plan. However, always open to constructive legislation that allows us to do our work faster and bring benefits to customers and investors. We're making significant progress on the regulatory front as well. As Jason shared in our general rate case update this year, we included undergrounding and EPSS.
We added $7 billion to the rate case, removed $1 billion in expense, and we're able to keep the projected customer bills essentially flat to what we shared in June of last year. This is an excellent example of a simple, affordable model and how we are making that transition between O&M and capital in all of our decision-making. Jason also mentioned the support we receive from our undergrounding advisory group. We have 22 diverse organizations as a part of this effort, and we've already been able to collaborate with them on, for example, joint trenching and what are the opportunities to co-locate with telecommunications and engaging with the state on how we have some synergies with the Middle-Mile initiative. We also will be having that group join us at one of our undergrounding sites in the next few weeks.
On that front, seeing is believing, and our doors are open. We have been inviting policymakers, policy staff, consumer advocates, anybody who wants to come to see our facilities. People wanna know what we're doing, and we're inviting them not only to our wildfire center but to our gas operations and our field projects. I told you last year, I told you twice, that California is a constructive regulatory environment, and I'm telling you again today, California is a constructive regulatory environment. We know that, and we own that our subpar performance over the years has led to unconstructive relationships. Good regulatory outcomes come from good performance, and so we own that, and we are improving our performance. You heard that from my colleagues today, and we are showing that to regulators and policymakers every day.
It takes time to rebuild that trust, but I truly see the progress that we're making. Just want to give you a few examples of some of the tweets and quotes we've heard from policymakers, and these are just a few, I didn't have to search too hard, about the progress that we're making. For example, a Marin fire chief, after a visit with us earlier this year, tweeted, "I was not only impressed by their use of technology in monitoring threats and risks using a variety of platforms and algorithms, but I was most impressed by the people who staff this vital center." That feedback extends to our gas operations as well.
Congressman Mike Thompson said, "After visiting PG&E's gas operations center, we were impressed by the center and PG&E's commitment to training their employees to ensure a safer future." Finally, CPUC President Alice Reynolds said, "PG&E has changed. They have a new board in place and new executive management. They are taking actions to shore up their system, to harden their infrastructure, to improve the way they do vegetation management. But we're going to continue to watch them. We're going to make sure that they're being as efficient as possible and that they're spending money in the right ways." Folks are watching. I know that includes you, and we're ready for that. With that, let me turn to my coworker, Chris, who will talk about how our activities are not only earning trust, but in ensuring financial success for our investors and our customers. Thank you.
You got it. It feels really good by the way, to be able to hug your former regulator. She used to regulate me, right? She'd sit up on the dais and look down. Pleased to have Carla as a colleague here with me at the company. Good morning, everybody. Great to be with you. Great to start to be able to kinda bring us home right before we get Patti back up here to let you know what's really going on. Let me just close it out. I think ultimately what I'm gonna be able to hit for you is to really show you how it all comes together in the form of a premium financial model. Since we last saw you, four simple things we've launched or completed.
First, we completed 2021 right on target, on purpose, at a dollar in terms of non-GAAP core earnings per share. Two, we dramatically expanded and improved the wildfire risk reduction on the system. What Sumeet talked about is an over 3 x expansion of the footprint to provide better safety for our customers on the system. It's a dramatic change. Third, we formally launched and are underway on the 10,000 mi undergrounding program that Jason talked about. We're just getting started. We've reflected the cost in our capital plan, and we've done so in the GRC at a form that's essentially flat for customers, as Carla said. Fourth, we're making real traction on the core financial plan. We're improving the health of the balance sheet, and we are out of the blocks now on the first major tranche of our rate-neutral securitization.
I'll unpack these a bit more, but as you can tell, year-over-year, substantial progress. I'm gonna go ahead now and talk about how ultimately what you heard today really is reflected in the company's simple, affordable model. These are not discrete things. They are not individual. They are not separate. They are all part of our overall model. As Adam talked about, we're changing the culture using the lean operating system. It's visibility, it's control, it's predictability. Do you understand how good those terms feel to me in my day job? When we were doing some of this work years ago, I'd get a monthly report. I'd get a quarterly rag status. Now we're getting eyes on week-over-week, in some cases on the data, day-over-day and hour-over-hour. It's fundamentally different. Sumeet talked about the EPSS expansion work.
That's a direct byproduct of the company's culture changing because we're more nimble. Sumeet said we didn't wait. That's the key change on EPSS. We didn't wait. We saw the ability to make it safer for our customers, and we moved on it. That is the essence of being more nimble. You're gonna hear that from us for years to come. We're gonna use data-driven decision-making to be more nimble. Beyond the EPSS work, you've heard us talk today about physical risk reduction. Financial risk reduction is also key. As it relates to the EPSS work, we are fully live, as Sumeet mentioned. When we woke up this morning, a third of our overhead system was on. We have a large system, everybody, but a third of it is on, ready to go, ready to make it safe.
