Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to PG&E's 2023 Investor Day, Investing in California's Prosperity. We're delighted to welcome our virtual audience, as well as everyone that made the trip here in the room today. As you'll hear throughout today's meeting, safety guides everything we do at the company and is at the heart of our decision-making. In that spirit, we've already reviewed safety in the room, so that everyone knows how to remain safe in the case of an emergency. Now for those joining us virtually, please just take a moment to familiarize yourselves with your surroundings and review your safety plan, including your emergency exits. Next, we're gonna cover our forward-looking statements, and we should remind you that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements about our outlook and future financial results.
These statements are based on information currently available to management. Some of the important factors which could affect our actual financial results are described in today's Investor Day presentation. The slides, along with other relevant information, can be found online at investor.pgecorp.com. I just wanna take a moment to introduce and acknowledge the many members of the PG&E senior leadership team in the room. Our main speakers will be CEO Patti Poppe; EVP of Operations and COO, Sumeet Singh; EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Carolyn Burke; EVP and Chief Customer Officer, Marlene Santos; and EVP of Corporate Affairs, Carla Peterman. Many others have joined us, including Julius Cox, Jason Glickman, John Simon, and Ajay Waghray . We are gonna go straight through our program today without a break.
Then we'll have plenty of time, and we'll ask you to hold your questions until the end. Senior team and others will also be available in the cocktail hour and also at dinner afterwards. With that, it's my pleasure to hand things over to our CEO, Patti Poppe.
Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. Welcome everyone, and welcome to those of you on the webcast. If you're on the East Coast, I know it's 6:30, so thank you for joining us. If you're in Europe, you should be in bed. Thank you everyone for making the trip and for being here with us live and in person. It's so good to see everyone. You know, we are writing a story of redemption here at PG&E, and we are well on our way. I think over the next couple of hours, you'll start to see that. Those of you who are here in person over the next day and a half, you will get to see how that story is taking shape. It starts certainly with our progress that we have made on our physical risk reduction.
Some of you who were able to visit our technology center were able to see the technology in action. I think it is easy to believe what we believe, that we have made significant physical risk reduction on our system using technology, and we continue to advance that every single day, and you'll hear more about that in just a few minutes. We continue to make financial risk reduction, and I'm proud of the progress that we've made. We have sector-leading rate base growth, and that rate base is in growth that customers care about. It's in an infrastructure that's climate resilient, that matters and is affordable. We'll share more and more about how our Performance Playbook is enabling our ability to deliver value at the lowest cost possible for customers. It's exciting to see the progress.
You're gonna get to see signs of it today because our whole system is anchored in our Simple, Affordable Model. That Simple, Affordable Model is got lots of runway here at PG&E. We're just feel like we're really catching our stride, and you'll get to see that as you hear people's presentations today. Finally, all of that performance, I have a saying, "Performance is power." When you perform, when you keep your promises, when we do that, we have the power then to influence the strategic direction that the state is going in, and the decisions that are made on our behalf are enabled by that performance. You'll get to see how our trust and our relationships continue to grow with people inside and outside the company.
You'll get to see some special guests with us here in the next day and a half, who will share with you the sense of progress that they're feeling and how our trust and relationships continue to grow. One of the things that I know is true is that we have the team for the time. The team that you will have an opportunity to meet, both the people on this slide and the one that Julius or that Jonathan referenced earlier, are incredible people, and that doesn't stop there. The depth of talent in this organization is extraordinary, and you'll get to see some of that, and you saw some of that for those of you who have been here.
You've seen some of that in person, and it's pretty exciting to me, and I hope it's exciting to you. You know, we're gonna have Sumeet Singh kick us off talking about the physical risk reduction and the technology we're deploying. He'll be breaking some news with you, so I won't steal his thunder about the progress that we're making, what that means for wildfire risk reduction. Followed by Carolyn Burke, our new CFO. This is her big debut, and we're excited that you'll get to see the Carolyn that we see. Sorry, I'm supposed to tamp that down. She's amazing. You'll get to figure that out. Carolyn will give you an early view into our 10-year capital plan. That'll be your first view of that other new news for you to see today.
She'll give an assessment of what she's observing here at the company and the progress that she sees that we have made, but more importantly, the progress that we are yet to make, and she'll share her views with you on that. Followed by Marlene Santos. I'm particularly excited about Marlene's portion of our program today. Marlene is gonna be joined by three of our senior executive leaders who are actually deploying our Performance Playbook and particularly our five basic plays now of our lean playbook. You'll get to hear real-life stories and how that lean playbook is taking shape in our operation, in our organization. You'll get to start to see, you'll just get a glimpse of the depth of talent that exists here at PG&E, and I think you'll like what you see.
Finally, Carla will be joining us, and bringing home the story. Carla will be sharing progress on our regulatory and legislative matters, talking about the relationships we're building. Both Carla and Sumeet are joined by special guests. Again, I won't steal their thunder. I was told to keep this brief. They will share with you, and be joined on the stage with some special guests here today. With that, with no further ado, I'd like to turn the mic over to Sumeet Singh.
Thank you for having us, Buddy. All right. Good afternoon. Excellent. Well, I wanted to extend my sincere appreciation for everyone making it here, in person and also for those that are joining us on the webcast. I wanna start with the fact that PG&E is continuing to make significant progress to mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires caused by our equipment. It's really grounded in the fundamentals of our layers of protection approach. Many of you that are here today had the opportunity to go across the street at our Applied Technology Services lab and firsthand see the innovative technologies we're implementing to dramatically reduce the risk of ignitions caused from our equipment.
To further our mitigations, we're investing in innovative partnerships, piloting state-of-the-art technology, working with the best minds globally, such as Peter Diamandis, who is the founder and executive chairman of the board for the XPRIZE Foundation. We'll talk more about that later. Also working very closely with our state and local stakeholders who are taking diligent action to continue to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, which is why I'm so privileged and have the pleasure to have Brian Rice, who is here with us in person and will be joining me up on the stage shortly. He is the president of California's Professional Firefighters. I will talk a little bit more about his impressive and tremendous background. Before I invite Brian to join me up here, I wanna share a couple of highlights with you.
The first highlight is our 2023 wildfire mitigation plan we filed at the end of March of this year. It continues to build upon our layers of protection approach from 2022. Our layers of protection include enhanced inspections, redesigning our electric system, making it more resilient, which also includes our 10,000 undergrounding miles. You're gonna see a lot more about that tomorrow, and Peter Kenny is gonna be here joining Marlene to talk more about the impressive progress that team is making. Our Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings program, our public safety power shutoff programs, and our advanced situational awareness and response capabilities. We continue to estimate that our layers of protection are driving more than 90% wildfire risk reduction today. In 2023, we are building on these core elements.
Some of the core elements that we're building on is implementing additional and expanded operational controls. The first I'll highlight, you had the opportunity to see a video demo of this at the lab across the street, for those that are here in person, is a downed conductor capability. We're enabling more than 1,100 devices within our high fire risk areas to be able to mitigate ignitions that are typically caused by low current fault conditions. It's really a complement to what we've already implemented within the entirety of our high fire risk area and beyond, and that was very successful last year. I'll touch on that as well, which is our Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings set-settings program.
In addition to that, we've also implemented our Partial Voltage Force Out capability, which is basically leveraging our more than 550,000 smart meters in the high fire risk area to be able to identify any potential anomalies on the electric system for proactive shutoff. In addition to that, we are expanding our transmission pole clearing program, have already implemented additional controls for our transmission system to further mitigate the risk of ignitions caused by our transmission equipment. When we look at these layers of controls that have been proven and effective in 2022, coupled with the additional and expanded programs and the controls I just talked about, I'm very pleased to share for the first time with you that with these controls, we are mitigating an additional 40% of the residual risk.