As an additional financial risk reduction, though, we've also got in place substantial wildfire insurance for this year. We have $940 million in wildfire specific insurance from April of this year to April of next year. Gives us that strong backstop that we need, gets us very close up against the AB 1054 attachment point. Really good bottom line backstop risk reduction. Jason talked about how we've got the plan for the long term. Sumeet's got us ready for today, but we've got to start planning for the long term. Jason and team are looking for the best risk spend efficiency we can put forward because we know we've got to put your dollars to work and customer dollars to work in the best way possible. We're gonna do that in a way and execute it in a way that our customers want.
The lines are gonna go underground. We're gonna be rebuilding the company from the underground up, as you heard Patti say, which is very different. It's improving sight lines. Customers want it. In fact, over 83% of customers want it, right? This is. These are actual data points where our customers are saying, "Come to my backyard first." When is the last time you heard someone tell a utility, "Come to my backyard first"? This is very, very different. We're executing this work, though, toward a more decarbonized future, and we're gonna do it more affordably. Let me spend some time on that specifically, because that's really the essence of the simple, affordable model that I'll break down here. First, you'll see on the left-hand side, we've talked about this with you for a few quarters. First side is what are we doing there?
We're trying to ultimately control costs, keep things reasonable as we improve things in terms of the balance sheet for you. The obvious focus that you've heard it come up in a couple of places today is the O&M reduction. A clear focus every day with the team. Second, low growth. Patti hit it. How fortunate are we to have the low growth opportunities that we have in California that are very real? Let's talk about what it looks like in action. Let's spend a little bit of time. Let me orient you to the right. As we start to unpack our work, we look at these individual projects and say, "What are the categories we can look at together, and what are the benefits they could provide?" Adam talked about productivity.
We got together toward the end of the year, and we just asked the basic question: How are our coworkers currently billing their time? 25% of their time essentially was a general bucket of non-billable. All expense fell directly to the bottom line. What do you do using a lean operating system? You put together a Pareto chart, you see what's driving those individual costs, and you go tackle them. The training changes are underway. I do not need to be trained on forklift operation. Okay? I just don't. You shouldn't want me in that role, frankly, 'cause that is not my skill. That is not my core skill. As much as I might be nimble, that is not my core skill. That's just the essence of it, though. We can take these steps now that you see here on the left-hand portion.
You'll see ultimately, the savings pass-through from lean are a little bit smaller initially. We're developing this muscle now. We're taking these targeted efforts as we see them, and we're reducing costs. That's on purpose. We need to be able to find them to teach our coworkers how to do this repeatedly, because you can do this excellent work, you can do it safely, and you can do it at lower cost. That's really the essence of what we're talking about. How we work this together, you shouldn't be surprised in what you're seeing today that, by the way, we do all this together. We get in the room every Tuesday morning in San Ramon, California, into the Results Ownership Center. We call it The Rock. I'm not gonna do any Sean Connery jokes, but that happened in California, too, and so there's that.
It's ultimately the place where we go to get eyes on the data. That's where we manage toward our financial targets, and we absolutely do it as a team. In The Rock, you come in there and you'll hear terms like catch-back plan, gap to target, and maybe Patti's favorite, who is doing what by when? This is a very different cultural experience at the company. It's co-owning the outcomes, it's using the best thinking, and it's driving toward results. Couple of quick examples of the benefits of The Rock as we work some things together. One example would be on gas maintenance and construction crew capitalization. We saw that those crews were doing nearly all expense work in their portfolio. Today, it's about 40% capital.
As we looked at our headcount, even internally, last year, roughly 5% increase year-over-year in a difficult economy in terms of headcount increases. 70% of that was generally back office. We got a lot of work to do in the field. That's not the right ratio. We're very focused on frontline development, frontline empowerment, and allowing those that are closest to the work to get the right work in the field, as Jason was talking about. Those are where the best decisions are made on expense to capital, not in a back room somewhere. That's ultimately what we're talking about. We've dramatically moderated the headcount trajectory of our internal colleagues and are very focused on the front line. In fact, so much so, I'll acknowledge the contracting question that was asked earlier. This is a very different change that's been going on.
We're now finding targeted areas of expertise and job classifications where we're actually insourcing the work and doing it more cheaply than the contracted alternative. We're doing that work, in fact, in partnership with our labor partners. They see the advantages, too. The ROC gives us that visibility to see right now we're doing this in two regions in Northern California with gas civil crews. What does that mean? These are civil crews. It means they know how to move dirt. Guess what? Jason needs a lot of dirt moved right now for undergrounding. The skill set is there, you guys. 21 crews right now are able to cross-train to not just do the gas work, but electric undergrounding work. We're gonna be saving on average $1 million per crew. Multiply that out. That is opportunity for years at this company.
It is not struggle, it is opportunity. That is why you're seeing me smiling. 'Cause this is the essence of what we're seeing. It's in visually seeing these pieces, pulling them together, seeing it week to week putting it together in the ROC and working it. Let me talk about how it all comes together. Ultimately, the physical risk reduction that we're doing on the system results in substantial opportunity for customers and investors. This is it in its most simple form as you see here on the screen. There are no big bets in this company's portfolio. You can see up here that the undergrounding work represents about 14% of the total capital for our investments over the five-year plan.
It results in what you're seeing on the right, which is a substantial top-quartile rate base growth that we're gonna have in the enterprise. The remainder of that pie, the remainder of that portfolio is just the bread and butter, gas, generation, and electric core work that we need to continue to do on the system to make the system safe and more modernized. This five year approach isn't even reflecting what else we've got out there. You heard it from Carla, substantial opportunities. You heard it from Jason, substantial opportunities. We're talking about 3 million electric vehicles in 2030 that we're gonna need to power. You can imagine that's even more opportunity here for the enterprise and for our customers. When I fill up my battery hybrid electric EV, it's got both. Got a little range anxiety. It's got both.
Ultimately, I'm filling that up right now in PG&E service area for a little over $2 in terms of gas equivalent. I live in the East Bay of California. I drive 1.5 mi from my house, and I'll fill up the family mover, which my daughter says, "Dad, why are you hurting the planet?" She started with, "what are you putting in the car?" One, she didn't understand what was going in the vehicle, and two, why are you hurting the planet? Literally, from my 8-year-old daughter, like, giving me sass in the car. I said, and I reflected after completing the fill-up, that I just did it for $6.45 a gallon, 1.5 mi from my house.
It sure feels a lot better, you guys, to do it for $2 gas gallon equivalent at my house with PG&E electrons. That's the opportunity for a large number of our customers, and the business case in California is fundamentally different. One in five of the electric vehicles currently in the nation are in our service area. The business case is fundamentally different in our service area because we're gonna be putting more vehicles in the hands of customers who are currently experiencing PSPS events to give them the solution that they need so that their experience is that a PSPS is invisible in the future. That's the partnership that Patti has helped us bring forward with both Ford and GM. Again, dramatic change, substantial opportunity.
Let me go ahead and close, everyone, with ultimately what we think is quite compelling, and that's our five-year value proposition. It is the reflection of the mix of financial risk reduction and physical risk reduction on the system. Results in what you see here. Top line, earnings growth, top decile. At least 10% for the next three years, and at least 9% for 2025 and 2026. We've got something called the dividend that's on the horizon, everyone. As I stand here today in front of you, we're only about a year away from reaching eligibility to reinstate the company's dividend. We're already planning for 2023 and looking forward to spending more time with you in the future on that item in particular. We've got the rate base growth that I talked about. It is organic. It is substantial.
We've got to balance that with the affordability that I talked about to keep our service reasonable for customers. Ultimately, the first test that we're gonna see of this is also underway, right? The new model that we've talked about, Carla referenced it. $7 billion of incremental capital in, reflecting a third of our undergrounding plan. $1 billion in expense out, that one to seven trade-off. Jason talked about it, too. Constantine, the growth is relatively linear, and it's not gonna stop anytime soon. Just to put this in context for you, this capitalization opportunity. If you just look at our 2020 numbers, if we were to move from our existing capital expense ratio of 0.92 up to about that peer average of 1.4, that's moving $2 billion in expense over to capital.
Again, for our service area, about $1 of expense equivalent to $7 of capital. Substantial customer savings opportunity here in the end. Our general rate case, as Carla mentioned, is a place where we filed it. Just so that you all know, Q3 2023 is the current anticipated final decision. Gonna be a key data point for us as well, as you can imagine. At the same time, we're making progress on helping you get the sense for a long-term level of support from policymakers on undergrounding that Carla referenced. There's also cash flow benefit opportunities that could potentially come through from the customer arrearages legislation that's in actually the budget this year in the California legislature as well. We've also got the opportunity to continue to put some of these legacy issues behind us.
We are making progress, and what's not on the everyday component of the value proposition are the lists that we're just working our way through, everyone. We're working our way through prior fire claims. We're working our way through the securities claims. Frankly, the balance sheet health is improving weekly. We just completed recently $3.6 billion of our first tranche of the rate-neutral securitization work. We've got $3.9 billion left that we want to execute before year-end. Even getting that first tranche done allowed us to take out $3 billion in operating company debt. It's an excellent first step. We want to continue that progress this year. We've got additional securitization opportunities in front of us as well in the form of the AB 1054 work.
We're just working our way methodically through these things as the year goes on. Ultimately for us, there's other key things where progress is being evidenced. We've now achieved S&P 500 index eligibility. As you've seen me kind of work through some of these examples, others are noticing. We were really pleased to see last week that Fitch Ratings upgraded our outlook to positive. I would expect more to come from some others who might be in this room.