Overall increasing our wildfire risk reduction to 94% this year. We're not stopping there 'cause we're not satisfied. Again, for those that were here and joined us for lunch, and if you had the opportunity to engage with one of the tables, you got to see some of the advanced technologies that we're currently piloting. This is not a pie in the sky dream. It's actually sensors that we have deployed on a pilot basis to our electric system today and are evaluating and capturing data on faults or conditions that may not be detectable via traditional tools. Also performing and detecting hazards before a fault actually occurs. That gives us additional speed by which we can detect an anomaly into a proactive shutoff before that risk materializes.
One of the key objectives on mitigating the wildfire risk from an operational mitigation standpoint is speed. Speed of detection and speed of action to be able to mitigate that risk before that risk materializes. These are the technologies that we're looking to continue to drive that risk reduction down further beyond that 94%. We're not gonna rest until we mitigate the entirety of that risk. When I look at our advanced capabilities on the meteorology side, our capabilities that are state-of-the-art on fire science, we have the ability, no matter what the weather conditions are, whether it be drought-like conditions in 2022 or the regrowth of vegetation that we're seeing now as a result of significant amount of precipitation that happened in the first quarter of this year in our service area or wind conditions.
Our mitigations are responsive to the range of these weather events. 'Cause we have the ability to be able to predict the adverse weather and prevent a catastrophic outcome before that risk materializes. One example I'll share with you about our preparedness and response capabilities, which have really been enabled by advanced meteorological analytics, is just in the first quarter of this year, we experienced 55 storm days. That's not typical, right? When you look at a average year for us. It's 10x what we typically see from a historic perspective. In those 55 storms, we had nearly 7 million customers that were impacted. We were able to restore nearly 90% of those customers within 24 hours.
The way we did that is because we were able to leverage our advanced meteorological science and capabilities, be prepared with equipment, pre-staging the resources, and when the storm hit, safely ensure that we're restoring our customers. The preparedness and response capabilities are enabled by these advanced analytics. That's really the key takeaway there. Now we're not stopping there either, right? We're partnering with the best minds globally. Recently, many of you may have seen that we announced our partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation. We're partnering with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation on a global competition and bringing the best minds globally on a four-year, $11 million investment, unleashing the potential and innovation that exists around the globe to be able to end destructive wildfires.
The intent and the objective of this competition is to be able to autonomously say that again, right? Suppress wildfires within 10 minutes and pinpoint ignitions from space within 60 seconds or less. Now, many of you may know about the XPRIZE Foundation. They design and build and are a very trusted platform for global and public competitions. In fact, one of the first competitions they sponsored was in 1996, when $10 million were invested to build and fly a three-person vehicle 100 km into space 2x within two weeks. There's 26 teams across seven nations that ultimately resulted in, with the $10 million of seed funding, $100 million of investment. That actually was the catalyst for the commercial space flight innovation and the genesis for Virgin Galactic that exists today.
This is the real deal from our perspective, and we actually have a message that we would like to share with you via video from Peter Diamandis, who is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation. If we can roll that, please, that'd be great.
Peter Diamandis. I'm the Founder and Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation.
We're very encouraged by the interest already. We have 82 teams across 25 countries that have already submitted and are interested in pursuing this innovation. In fact, we've heard from 1 of the teams that all of the hardware already exists to accomplish this feat. What needs to be done is to be able to integrate that hardware into new software approaches, build a packaged product, and target that towards this problem. That's very, very encouraging. We look forward to seeing if that prediction comes true, but it's outstanding to be able to bring the best minds globally to this challenge, not just to end the catastrophic and destructive wildfires in the state of California, but on a global level. We're not stopping there. Right.
We're continuing to work very closely with our local and state stakeholders, which is why I get the privilege to be able to have Brian Rice, who is our and is the President of the California Professional Firefighters. Before I welcome Brian, I'd like to share a couple of things about his impressive background. He's been involved with the California Fire Service and the Firefighter Labor Union for more than three decades. He represents 35,000 firefighters, paramedics, and first responders in California, including more than 5,000 of the state or CAL FIRE firefighters. He's one of the state's most influential labor union leaders, sitting on the Executive Council of the California Labor Federation. He has spent more than 30 years with the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire Department, rising to the Deputy Chief of Operations.
He's also an appointee to the State Board of Fire Services and sits on the State Board of FIRESCOPE, which provides recommendations and assistance to the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services. With that, please welcome Brian Rice. Hi, Brian.
Hi.
It's good to see you.
We just sit-
You wanna take a seat right here?
All right. One in between us or next to each other?
Next to each other.
I like that.
Yes. Always partners. Thank you so much, Brian, for joining us today. I also want to extend my sincere appreciation and gratitude to what you do with 35,000 firefighters in service of our hometowns and making sure you keep the residents of California safe. Thank you so much for what you do.
Everyone here, thank you. Thank you for having me and I've been looking forward to this forum or this discussion, thank you.
Excellent. Maybe, Brian, we can start with, you know, can you share some of your insights that the state of California has had, in regards to rapid detection and suppression of fires? How would you characterize, the capabilities that exist today as compared to what existed several years ago?
Let's just go back a decade. It's night and day. I think I'll kind of start at a beginning point and go back. Really when I came in at about 2018, we were in the middle of some really severe fire seasons. I've watched the state of California and their commitment and also Governor Newsom and his commitment. We all know that adage, "Show me your budget, and I'll show you what's important to you." When Governor Newsom came in, we toured it personally and brought the first partner up and then, and then the governor-elect, then also then Senator Kamala Harris.
What I noticed was his intense commitment, and he hadn't done anything yet, but you could tell he was listening. This wasn't a dog and pony show. This was meeting firefighters in the field. He goes from Governor-elect to Governor. The first press conference the man had was over wildfire mitigation, protecting communities and wildfire prevention. That was the day after he was sworn in, and that started that commitment. He immediately, the State of California, led by the Governor, put $2.8 million into a four-year program of mitigation, vegetation management, and a partnership with the federal government with the end goal of 2025 of mitigating and doing fuel reduction on 1 million acres a year.
There's so much more than that than just that statement, because at that same time, you know, we had our fire seasons were year to year. They were not we were not having an off-season. CAL FIRE's budget, who's our state fire service and really has the charge for the wildland or the wildfire problem, their budget has gone up since 2016. It's doubled to almost $3.8 million. He's brought in 500 new firefighters. It is hard to onboard 500 new firefighters. You don't just do that in a year, so that's gonna take a little time.
Updated the fleet for CAL FIRE with FIREHAWK helicopters and securing seven C-130s from the government to bring in a tanker, air tanker response. You go and look at in order to begin this mitigation process, 58% of the wildland in California is federal property. 40% is privately owned. 3% of it is the state is responsible for. There's a lot of stakeholders or partners in this. One of the first things that he did was to reduce and roll back some of the CEQA requirements. The California clean air. I'll get my acronym messed up. CEQA's tough, you know, and there's some tough restrictions. He rolled them back so the mitigation process could start.
We saw the tech side of it, and the way that we get notice for fires. We still do the old way. We have fire lookouts still, they also have infrared cameras and Doppler radar and different radar sites, so we're getting those notices sooner and sooner so that we can get on top of them. All the time that that's happened, as I sit on the State Board of Fire Services, we discuss utilities and response to not only fires, what we do together, how we put things back together because we work together in that venue too. We also talk about the public safety power, the PSPS, and how we coordinate and deal with that.