What I wanted to offer to you today is, ultimately, when I step back from the place that we came from when we emerged from Chapter 11, we are truly ticking off the lists of the past and giving you the picture of the stronger financial foundation for the future. We are doing it through giving myself and my coworkers the culture change that's required and the core capabilities needed to do it over, and over again. That's what we intend to deliver for all of you. Thanks so much for your time this morning. Carla is gonna come up here with me, and we'll go ahead and answer some of your questions.
We're just gonna start with one from the audience, from the virtual audience. Is PG&E going to apply for federal aid for Diablo Canyon, and where are we in that process?
I can take that one. If Diablo were to stay open, then of course we would be interested and welcome any additional funding that might offset some of the costs for our customers from relicensing and operations. As folks may know, the California governor did send a letter to DOE asking them to consider updating and clarifying the eligibility criteria for the federal funding. There has not been yet a response from DOE, so we would have to see if DOE does update the criteria before we consider whether to apply for funding or not.
Srinjoy Banerjee from Barclays, Credit. Chris, thank you for your comments, especially around sort of the Fitch positive outlook. I think the rating agency is increasingly getting comfortable around the operational risks. In terms of the FFO to debt metric, I think that's still been a bit of a concern, including at S&P, where we are still on negative outlook. You have target 13% for 2022. You said mid- to high-teens by 2024. How should we think about the sensitivities, you know, just given the significant investment plan sensitivities to the 2023 general rate case, as well as, you know, some of the legislative elements out there talking about potential delayed returns on undergrounding?
Sure. Great question, and there's a lot in there. I think it ultimately comes down to we've got a good level of confidence in the forward projected FFO to debt, and here's why. You've naturally got, remember, it's about $4.7 billion or so in outstanding previous wildfire costs that are now gonna be flowing back through with a greater level of predictability. We've got already $0.7 billion in rates, and we've got essentially everything outside of about $1.9 billion already working its way through proposed decisions and other proceedings at the commission. That's gonna be key. We've also, just generally speaking, we're planning more conservatively. I just have to offer that to you. That's ultimately a key part of the work that we're doing together.
We'll be prepared for GRC outcome no matter what it is, but the point is we've put forward a much stronger plan in terms of being able to put forward all of that undergrounding work and showcase how we're able to reduce expense year-over-year in some key categories as well. It's gonna take us to the place of smoother operating cash flows, especially when you combine it with the securitization tranche that we hope to complete here, intend to complete here before the end of the year, $3.9 billion.
This is Stephen Byrd with Morgan Stanley . You guys have had that $2 billion holdco debt reduction target until by 2023. Do you guys have any sort of color as to timing to be expected this year or is it gonna be more next year?
Hard for me to be too specific beyond just the fact that we're definitely focused there, right? We realize that's part of the overall de-leveraging plan that we've put forward to ensure that ultimately we get there by year-end 2023. Again, that's $2 billion of holdco debt reduction at the end of 2023. Certainly focused there as well, right? Gotta do it efficiently just given where the market is, but focused on hitting that goal.
Yeah. Maybe just from a cash flow and capital allocation standpoint.
Can we just get Antoine the mic, so the virtual audience can hear?
Sure.
I don't know if it's working. Oh, yeah, it is.
Yep. There we go.
Just in terms of, you know, like, cash flow and capital allocation for 2022 versus 2023, you know, sort of give us a sense of, you know, like is there any sort of like remaining unallocated capital for that pay down this year or is it gonna be more next year?
We could go with either. I think some of it will have. You've heard me talk about this before, everyone, in terms of the ability to also continue to resolve legacy legal claims. I think that's certainly another area where we're watching kind of that timing. As you heard me mention before, we've also got this opportunity that's moving really in real time in the legislature for customer arrearages. That proportion for PG&E, I'll be around here, could be roughly a $350 million opportunity. Antoine, we're watching, as you can imagine, and encouraging the timing there as well, which could impact kind of the trajectory we're looking at.
Right behind you.
Thank you. Steve Fleishman at Wolfe. Carla, maybe just from your past experience at the commission and we have this cost of capital review going on, and we've seen a big increase in interest rates and credit spreads this year. How much is the commission in the process allowed to kind of incorporate that? 'Cause some of it, you know, kind of is happening real time in decision-making, just from your past experience. Thank you.
I think you're referring, Steve, to the 2022 cost of capital decision that's under consideration as well as our 2023 that we filed. I think the utilities made a convincing filing that the trigger mechanism should not apply for this year given kind of the unusual circumstances of the market. We made those points to the commission. When they ultimately come out with a decision, there's an opportunity for us in comments as well to specifically talk about what we've seen with interest rates this year. They have computers, they can see that as well. I think since we have to be a part of the formal record, we'll make sure that we present those as part of comments when we do see a decision.
Just to build on that too. I mean, you can imagine a lot of our focus has been, at least for 2022, on working very hard to be sure we've tried to put the plan in place to work hard to overcome that issue and the trigger itself, right? That, that's the point here, is to be able to plan for this as best we can so you're not worrying about it.
Well said.