I can't even name to you the number of partners or stakeholders that go into those conversations. Then I'm gonna forget something too, and I apologize. I apologize for that because there's a lot there, and it's all important. It all matters. When you get to that point with the technology, CAL FIRE and OES formed the Wildfire Forecast and Threat Integration Center. What this center does is it brings in data, and it's analyzed. It is used to make plans. It's used to forecast where things are going on the fire front, the weather. The people involved in that, the CPUC, the CDM, don't ask me what that stands for. California UC system.
Yep.
The California State College system. It's broad, and all that information gets brought in there, and it gets digested, and it gets sent out into the field so that the field commanders and the firefighters on scene can actually use that to mitigate the emergency. After that, this one is super important, and this goes to PG&E employees too, the IBEW members. They're some of the most trained and skilled workforce in the world. They really are. They work for PG&E, and they're members of the IBEW union. Firefighters are the same way. There's 35,000 of us. We have a performance-based statewide training program that we are integrated in with the community colleges.
At any given time, there are 10,000 apprentices within the California Fire Service that are on duty every single day working to that journey level in a job that is incredibly dangerous and incredibly complex. All of these things going together show the importance that the state and this Governor has put on wildfire response and mitigation.
Well, thank you, Brian. I can just underscore the leadership that you've actually, you know, through this challenging time for the entire State of California, and just so encouraging to hear, you know, the tremendous capabilities, right, that exist today as compared to where we were at a state level. I always talk about it takes the collective us, right? It takes all of us all in, you know, to continue to mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires. That transitions to, you know, the next question, if you can, and some of this you already started to talk a little bit about. Maybe you can elaborate more about some of the current partnerships that your organization and State of California has with us to collectively mitigate the catastrophic fire risk.
I really started having intense discussions about mitigating the wildfire risk on the heels of the Camp or the Carr and the Camp Fires when. That's really when we first met too and started having some discussions on what actually works. I'm proud of all the relationships and partnerships. There's two I'm very proud of being a part of, and one is the Underground Advisory Committee, which I get to co-chair with Carla Peterman. And sometimes you do these things, and you're not really sure, is there gonna be a deliverable? You know, are we going to make a difference? I can tell you, sitting here today, we're making a difference.
Just in, you know, being able to look at the undergrounding, what it takes, what it has taken to get there, how PG&E as a utility learns as it goes along. It brings costs down, makes it more affordable, makes the men and women on the job doing it more, more proficient as they get things done. It works. The 10,000 miles of undergrounding and wait till you hear this. It is a big deal. One of the things that I realized right in there, and it makes total sense. If you put a mile of active or charged electrical line underground, I don't care how big it is, make it the biggest in the world, it doesn't matter.
If you put it underground, you have reduced your risk for fire by 99%. It's an incredible amount. That works. The other one is the asset protection teams, the safety asset protection teams. I was ground floor with PG&E management and IBEW leadership also. You know, I won't go all the way there, but there's a lot of private companies that come from out of state that are contract for-profit firefighters. We're having an issue with it. Literally at the snap of fingers, we got leadership, firefighter leadership, PG&E leadership, and IBEW leadership, and we came up with these asset protection teams. We worked together on it. Essentially they prepare sites, hazardous sites or where hot work's gonna do.
They prepare the site so that it can be safely operated on and reduce the risk of fire while there's active work going on. They do a standby, ready to mitigate anything that could potentially happen. They're not firefighters. They know it, we know it. They get the system going. We've been doing this for four years.
Yep. We started in 2019. Yep.
I have not received one complaint in well over three years. Maybe there was a handful of them when we first started. This is a big deal because it puts people that can really check the situation and have the ability to say, "We're gonna hold on to work 'cause of weather and the wind's not right," and be able to go back to it. One of the things that I was pretty proud of and tickled by IBEW. They said, "Brian, we don't want our men and women here to be firefighters, but it would really be helpful if they were trained EMTs, because sometimes we're remote.
Right.
It's like, now I get where you're going. To be able to help, your workforce, absolutely they should do that. We made that partnership. It is working fantastically. One other one. I have to, I think, have to be 360. I'm the Chair of the California Fire Foundation, and I didn't even say this, but going into Governor Newsom's when he was elected, he didn't do an inauguration. We'd had the Carr Fire and the Camp Fire, and he said, "In place of that, I want to do a fundraiser." He called it California RISE, and our foundation was a part of that. It raised several million dollars, but I'm super proud to say that we worked hand in hand with state leadership. We worked with you guys on some of this 'cause we're involved with you too.
Yep.
To actually put in his case, over $4 million back into the community for fire mitigation projects. Some of the ones, there was one in Northern California in Trinity. It was a conservancy group, and it was a very small community. They had a community center and one road to an airport, and it was overgrown, and it was one way in and one way out. If they had a fire, people were trapped and people were potentially injured or dying. They used that money to treat that entire forest area and make it safe. They did a mastication process, which eats everything up and kinda turns it into sawdust on the ground. I just went, "This is what this is about." It isn't, "Hey, we did 100,000 acres.
Hey, we did 1 million acres. It's communities in partnerships with whether it's, you know, PG&E, the state of California, Fire Safe Councils, California Fire Foundation. The partnerships matter, and the state of California notices those partnerships, and it has meaning, and it adds up.
Yeah.
That was kind of my 360 on that. My look into this is more than just a firefighter.
No. Thank you, Brian, for that, and just, very, very helpful, and your partnership has been tremendous. I call it, the power of one, right? When, the collective us is working on this unified mission. Just to, bring it home, I know we're out of time, so
Okay.
-keep this one a little bit brief is, maybe you can share your perspective and also the stakeholders that you have an opportunity to engage and work with about PG&E's progress in mitigating the risk of catastrophic fires.
Different meetings that I've had and then the underground, the Undergrounding Advisory Group, and then just work in the field. We have come a long way. PG&E as a company, the fire service, as a profession, and then I believe collectively, but I think we all know we have a long way to go. We are going to have a next fire. Hopefully, we don't see the likes of some of the ones that we've had recently. I will say this, the attitude and the actions and the results that I'm seeing, if I didn't see these, I wouldn't be sitting here today. I am committed to making California fire safe. Being a public utility and a large utility, unless you don't realize it's a risky business, men and women. It doesn't come without risk.
I will partner up with a company as long as I see the corporate responsibility and the responsibility towards the citizens that I'm seeing right now. You know, there's water under the bridge and some of that we can't make right. You know what I'm talking about, I know what I'm talking about, and we're plagued by that. We can make it better. What I am seeing in the last several years in demonstratable and quantifiable work and results is that PG&E is really doing what they need to do to be a good business, a good utility provider, and a good partner for California. I think the biggest thing is none of us can take our foot off the gas because this is such a delicate balance and a very hard-earned reputation.
You cannot sit back and go, "We're good. You know, we've got it all covered. We're doing this, we're doing that. We can accept this." The fire service is not a low bid service. You know what? PG&E isn't either. I'll end with this, and it's super important. As a fire captain, I did a ton of emergencies with electricity, but in Sacramento, it wasn't PG&E, but gas, a lot from service lines to distribution. I cannot stress to you how important it is to us as firefighters to see a PG&E blue truck with uniformed men and women pull up that are gonna work with us mitigating an injury. We know that they are skilled and trained, and that they're of same professional level that we are. Never go low bid. You know, it is super important.
The men and women that work for PG&E, we have a lot of faith in them, in what they do. They keep us safe. That's super important. We have to stay together, and once we get lazy or think we've finished, we have every chance to set ourselves back 10 years. Don't take your foot off the gas. My intention is to be a good partner. You know, in closing, I do talk to the Governor about this stuff. It is important to me. My members get killed on these fires, and I have to do everything possible to make sure that things are balanced as much in their favor as we can possibly do.
We're never gonna eliminate risk of potential injury and death, but we sure as heck can do everything possible to keep that risk as small as we can. It has been a good partnership, and I look forward that we do this together and keep our foot on the gas.
Thank you, Brian. There's no daylight between us.
Love that.
In terms of keeping our foot on the gas. We're unified in that mission. Thank you so much for joining us, Brian.
Thanks.
Brian's gonna be with us for the reception and then dinner as well. In case there's any questions, you're more than happy to engage with him. Before I hand it off, just five key takeaways I'll leave you with here, team. The first is, based on the additional mitigations we're implementing in 2023, we're reducing 40% of the residual risks for overall wildfire risk reduction of 94% in 2023. First key takeaway. Second is, we're prepared to mitigate the wildfire risk from a multitude of weather conditions. Third is that we're investing in innovative strategies like the one that we announced with the XPRIZE Foundation that will further mitigate the wildfire risk by bringing the best global minds of the world together.
Fourth one is, you just heard about the partnership that we have at the local and the state level with no daylight to ensure we're continuing to keep the 16 million friends, families, and neighbors that we have the privilege to serve every single day, first and foremost, safe. The last one is we're not gonna rest. We will never rest because 94% is not good enough, and we're gonna continue to push the envelope on reducing that risk until we get it as low as possible and to 100% if possible, right? We're investing in the best technology that's available. It's not pie in the sky.
We've already got sensors out there, and we look forward to sharing some of that greater deployment that we're gonna do in the future with you and at scale. With that, I'll pass it on. I have the privilege to introduce our CFO, Carolyn Burke.
Rookie mistake. All right. Well, thank you. I just wanna thank everyone for joining us here today. We really appreciate your interest in PG&E. In particular, I wanna thank everyone who has traveled here to our great state of California, which is my new home, to hear about our incredible turnaround story. We value your ownership. Indeed, it is your support that allows us to invest in California's prosperity. As Patti mentioned, I thought I would give you my early thoughts, my assessment. Been on the ground for a few months now. A couple of things. First, our strategy. It is powerful, and it is achievable. I say that because I have been on the ground for a few months now, and I have met many of the PG&E coworkers who are making this happen.
They are absolutely committed and have embraced the triple bottom line: people, planet, and prosperity. That's because PG&E is their family. That's the culture here. Of course, California is their state. I've never seen a group of employees as committed to ensuring a better future, both for our company and for our state. Number two, we are providing the tools to our employees to be successful. We are building an efficiency engine here at PG&E, and it is being enabled by the lean operating system. I have never seen a company adopt lean or anything like lean as quickly as PG&E has. It is extremely impressive. I would say the biggest challenge with this is simply scale. We have 26,000 employees, okay? 26,000 employees to train from reacting to emergencies to proactively planning and mitigating.
Imagine the power of 26,000 employees all pulling in the same direction. Our focus, this is number three, continues to be on our customers and our investors. What truly differentiates us is that we are laser-focused on delivering a consistent financial performance year in and year out. Number four, the more I learn about California's regulatory environment for utilities, the more I like. It truly does allow us to invest in California's prosperity. Underlying all of this is really strong leadership alignment. It is one of the key reasons that I decided to join the PG&E team, and I believe it is one of the key elements of our value proposition. Okay, let's talk about another key element of our value proposition: capital investment. The need and appetite for capital improvements to our system is significant. There's no doubt.
Our five-year plan currently amounts to $52 billion of investment. I am pleased to provide you with more visibility into our longer-term plans. As we look at the next five years, we plan to invest $67 billion with a continued emphasis on safety and reliability. That's a 30% increase over our current 5-year plan. Let's see how we get there. First, and this is important, there are no big bets, okay? There's no giant power plant. There's no mega infrastructure project here. Instead, what we have is a diversified portfolio of programs and projects in our electric and gas operations. Let's talk about electric operations first. In 2023, our capital investment for electric operations amounts to about 64% of our total plan. In 2027, it grows to 70%.
That's largely due to the scaling up of our undergrounding program, but it also includes an increase in basic maintenance outside of our wildfire risk reduction program. Additionally, what you'll notice is that electric transmission and customer connections is also growing over this period of time. That is as we invest to meet the vigorous standards set by California for electrification of vehicles and buildings. Finally, gas operations. As many of you are aware, our gas operations benefited from a significant investment after San Bruno. In this plan, our capital investment in gas basically holds steady over the decade, but it still equates to 20% of the total plan. That's still significant, and we believe it is still industry-leading. In total, that tallies up to about a $120 billion investment over the next 10 years.
Those are some pretty significant dollars, but what our customers get for those dollars is also equally impressive. You already know about the 10,000 miles of undergrounding, but our plan also includes work on 1,000 miles of service lines, 500 substations, and interconnecting 10,000 MW of new capacity. We're committed to making these investments, okay? We want better outcomes for our customers. We want better safety, we want better reliability, and we want better quality of service. We are going to spend wisely. We're going to spend wisely on wildfire risk reduction, and we are going to enable California's energy transition. We're going to decarbonize the state, and we're adding to the resiliency of our system as the climate changes. We are also addressing growing demand from customers for electrification of both vehicles and buildings.
We are going to do this by helping to fund it through our own productivity gains and eliminating waste. That's important that we do that. Waste elimination is a key part of our story, and you're going to hear more about that. It's important because we believe that there is additional opportunities to address the customer needs, customer growth, and customer demand for electrification. We estimate that there is an additional $5 billion of investment needed to respond to that demand that is not in our current plan. We are working hard to make sure that that is affordable and that we can efficiently deliver it. That's what's key. We're not going to invest this unless it's affordable, unless we can efficiently deliver it. What we're looking at is we're looking internally. We're looking at our own IT.
How can we be efficient with more IT? How can we bring automation to our operations? Again, how can we do more waste elimination? Because affordability matters. Okay? I know that many of you are familiar with this slide already. We've pulled it out a couple of times before. Simple, Affordable Model. It is truly simple, okay? We deliver cost reductions, we benefit from load growth, and then we implement other efficiencies, like efficient financing to offset rate-based growth. That is rate-based growth of 9% sufficiently offset to limit customer bill growth to about the rate of inflation or 2%-4%. At our recent earnings call, you heard about two new initiatives, new potential savings initiatives, trenching and postage. You're gonna hear from my colleagues later today that we have other savings initiatives on the plate as well.
We have a, what we call a fast start here. We already saw 3% of savings in our 2022 non-fuel O&M. We're comfortable with that 2% target in 2023 and in the long term. Let me tell you why. Let's compare ourselves to our peers, okay? Non-fuel O&M per customer for our peers in the top quartile is about $600. Fortunately or unfortunately, PG&E is at the bottom of the heap in the fourth quartile. Over the last few years, our costs have been increasing faster than our peers. My view, that's opportunity, and we're working very hard to embrace that opportunity. As I said, we had that 3% savings in 2022. As you can see, you can understand why we are very confident that we can achieve 2% savings.
Again, that's absorbing inflation year over year over year. If we do that, we can provide affordable service to our customers. This slide illustrates how we're going to do that. Here you have in 2023 our revenues, basically our customer collections. It grows to $25 billion in 2027. Again, a Simple, Affordable Model. We invest capital CapEx, and we have some efficiencies. What I really want you to note here is the substantial shift from expense-denominated costs in 2023 to capital-related costs in 2027. That alleviates the pressure on our customers' bills. It's because we are investing in permanent fixes, not repairs. The undergrounding program is a perfect example. This model also enables us to provide consistent EPS growth throughout the time frame. That is affordability for our customer. Let's talk about affordability for our balance sheet, okay?