Thanks. Gregg Orrill, UBS. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about SB 884 and sort of how that helps you to move the undergrounding strategy forward, and generally speaking, what, you know, where is it headed with changes, et cetera.
Sure. I mean, we are happy to be having this policy conversation with the legislature around undergrounding, and this is a 10-year plan. This is a plan that works over multiple years. What we like about SB 884 is that it would be allowing us to have a 10-year plan so that the regulators can see that, so they can see our cost declines over time. Also, the opportunity to assist with permitting, issues around eminent domain, et cetera. As we talked about, and as I mentioned, there are some concerning provisions around return of equity. You know, we have been in active conversations in Sacramento around that, so I do look forward to seeing amendments. I won't get ahead of Sacramento, it's never a good idea, but we've been having constructive conversations.
Hey, thank you. Nicholas Campanella, Credit Suisse. Just a question on the dividend, Chris. It seems like you have, you know, increased line of sight into next year. Just curious if your thought process has changed at all. Is it about just turning it on at this point, or are you thinking about trying to target a payout ratio that's competitive with your peers?
Thanks, Nick, for the question. I think it's safe to say at this point, when we do resume the dividend, it will be small. We'll be growing into this over time. Don't wanna be putting ourselves in the position of essentially having to finance it, as you can imagine. Assume that at a high level, upon reinstatement, that it's at a low level. Obviously, you're gonna be spending time with the board on that as well as we get ready in terms of that eligibility window, middle of next year.
Happy to ask just a follow-up. On Diablo Canyon, just if you were to continue to run this plant, can you just give us a sense of what the capital commitments would be, for PG&E?
Sure thing. Nick, I honestly, there's probably limited capital explicit opportunity. We think about this as you step back as part of a broader conversation with the state. This is really about the partnership in the end that's key to making sure that the energy resources are there for the midterm, and that's really where the conversation is. I think for us, the question will then become this plant has already been operated, and these two units have been operated beautifully over the last, you know, decade plus, and that consistency is so key. For us, this is less about what is the capital opportunities there. It's really about how do we be sure that we're continuing to operate it safely if the state needs to call on those resources.
In the end, in terms of the total capital portfolio, I wouldn't contemplate something like this as a major driver. Ultimately, we've got existing capital that's in place there. If there were to be an extension, obviously we'd have to do an audit of the work for what else the facility might need to run longer. We'd be able to provide probably more at that stage. Hope that's helpful to give color.
If I can just say, Chris, when asked about this topic in Sacramento, we have made it clear that it has to be able to support state reliability, it has to be good for our customers, it has to be good for our investors. You know, we are focused on that if we're asked to continue with operations.
Great. Now we're gonna invite the entire presenting-
I think you have one more question over here, Matt.
Oh.
Hey, guys. Michael Lapides of Goldman. Just real quick, y'all were such an early mover in renewables, meaning contracting for renewables, where you are the customer, that you have lots of legacy contracts out there that are 10+ years old. As those contracts restrike, and they're going to expire at some point, it'll. A lot of those were at dramatically different cost than where renewables today are. How do you think about when that provides a lot of bill headroom? Like, when do those roll-offs create a lot of bill headroom where it actually creates downward pressure on the customer bill? When does that become material?
It's a great question, Michael. Thank you for it, and we've got eyes on it within the five- and 10-year plan is I guess what I would say. Ultimately, those vintages start substantially rolling off in 2024, 2025, 2026, kind of in that timeframe as those above-market costs, right, are something we're able to revisit. It's a material opportunity for the company and for customers.
Great. With that, we're gonna invite all the presenters back up onto the stage for a final panel Q&A, and then we'll have Patti close us out.
We're onto audio. Audio? Sure. Okay.
Okay, I'll field the questions, but I'm gonna phone some friends here on the stage. What's on your minds, everybody?
Hi. Leslie Rich, J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Patti, you've talked a lot about risk mitigation today. You know, as we head into fire season, how would you describe your overall sort of preparedness? I'm hesitant to use a football analogy 'cause I don't understand football. I wanna steer clear of yard lines, and I didn't even understand part of the response to the whole football thing. Could you just put it in, like, percentage terms or just, like, non-sports lingo?
I'll put it in rock music lingo for you.
Yeah, there you go.
Leslie, I know you'll get that.
Just, you know, sort of, how prepared are you for this year's wildfire season and, you know, sort of how far you've come and how far you still believe you need to go?
Yeah, it's a great question, Leslie, and thank you for being here today. We're so happy to see you. You know, as we've said and Sumeet shared, we had a 90% risk reduction on our system for wildfire. That we know. Our EPSS being fully enabled on 44,000 mi of line gives us a lot of comfort. We know that those settings, they de-energize in less than a tenth of a second. That's extraordinary. That is a huge risk mitigation. While we are doing the inspections, doing the vegetation management, burying the lines, hardening the overhead, all of those things in concert add up to this 90% risk reduction. But we're not done yet. As Sumeet shared, we've got additional technologies that are getting deployed as we speak. The smart meters on these low voltage notices, that's a big benefit.