We all know that as we invest our capital, we provide benefits to our customers, improved safety, improved reliability. We also know that as we invest in our capital and grow our capital, we grow our earnings, good for our investors. What we don't want to forget is that as we grow our capital program, operating cash flow also grows. Here's our capital investment program, and as you can see, our operating cash flow is growing from about $4 billion in 2022 to about $10 billion in 2027, improving our overall balance sheet. We are committed to increasing our FFO to debt metric to the mid-teens. Replace that. Mid-teens in 2024. Sorry about that, I got confused with the mid and the high. Mid-teens in 2024.
I don't want to forget that two things. One, that reduces interest expense or financing costs for our customers. What I really don't want you to forget is that because of our significant NOLs, we have minimum exposure to cash tax for the rest of the decade. Our value proposition. There are few utilities that have such a significant capital investment program with growing customer demand. There are few utilities that have such ample opportunity for O&M savings. I will submit there are few utilities that have such an aligned executive team with a lean operating mindset. That is our value proposition. It is tremendous, and it will lead to affordable service for our customers and a simple, affordable model for our investors. With that, I'm gonna hand it to Marlene.
Thank you. Thank you, Carolyn, and good afternoon, everyone. For those of you that don't know me, I'm Marlene Santos. I am Chief Customer Officer. I have been with PG&E for a little bit over two years. I spent my entire career at NextEra Energy, most of it at Florida Power & Light in various leadership roles, and most recently was President of Gulf Power. My team here now at PG&E is responsible for all of the customer operations, for communications, and also for implementing the lean operating system. You might wonder, why in the world is the Chief Customer Officer implementing the lean operating system? There's some really good reasons for that. The first one is that for us, lean is about our customers.
It is at the center of our customers, and it's about the providing processes that optimize the customer experience and provide value to our customers so that then we can provide value to all of you, our investors. Secondly, I, because I was at NextEra and FPL for my entire career, I received a whole lot of training and experience in quality management. Those two things work out really well. For those of you that don't know about Lean, I thought I'd give you a little bit of understanding of what it's about. It's actually been around since at least the 1990s. You know, Toyota sort of was the one that popularized Lean, and lots of companies use it. Global leaders. It's proven. It gives results. It improves performance culture of the companies. I've given you some examples here.
Everything from Toyota, that has used it to improve quality and safety, to Starbucks, who's using it to measure how many coffee beans they put in a cup of coffee in order to eliminate waste. This is used and proven. That's really the key that I wanted to mention here. We have actually implemented Lean as part of our Performance Playbook. It's part of our culture. You've heard about our four plays. This year we have a fifth play, which is Waste Elimination, and I'm going to be getting into that more deeply with some panelists that will come and join me in a little bit. Just to give you sort of a summary of those, our first play is Visual Management.
Visual management is our ability to very quickly, at a glance, know how we are performing to our most important metrics. We take that visual management then into our second play, which is our operating reviews. Our operating reviews are about daily, weekly, and monthly having business performance reviews with our teams that very quickly can escalate issues and where leaders can very quickly also know if they need to provide any support to their teams so their teams can be successful. The third play is problem-solving. Problem-solving is about giving our coworkers a standardized set of tools and a methodology so that they can solve problems, both simple problems and more complex problems. Standardized work is a methodology for us to understand the sequence of events that need to occur in order for us to provide consistency in our work.
Lastly, Waste Elimination, which is our fifth play, is a way of thinking. It's a way of thinking that we're teaching our teams in order to identify non-value-added work, to take that out of our processes and redesign processes that are optimized and that are efficient. We'll be showing you some examples of that. I'm excited to do that in just a little bit. This is what Lean looks like for us. I wanted to show you this picture because it's very different. It's very different than what most of you are used to. If you can see on the slide on your left, it's very active. That's a picture of us in one of our Lean centers. We've got 16 Lean centers, and that's where we gather to do our operating reviews. You can see our Visual Management.
They're hybrid, they're physical and they're virtual, so we have digital versions of them too, but we love to be together when we're together and do the visual management. It gives us a lot of energy. That's how we collaborate. There's a lot of psychology around why it's physical, why we're together, why we get on the boards, why we have markers, and we mark things on the paper. There's a lot of psychology around that, and we find that it truly gives us a lot of energy and is giving us some great results. Wildfire Command Center was our first Lean Center, and you've seen the results, right? I mean, clearly what Sumeet showed you today, Lean has been a core enabler to providing us with results in our wildfire area.
I myself, as an example, I have one of those centers myself, and we measure things that are important to our customers, like customer satisfaction, like complaints, every, like, news, positive news, all those types of metrics. I'm getting together with my team in that same cadence in order to make improvements. Let me tell you about the 5th play. By the way, there's not gonna be a sixth play. Right, Patti? No, no, not yet. We are just started implementing, Play 5, waste elimination. As I mentioned earlier, it's a way of thinking. It's a way of thinking that we're teaching our coworkers, so that they can identify waste, eliminate it, and redesign our processes. We talk about 8 types of waste. You can see them on the slide, everything from inventory to waiting, to overprocessing, to defects.
Those are all types of waste. We have a joke amongst ourselves. It's like once we teach our coworkers to see waste, it becomes a curse. Your curse is like you cannot unsee waste, and you're one of those people that goes around, like, seeing waste everywhere you go, and it's like, oh, my God, you know, you get paranoid with it. For the business, it's a good thing, you know? For their daily life, I'm not sure, but for the business, it's really good. We're really excited because we've gone really fast. We're getting really good results. We already have a project pipeline of over 200 projects. They're all in different phases. You can see sort of our phases from ideation to actual financial realization.
What I thought I'd do today is to bring up a couple of my colleagues to the stage, they're gonna actually tell you how their projects are going. Colleagues, welcome up, and I'll introduce them when I ask them a couple of questions. Come on up. You guys brought water. What a good idea. I think there's water back here. We're gonna start with Joe Forline. Joe is our Senior Vice President of Gas Operations. Joe has been with us about two years, and he comes from PSEG. A long career in the gas business, came to us from PSEG in New Jersey. He has done an amazing job leading our gas team and taking them through their lean journey. Tell us about the lean journey and specifically waste elimination, what you're doing.
Thank you, Marlene. Hello, everybody. It's great to be here with you today. I love working with Marlene and PG&E and the team, and I'm really excited about what we're doing. I'm gonna give you just a simple example of how we use lean in our operation. Next slide, please.
Me. I can't be drinking water.
Take a look at the part of the slide on your left, and it shows 1,637 damages. What is a damage or a dig in? Basically, if somebody wants to dig a hole, if you want to dig a hole in your backyard or a contractor wants to dig a hole or do a construction job or build a house, they have to call the utility, and we mark the underground facilities. If the facility isn't marked correctly or if the records aren't right or if the contractor doesn't call in, they could hit a gas line. Hitting a gas line is one of the most significant risks in the utility industry or with any gas company.
Whenever you're looking at risk associated with gas companies, a good area to look at is how do they manage their damage prevention program and what type of performance they have. I've been working in the gas industry my whole career, and I'm out here in 2021, and I'm really working hard on my damage prevention programs. We end up with 1,637 damages. Top quartile in the country. Really strong program. Super impressive. Tons of improvements made since San Bruno by many of these leaders here. I get a 5% improvement target. You're saying, "Gee, how are you gonna reduce your damages by 5%?" It was the lowest number we ever had in the history of the company, and it was the year of COVID when nobody was digging. Of course, I argued against the target.
That was not gonna be achievable. We put our four and now five plays into action. You could see the other part of the slide shows all four plays. Number one is the visual management. You saw a great depiction of the room. Amazing just to watch the Wildfire Command Center as it evolved over the years. We had a similar room with a board, and that's our board there for damage prevention. It shows every one of our headquarters facilities. I have 38 headquarters facilities up and down California. That visual management shows how many tickets came in, how many people are working, where they were distributed, when they were due, where they covered, what was the damage rate yesterday, what do we expect it to be today? How many times you have to stand by?
You get to see a nice picture of everything that's going on in the process, and you start to identify opportunities when you get into play number two, which is your operating reviews. Every morning, we review the results. Every morning, review the prior day's damages. What was the cause? Who did it? Why? Every week, we look at a pattern. How are we progressing toward our monthly goal? Of course, we have our monthly operating review. For every metric, every department, you have a simple periodic review at all levels of the company as to how you're doing against that metric. That brings to play number three. You start to see patterns, and play number three is problem-solving. It's a simple eight-step process to find the problem through continuously improve.
We went through problem-solving, and we found we had inconsistent performance across our headquarters. We found that people were doing their marking out the facilities differently. They were using their mapping tools differently. They had different mark out equipment or locate a mark out equipment. We developed a training course, and everybody went through the training course 'cause we developed one way for everyone to do the job called standard work. Standard work, which can be applied across all of my departments. Standard work for Locate Mark was rolled out consistently. When we rolled out standard work, we didn't just accept it. We had a process to check in.
Every week, we look at all our damages, we look at the cause, we determine if it was human error, if it was equipment error, if we didn't get a ticket, and we make corrections on the fly. Very impressive process. On top of that, we also found that we had a savings because we were able to make sure everybody had enough work. We were able to eliminate tickets that had no chance of creating a damage. We were able to do route optimization amongst our locators, and we were able to reduce overtime through better planning. This year, $50 million budget, we saved $4.6 million, and we reduced our damages by, you know, 150. This year, we're on pace to reduce them by another 200 damages.
1.6 million tickets we get a year. 1,600 damages. Now it'll be down to 1,272. I have a dream of 1,000 tickets. Maybe it'll be next year to break that barrier. It's really important because every ticket could be the one. Every time you strike a gas line, it could be the one. It impacts customer safety, employee safety, worker safety, risk mitigation, methane. When the gas is flowing, there's a lot of benefits to having a strong damage prevention program. We're applying these lean plays all across the company and especially across gas. Marlene mentioned waste elimination. We have an $80 million target this year just in our capital program.
As Carolyn said, we have a passion to get that savings, so we can reinvest it and close that $5 billion gap that Carolyn stated. We know that we have so many investment needs, and we wanna keep our bills reasonable for our customers. We have a passion to capture those savings and reinvest them in the business.
Thank you, Joseph. Impressive results, right? Am I on? Yep. Such impressive results. You mentioned earlier, I don't want anyone to sort of, forget, your business was already top quartile?
Yes.
Already top quartile and making these improvements. I think that's super impressive. Thanks so much. Okay, we're gonna go now to Christine Cowsert. Christine is our Senior Vice President, and her team is in charge of Gas Engineering and also Service Planning and Design. She's been with us for over 20 years. She's been in electric, she's been in gas, lots of leadership roles. We're excited to have Christine share with you what her team is doing to actually improve the customer experience. Christine, tell us about that.
Great. Thank you, Marlene. I own the process for all of the new customer connections for the company for both gas and electric. What we started down the path of in the last year or so is looking at the value stream mapping process for that work, which means basically laying out the end-to-end process, as you see on the slide, identifying each step in the process, the pain points in that process, and where we have opportunities to streamline and make the experience better for both our coworkers and our customers. There were a couple of really dramatic insights that came out of putting this visual on the wall and starting to look at the timelines associated with our process.
First of all, we noticed that we had a significant amount of customers that came in the front door in our intake process that didn't make it all the way through the process, that at some point they decided that they were no longer interested and no longer continued through the process. That number was 63%. From the day one, when they come in the door to the end, only about, you know, less than 40% of the work actually got done. The other thing that we noticed as we laid out the process was from that intake point to when the work was completed, was taking about 330 days on average.
When we went and looked at each step of the process and how long that actually required us to work, how much processing time was in that's only about 90 days. We have a significant amount of opportunity in this process to shorten our timelines and to deliver more effectively for our customers. We've got a lot of things underway to address that. If we go to the next slide. Starting with just a few key areas that we're looking at, within our intake phase, one of the things that we noticed was we had customers coming to us who were really just sort of kicking the tires, right? They were trying to get an idea of what it might cost to do some work or what the scope might look like.
We were treating all of those applications as real applications. One of the things that we identified immediately was we need to take the opportunity to send those customers down a different path than the customers who already know they've got work that needs to be done. That'll free up our resources to focus on making sure customers are moving through the process more timely and also will result in less frustration for the customers who are coming to us who maybe are being pushed to make a decision that they aren't really looking to do. They're just trying to get some more information. That's one big thing. We're also looking for opportunities to standardize. Within that, once we have someone who's come to us, our intake process was not standard for customers.
Now we have a process where we provide them with consistent information, we ask them consistent questions. That allows us to make sure that we are taking the right approach with how that customer comes into our process. Second piece is around our design and estimating process. This is an area in our end-to-end process where we had a significant a backlog, right. We have work that's there, customers in that end-to-end wait time are sitting in the estimating and design process for a period of time. We have a lot of efforts underway to improve productivity of our estimating teams, leveraging our talent more effectively, managing our overtime more effectively so that it's cost-effective, and we're also working that backlog of work. We're also working on reducing the defects in that process.
This is a key problem-solving opportunity for us and understanding when we have estimates or we have designs that are getting rejected or getting sent back in the process, what's driving that, and are there opportunities for us to build standards or educate our teams to avoid those defects going forward. Then lastly, in our overall cycle time, we've done quite a bit to make sure that work I was talking about that customers are self-selecting out. Part of that was also just not the work not being ready for the next step. Making sure that work doesn't progress unless it's really ready to move on in the process helps us free up capacity for the real work.
We've also been able to partner with the California Building Industry Association to help us get feedback about our process and implement changes to improve our relationship with that organization and also make sure that the work is flowing more effectively for everyone involved. Can we go back a slide?
Sure.
Sorry. A couple of key takeaways that we've already made progress on is we've reduced our backlog by over 1,000 projects already this year. That's significant progress for the estimating and design team. We've also already seen a 60% improvement in our customer on-time delivery year to date. We have lots more opportunity in this process, we're making really strong strides already and excited about what's coming next.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Christine. Grateful that you're improving our customer experience. Very, very grateful for that. Our last speaker here is Peter Kenny. Peter is in charge. He's Senior Vice President in charge of what we call MID, which is our Major Infrastructure Delivery, and that includes undergrounding, vegetation management, and electric inspections. He has decades of experience. Before coming to PG&E, he was with National Grid. One thing that I love to say about Peter is that he started his career in the utility industry as a utility worker in Brooklyn, New York. Peter really knows the front line. He brings the passion and the knowledge of knowing the front line, which is so important. With that, Peter, you've got some really big dollar savings that you're gonna tell us about in your area. Go for it.
Thank you, Marlene. I'm so excited to share with all of you of how we were able to deliver on so many savings through waste elimination. I'll start first with vegetation management. If we can go to next. There you go.
Yeah.
That's vegetation. Okay. In vegetation management, we actually began our lean journey, our waste elimination journey last year, right? We engaged with those closest to the work, and we partnered with the union. That's the IBEW and ESC, and saved $hundreds of millions while completing all of the work. We made significant improvements in both safety and quality. Going into 2023, we're keeping the momentum going. We have a $300 million+ reduction challenge, and we are well on our way to achieving that. I'll provide a couple of examples of how we're actually using waste elimination to deliver. The first here is how we used to do things. We had 24 prime contractors. It's about 8,000 utility tree workers performing work across many different programs within vegetation management.