You know? There's more that we can do, and we're just not gonna rest till it's 100%.
Patti, may I?
Yeah, please. Carla. Oh, here.
Oh.
You can use your microphone.
You know, we had the opportunity to facilitate a conversation with Ana Matosantos, who's the governor's Chief Energy Advisor and advises on many a thing, with analysts, and what she shared was the state's preparation on wildfire as well. The state has invested significant money year over year in wildfire fighting resources. For example, you know, Chris, you may recall, but I think she mentioned the number of firefighting helicopters that are being brought in that have night capacity, for example, to fight fires at night. Billions of dollars are going in on this by the state as well. There's really a partnership that's happening here, which I think prepares us well for this fire season.
Yeah.
Hi. I'm Jonathan Arnold from Vertical Research. Could you guys share some thoughts on the approval process for the 2022 Wildfire Mitigation Plan? It seems like the safety office is asking you to come back with some more data, pushed out the schedule. You know, a lot of what we've heard today, it sounds like you may have some of that data coming together. So just love to get some perspective on, you know, how you see that.
Thank you, Jonathan. I'll start, but then I'm gonna hand it over to Carla and Sumeet to weigh in. First of all, it's important that they ask questions when there are questions. The Wildfire Mitigation Plan process is a fundamental component of AB 1054. I will remind you that we do have a wildfire certificate that stays in place through this process and as we have these conversations and do the review. That's very important to remember. We had a significant improvement to our Wildfire Mitigation Plan year over year, and it warrants clarification with our regulators to make sure that they understand and approve of those actions that we take, and if they don't, we have time to modify and make adjustments in that three-year time horizon, if requested. I'll go ahead and turn it over to Carla and Sumeet.
Let me just build on that, I'll pass it over to Carla. We expected Energy Safety to do additional due diligence because there's two aspects of the programs that are very significant that we've included as part of our Wildfire Mitigation Plan this year, which are new, which is the expansion of the EPSS or Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings, and second is providing details about the undergrounding effort. When we filed this plan in February of this year, we were actually, and our teams were doing work in parallel, so we have a lot more information today than we did back in February, and that's gonna be key in terms of providing those insights as part of the responsiveness.
The testing that I talked about that our engineers are doing for EPSS, there's a multitude and hundreds of tests that have been done that we have white papers written on that we're providing to Energy Safety as part of this. I fully anticipate that, we're gonna be continuing to work with them in a collaborative manner, and we frankly appreciate their diligence and their insights and observations, because it only helps us get better.
They covered it. I'll just kinda conclude by saying we look forward to being responsive to their questions, and we'll be able to be so.
Hi, thank you. Paul Zimbardo, Bank of America. Just if you could comment a little bit about the customer bill trajectory as you go through the plan, and I think Carla mentioned the declining share of the energy wallet. Just kinda the views you have on, like, customer bills, percent of wallet shares, not just the utility, but as you increasingly shift to electrification, how that trends as well.
Yeah. You know, this whole notion of a household energy wallet is gonna continue to be shaped. In fact, we were having some discussions last week, actually with the governor's office about this exact topic. People may not yet appreciate that as customers transition to an electric vehicle, the exact case that Chris shared about his own car, $2 equivalent gallon versus $7 an equivalent gallon in California right now. That transition to what a household spends needs to be understood because obviously when you have an electric vehicle, your electric bill goes up, but your household spend goes down. We're gonna have a job to do to really communicate that and educate people about the benefits of that.
Look, this simple and affordable model is the method that we can use to invest in that capital that our customers so desperately want us to do. They want us to invest in the infrastructure to make it safe, clean, resilient, reliable and affordable. We can do that by offsetting costs and the additional load that comes from EVs and electrification. As we look forward, we forecast a 2%-4% rate affordability range that we're going to hold ourselves to make sure that we can make those necessary investments and save customers money. Did I miss anything?
You did not.
Okay. Thank you, Chris Foster.
Thank you. Thanks everyone for your time today. Raymond Leung with Scotiabank. Two questions. First one, just can you talk a little bit about equipment inventory given all the supply chain issues? I keep hearing like transformers are a little light given all the supply chain issues. Then separate question, maybe Chris, more targeted for you. You mentioned the fire insurance coverage for this year. How should we think about fire insurance going forward? You know, what's the right level? And if you could provide some costs around that. Thanks.
Thanks, Raymond. I'll start on the materials issues, and maybe I'll give you a couple of data points in undergrounding specifically, and then talk about how that expands from there. You know, as we're ramping to that 175 mi this year, we took a look category by category across those 500 different materials categories I mentioned. We are totally confident we have on hand or have on the way inbound 98%+ of those materials. The remaining 2%, we've got plans to bring them in. We feel really good about those categories. We're certainly monitoring transformer inventory and supply chain impacts. It is an issue across the industry.
We have not seen it yet and don't expect to see it really put a dent in our capital plan more broadly this year, but it's something we're staying on top of.