What that meant was, is that they were making several trips, many trips to the same location. We're really focused on the program. Right. What we did is we bundled the work, really started issuing or allocating work based on regions. We really aligned it around our regional model. As a result, we now have 14 prime contractors performing this work. It's a big impact to our customers because now instead of having sometimes up to 10 visits down the same circular street, we're bundling it, and we have less touch points, and we're doing the work more efficiently. Big, big change there. Second is high use of time and expense contracts. Basically hourly contracts. We changed that from hourly to standard unit rates. That really helped us or enabled us to do bundling of work from the first one, right?
If you looked at the overall cost structure when we did this, it brought the cost structure down more than 20%. 20%. On the third item here, we have very high standards for vegetation management. In the past, took numerous visits or rework to meet that high standard. Now, working with through our waste elimination, we were able now to meet quality standards the first time. All of that waste that was happening, rework, and our interaction with our customers has completely changed through waste elimination. For us, on vegetation management, waste elimination is truly all about delivering on our ends. We care so much about our coworkers, about our contract partners, and we know that they're safer today because of waste elimination. Our quality has improved significantly.
Doing work the right way the first time, gonna save $300 million this year, and we're delivering much better outcomes for our customers. If I go to the second, I'm gonna go over undergrounding. We're really running the same play in undergrounding as we have in vegetation management to deliver $70 million in cost reductions. Again, we engage those closest to the work and partner with our unions to deliver on this. Here's three examples of how we would do that. The first is that we had a handful of contractors performing this work, our undergrounding work. We know that we have this talent internally. I mean, if you just look at our Gas Operations with Joe, such amazing talent, and they do this work every day. We're leveraging that talent. We've allocated about 20% of our undergrounding work.
They're doing an outstanding job. It's really been a game changer. Additionally, we're really looking at our specialty contractors. What are their capabilities, and how do we ensure that, you know, we're using a different skill set? Again, all about how we're approaching and contracting and doing more work internally. The second item, about the size of the excavation, right? Trench depth, we went from 36 in to 30 in. We are also looking at the actual width of the excavation, right? If you think about that for a second, right, 18 in in width, and we're putting in a 2 in conduit. We need the right size excavation for the right size conduit. We're rethinking on how we do this. It's really about how are we designing? What's our standard for design? We're really challenging ourselves to say, how do we do it differently?
Not the way that we've always done it in the past, but how do we design differently to ensure that we're doing the right thing in the field for the right job? Heard this item before. We saved on this item alone $25 million out of the $70 million, just on this. The last item, again, another example of how we're using design engineering to really change our standards. In the past, there was a maximum requirement that when you pull cable that there needs to be a box every 800 ft. In this box, right, it's a large enclosure, and it ranges from 5 ft to 7 ft width and in length, and it goes around 5 ft to 7 ft deep as well. We were installing these at 800 ft. We challenged the way we were thinking about this.
We've engaged with others. We've benchmarked with other companies. Most importantly, we engaged those closest to the work. What we learned was there's different ways to do it. Again, the right application for every job. As a result, we're doing jobs right now that are doubling that. For some additional context, each box costs about $30,000 to install. When one job, we're reducing about three boxes a mile. It's about $90,000. Because there's less connections and splices, we're actually increasing the reliability of our system. These are some examples of the big changes we're making. This is $70 million savings in undergrounding this year over 350 miles.
Just think about if you were to extrapolate that over 10,000 miles, improvements we'll make with safety, quality, and really how we show up in our hometowns. Waste elimination is a really big deal. It's a game changer for us. We really have only just gotten started. There's many, many ideas here. With that, I'll hand it back off to you, Marlene.
Okay. Thank you, Peter. Impressive. Thank you so much to my colleagues. In summary, what's happening with Lean at PG&E, it's growing, it's maturing. We're driving a culture. It's really about our culture. It's a culture of performance. It's a culture of continuous improvement. You're seeing how we're improving the customer experience. We're eliminating waste. We already have over 200 projects that have been identified. We're enabling our 2% annual O&M savings that we have committed. At the end of the day, it's delivering on our Simple, Affordable Model. Thank you so much for your attention. Thank you, team, for helping me.
Nice job.
Okay. Now to close us off is my trusted colleague, Carla Peterman.
Thank you. I'm glad she called me that because I'm talking about trust. It's a good set up.
That's why I did that.
I really enjoyed that panel. For the work that I do, working with stakeholders, having real-world examples i s the best. I'm just so excited we've been making so much progress that we have those now to share. As Marlene Santos introduced, I'm Carla Peterman. I'm EVP of Corporate Affairs, I have the pleasure of working with our teams that are engaging directly with our local government, state and federal, and many of our stakeholders. I should say good afternoon, actually. Good afternoon. You're such an attentive audience. We really appreciate that. Each Investor Day, I've spoken with you about our commitment to earning and building trust, and I'm gonna speak about the same thing again to you today. That is because we fully understand that having trust and alignment with stakeholders is an important catalyst to making the progress that you heard about today.
We are not going to give up on making sure that we're building that trust and earning it every day. I'm very proud that we have had stakeholder support for many of our policy and operational proposals. Policymakers, since we were last together, have delivered many decisions, constructive decisions that support physical and financial risk mitigation. On this slide are just 10 examples from this year, and there are more. I'm gonna focus on 4 of them. Let me orient you to this slide, and I'm gonna start with the first one here, the undergrounding legislation in September 2022. I should take a step back and say everything on this timeline took many people to make possible. None of this was done without support, either from the legislature or the Public Utilities Commission or the Governor's Office or ratepayer advocates. Everyone is represented here.
I'm gonna focus first on two physical risk mitigation milestones. Last September, we had the passage of undergrounding legislation. This legislation enables us to file a 10-year plan for undergrounding that will provide more regulatory and cost recovery support. I do think when this legislation was passed, it was a turning point in California with our stakeholders in terms of their support for undergrounding. You may remember that at last investor day, there was legislation on undergrounding being proposed, and the leading piece of legislation had some, I would say, concerning financial disallowances as a means to hold us accountable to plan. We did not believe that that was the right approach, that there's another construct under which we could be accountable.
What we did was we educated and engaged with policymakers, and ultimately, you saw that concerning language removed, and that same bill evolved into the constructive legislation that we have today. That is what it takes, building that trust and partnership every day. The second physical risk mitigation I wanna point to is the last one here, and that is just earlier this month, the CPUC voted to close a 2015 safety OII that was associated with PG&E. We know that safety is a journey, and we have to prove ourselves to regulators. The fact that this OII was closed is a big deal for us, and it means that we are now integrated into the more mainstream framework for safety cultural assessment.
What really made us proud was that the Office of Energy Safety, in their assessment when they recommended the closure, they said several things. One of the things they said, and they noted, is that PG&E continues to evolve in our maturity on safety, that our safety culture is evolving. One of the other things that they noted was that in focus groups with frontline workers and supervisors, our frontline workers and supervisors expressed positivity and optimism about our safety culture. That's really important feedback for us because we are also working to build trust with our coworkers who have been here for so many years as well. Now let me turn to two examples of financial risk mitigation. First, happy to highlight again the wildfire self-insurance settlement that we reached and the CPUC approval that happened earlier this year.
This is a great example of a Simple, Affordable Model, and I was just wowed with how quickly it was accomplished. This will save our customers $ several hundred million in wildfire insurance costs this year alone and up to $1.8 billion during the term of the rate case. This also, as I mentioned, got resolved in record speed, three months till we had a final decision. That was the commission understanding that we really wanted to stay out of the insurance market this year and the value of having a timely decision. I am pleased that just like undergrounding, the self-insurance construct is now being adopted by other California utilities. Let me turn to my fourth example on financial risk. Just recently, we had a CPUC decision supporting interim rate recovery for one of our wildfire cost recovery proceedings.