Chris.
There's a good story to share here on insurance. I'm finding myself spending a lot of time on this, but it is ultimately. Here's the bottom line. For years, we've seen the rate on line pick up, just consistently tick its way up. This past year, though, two key things changed. One, we were able to talk more broadly about the EPSS work that Sumeet and team have put into the field. That was very important for the insurance counterparties. As a result, the outcome this year was more parties at the table who previously said, "We just can't insure in California." Two, rate on line was year-over-year, nearly flat. Three, we had more capacity come in previously than we were able to get even last year. That got us to $940 million this year.
We're going to continue to get the right level of insurance to give our investors the support that is needed. I have to tell you, there's potentially another way to do it. In our 2023 general rate case, we put forward a proposal that would actually have almost a self-insured model that's got the, essentially the regulatory construct as the backstop. You'd see the opportunity, instead of having this be $700+ million in expense out the door every year, you would instead have the opportunity to, in years where you had limited fire risk and limited times the insurance product was being called on, you could actually build it up in $250 million increments each year. Substantial savings there for customer.
This is a part of the simple, affordable model, and we're hopeful that comes through the general rate case, that we're working on now.
Thanks.
Ryan Levine with Citigroup. I guess one on inflation with headlines of rapid inflation. Curious your thoughts on how inflationary pressures could shift the acceleration or decrease from O&M to CapEx within your plan that you highlighted today.
You know, this is obviously the sort of unprecedented rate of inflation puts pressure on all costs. When we talk about a 2% O&M reduction, we talk about a net 2% O&M reduction. In other words, given whatever the inflation is, we'll build a plan that over-delivers so that we can self-fund, whether it's wage increases or material expense, et cetera. It also, again, makes even more beneficial the transition from expense to capital because for two reasons. One, it spreads the cost when it's a capital investment over time, and that benefits customers. Also it allows us to do contracting over time and take advantage of price savings, cost savings, efficiencies of those contracts over time. We don't expect it to change the simple and affordable model. It's a tried and true method through all sorts of financial conditions.
We'll expect it to deliver in this one too. Thanks, Ryan.
I'm Humberto Medina, Cohen & Steers. I was hoping you can comment on how disruptive EPSS is. I'm interested in the number of false positives that you get and the community response to those false positives.
Yeah. I'll have Sumeet take the first part, but then I'll have Adam talk a little bit about our field response and how that works. You can just talk about the effectiveness.
Thank you for that question. You know, based on the criteria that we discussed and that we actually have in place for spring and the winter, right, which is the fall months of the inclusionary criteria and then kind of the posture we're in now, where all of the circuits are enabled, but then we disable with heavy fog and rain, that actually reduces the false positives dramatically. The posture of our criteria came from the learnings from last year, because things like when heavy fog rolls in, you have impact on the insulator, we have moss sets in, and you actually have an outage that gets created, whereas on the ground you have full saturation of the water, so you're not gonna have a catastrophic fire risk, right? In that instance, you don't need to enable EPSS.
Those are all the learnings that came out of last year, which is why we saw a high number or a higher number of false positives, which we've actually been able to mitigate going into this year. One of the other things that we've been able to do, and I'll pass it on to Adam to talk about our field response, but we've been able to improve our restoration outage time by more than 40% as compared to last year. We're well below our target of 240 minutes as part of the restoration. I'll let Adam build on that aspect of it.
Thank you. I will say that, and just be open and honest with that it is disruptive to our customers. Anytime the power gets shut off, it's bothersome to our residents and commercial operations and industry. The response time is very important, and we've seen that drastic improvement partly because of the way we've been able to program our settings now. When we first implemented the program, we were using a hotline setting it's called, that's really meant for a coworker safety application. We're using that as a blunt instrument in response to the Dixie Fire to make sure we didn't have any more catastrophic fires. As a result of that, we were tripping off very large segments of our system, 10 mi, 50 mi, 75 mi at a time.
Our stance was, and our standard was, the whole thing needed to be patrolled before we turned customers back on to make sure we didn't have a tree in the limb somewhere or a limb on the line somewhere. Since then, we've been able to coordinate our settings better, so now smaller segments are tripping offline. That's allowing us to patrol less and improve our restoration times. That's been the biggest change. We've positioned folks, we have people at the ready. When we know we're gonna implement EPSS, now it's 100%, but as we ramped up this year, as we put those circuits on, we had coordination calls to make sure resources were ready to roll to respond in time.
Now we're below our target of 240 minutes, which is what we are set at and responding to and restoring under. So far this year we've been green the whole way through.
I think we have time for one more before we go to Patti's closing remarks.
Going once.
No takers?
Going twice.
All right.
Okay.
Thank you, guys.
Hope...
Oh, last minute.
Oh, one more.
We have a last-minute guest.
There we go. Good.
Sold.
Beat the buzzer.
Beat the buzzer.
Srinjoy .
Right over here.
Oh.
Thanks for all the comments. You know, we had sort of rating agencies to worry about before, and now we have ESG providers and indicators that people are looking at. You know, there's all kinds of different sort of indicators that people look at, including the UN corporate principles. You know, what is the sort of engagement that PG&E is doing just to sort of, you know, talk to these different providers and entities, especially as a lot of the measures like governance often tend to be backward-looking?
Yeah. I'll hand it to Carla as our Chief Sustainability Officer, but I'll tell you it's top of mind for us, and we expect to reclaim our leadership role that PG&E has long held in E, S, and G. I think we've got a great story to tell. Our net beneficial climate strategy, obviously on the climate perspective is an important part of the E. But our S and G, S, social issues, we've been a strong advocate for people, human rights, our labor relationships are strong. From a governance perspective, we are earning the right to be considered a highly well-governed organization. But I'll let Carla talk about the interaction that we have with the variety of agencies.
Yes. As Patti referred to, we're actively engaging with a variety of agencies and those who are doing the relative rankings. When we did an analysis about what would help us improve our standing, there were a few things. One is operational performance. You know, obviously there's been concerns over the years about wildfires, and so you've heard from my colleagues today about everything we're doing to improve operational performance and reduce wildfire risk. We're looking forward to seeing that being recognized. The second area, as Patti mentioned, is around resources and human resources. We adopted a human rights policy last year and continuing to, you know, engage in activities that are supportive of sustainable workforce. We also heard directly that having carbon goals was very important in terms of having a higher ESG standing.
Please do take a look at the report we put out this week. It is industry leading in terms of the fact that we've made commitments for 2030, 2040, and 2050 across Scope 1, 2, 3, and 4 emissions. I'm excited to do a bit of a roadshow on our report with our investor relations team and continuing to improve our standing.
I'll just add one point on that is that the engagement with investor relations as well as a member of Carla's team, multiple members of Carla's team with the ESG rating agencies are taking place. We're engaged with them in having those conversations.
Thanks, Matt.
With that, we'll hand it over to Patti.
Thank you. I hope you're getting the message that it is a new era at PG&E. Since we were together, you know, many of you came out to California. It was been less than a year, but many of you came out to California, and since we are together, we've had some pretty significant accomplishments. I just, I literally just rattled off this list yesterday. I'm like, "There's some good things that have happened." I'm just gonna read it because I think it's pretty incredible. 42% since we were together last, reduction in employee injuries. Almost 1,000 of our leaders have been through a four-day breakthrough mindset workshop. These are the leaders who will deploy this culture throughout the entire company. Many of them describe that four-day experience as a life-changing time and their renewal of faith in this company and where we're going.
Every day, we're holding over 2,000 daily operating reviews that Adam talked about. That is a new method to know what was supposed to happen yesterday, what did happen yesterday, what are we doing about closing the gap, and what support do our frontline teams need to deliver for our customers every day. We've reduced our ignitions by 80% on our EPSS-setting circuits, and we've expanded those circuits to 44,000 mi of line. That's our entire high fire threat area, plus surrounding areas. That's a massive change. We do have a wildfire safety certificate that was granted since we were together. 90+% total wildfire risk reduction on our system. 90+%. I was at a ribbon cutting. It's been a busy week.
Monday I was at a ribbon cutting at Elkhorn, where we cut the ribbon on the largest utility-owned battery storage facility in the nation. 182.5 MW online, serving customers today. That's part of our 950 MW that we've added of battery storage in the last year. We launched this week our climate beneficial plan, and I love Carla's enthusiasm for it. Read it. Take a look at it. It is industry-leading, and we're really excited about what it positions PG&E to be. We updated our GRC, as you've heard. Added $7 billion of capital, reduced $1 billion of expense, making bills generally flat in that arena and funding the first three years of our undergrounding program. Everyone loves undergrounding. They worry how much does it cost.
Our simple, affordable model put into action showed exactly that we can deliver that kind of resilient, climate-resilient infrastructure that customers can afford. As Chris mentioned, and just to remind you, we delivered $1 of EPS just like we said we would. We want to be that kind of company for you. We are striving to be that kind of company for you, the kind of utility that you can trust, that you can set your watch to, that you can count on. If there are just three things you remember when you leave today, these are the three things I want you to remember. Number one. We are changing the culture, and we're underpinning it with this lean foundational capability that delivers and keeps our commitments. Two. We are reducing physical risk today and the financial risk that goes with it today. That is true today.
You do not have to wait to see that materialize. Number three: as Carla said, the California regulatory construct is good when we are. We are putting together the winning team that I think you saw to control our own destiny. Our future and our success does not depend on all sorts of other people. It depends on us keeping our promises. That's how we gain trust. That's how we have positive regulatory outcomes. We don't need the environment to change. We are changing, and we are delivering the kind of company that controls its own destiny, that controls its own future. Our hands are on the wheel. This is a badass set of hands on the wheel, and I hope you leave today knowing exactly that. Thank you for joining us today. Please be safe out there.