Making sure that we are able to recover the spend related to wildfire is an important focus for us, and I'm proud to say that since our last Investor Day, over, nearly $2.5 billion in previous wildfire spend has been put now back into rates or are pending inclusion in rates. With this 2022 WMCE decision, which is scheduled for vote in June, this will save our customers $30 million in financing costs, which is a great outcome for our customers, and it also provides us with cash now to do work sooner. We are so appreciative when the Commission takes decisions like this, and it still allows them to do a full reasonableness review while allowing us to move forward and do productive work.
In terms of physical and financial risk mitigation, we are very excited about the opportunity that our 2023 general rate case will deliver. 86% of the incremental ask in our rate case is focused on safety and reliability. There is a lot that's great for customers and investors in this rate case. It's a four-year rate case, it provides certainty around our funding for the next four years for our core safety and reliability work. It also, even though the decision is anticipated this summer, the rates go back retroactively to January. That's an important part of the construct. It also continues to include important rate-making mechanisms. For example, the [CMA] account and [AMEA] account, which allow us to track costs related to storms. You heard earlier about how important that construct is when we have such a historic year as this one.
In terms of state support and policymaker support, we appreciate the commission's continued commitment to a timely GRC decision. Just earlier today, there was a legislative hearing on grid infrastructure where a senior executive from the PUC reaffirmed their intention to resolve our rate case this summer. The understanding that we need this to continue to provide safety for our customers is quite important and something we continue to message with policymakers every day. Our rate case is complex. Therefore, I appreciate that we have good commissioners who are considering this GRC. The assigned commissioner to our rate case, Commissioner John Reynolds, has held several roles at the Public Utilities Commission and was most recently in private sector before returning to the commission.
The CPUC President, Alice Reynolds, no relation, she has had also an extensive career in utility regulation, serving as a senior advisor in the Governor's office, working directly on the issues before them today. The rest of the commission is also strong, with many decades of utility regulation experience. As Patti said, performance is power, and so we are looking forward to showing the commission what we'll be able to do with this rate case funding to improve safety and long-term affordability for our customers. Now, we know we have to look forward. Important for us is making sure that we are focusing on the issues that are most important to our customers and policymakers, and that there is alignment. Some of the areas in particular where we know alignment is important include working on clean energy, electrification, reliability, and affordability.
Let me just share a little bit about each of these and some of the work underway. First of all, last year, last summer, Governor Newsom, under his leadership, made sure that the light stayed on in California with a clear focus on reliability. Reliability as we make this clean energy transition. It is an and, not an or. One of the cornerstones of that effort was legislation that allows us to extend, seek relicensing for the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. That is an opportunity that we do not take lightly. Diablo Canyon provides 19.4% of California's clean energy, and we are making progress in that relicensing.
I'm pleased that the NRC has granted us the opportunity to continue operating as we seek relicensing, and we're making progress every day on the local and state actions that we need as well. Oh, took my thunder away, but that's all right. A little teaser. Let me talk about electrification, empowering the clean energy economy. This is very much an important focus for us. Last year, we also saw constructive legislation in support of decarbonization with a passage of a law codifying the 2045 carbon neutrality goal for the state. As you heard earlier at ATS around our EV leadership, that leadership is taking shape, and we are very much leaning into the decarbonization of society. I'll just highlight one statistic about how we've already been powering that transition.
Over the last two years, there's been a 41% increase in fast chargers energized in our service area. We remain steadfast focused on how to meet demand. Now, we have heard the concerns from our customers and our policymakers around the timelines for connecting new customers. You have heard from Christine the work underway to reduce those timelines. We know we have to get faster to meet the need. There is legislative interest in this, as we would expect there to be. This session started out with several bills focused on how do we approve customer connections. Again, just like last year, we are focused on education and engagement. Now there are only three bills remaining. We think all these bills have the opportunity to be constructive.
Again, we're continuing to lean in, continue to talk to policymakers about what is the right funding mechanism, what type of dynamic mechanism do we need in order to meet demand that is rapidly evolving. Finally, focusing on helping our customers. We are also focused on helping our customers most in need, especially those who have been impacted by COVID as well as the gas price spikes. Here are just a few of the things we have done to help these customers. Over the last year, we were able to join a coalition to have support for legislation and budget allocation to support bill relief for customers most in need. We were able to allocate $545 million over the last two years to our customers, 653,000 customers who most needed it.
Early this year, when we saw the gas price spikes, we didn't just sit and do nothing. We worked with the Public Utilities Commission to expedite the climate credit, which allowed for a reduction right away in customer bills. Finally, we're also looking to the future about what is the right rate design to support electrification. We are working with stakeholders on identifying a reasonable fixed charge that will send a clearer signal around the need and cost of electrification, and at the same time, lower bills for low and moderate income customers. A lot of work underway. What we continue to know, though, is to make this work happen, the partnerships are key. I'm excited to come back next year and tell you about the progress in these areas.
Now, continuing the theme of engaging with policymakers and seeking alignment, I am pleased to welcome our special guest. We are pleased to be joined by Ann Patterson, who is Cabinet Secretary to Governor Newsom. Let me say a couple of things about Ann as she comes up. Ann Patterson serves as Governor Newsom's Cabinet Secretary. She's chief advisor on policy and regulatory matters pertaining to regulatory bodies and the administration. Yes, she is a big deal. All policy matters pertaining to, like, everything. That's pretty much the shorthand. Some of you may know Ann already because she was appointed counsel to the Governor's Energy Strike Team in 2019, and she led and facilitated the AB 1054 fund design and emergence, and she led the state's response to PG&E's bankruptcy. Without further ado, Ann, please welcome.
It's good to see you. Ann, first of all, thank you for taking the time to be with us. I know with the budget discussions underway in Sacramento, it is a busy time, and we all appreciate you being here.
Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here, Carla. I think I see some faces that are familiar from way back in the, AB 1054 days.
Let's just start with what's the top priorities for Governor Newsom?
Oh, God, how much time do you have?
As much time as you want.
This is a big and complex state. I think on the precipice of being the fourth largest economy in the world, we are nipping at Germany's heels right now. I would say, you know, as we think about, you know, what drives that kind of economic growth in California, it isn't natural resources entirely. Like, obviously, traditionally, we have our abundance of those, but it really is our people and the innovative spirit that we have in this state.
You know, I think the governor is the biggest booster for California in the world and really very proud of our innovation economy here and is really focused on continuing to foster that innovative spirit that drove our economic success in the past and will hopefully continue to drive that economic success in the future as people come here to turn ideas into the businesses that are transforming our world. You're right down the I was just at NVIDIA down the street a couple of weeks ago seeing what they're doing powering AI. I was down in the Salton Sea watching people, you know, develop new technologies to extract lithium from saltwater brine.
It's just, you know, watching that and even watching the XPRIZE, like the innovation and the innovative spirit that we bring to problem-solving in California is something that's really special. Part of it is cultural, I think. We are a place that embraces our diversity. We don't stigmatize it. That includes inviting and welcoming immigrants from all over the world to build businesses and build their lives here. It's also about investing in people, investing in our education and our higher education system and in the infrastructure that we're gonna need to, you know, power our new economy. I think that's really the exciting place where we're gonna be devoting a lot of his efforts.
We are embarking in California on, like, the largest infrastructure program that this state has seen really since the Pat Brown era. For those of you who are not Californians, that's over half a century ago. Over the next 10 years, we will be investing around $180 billion in infrastructure in this state. That's federal and state money. Thank you to the federal government for the IIJA and IRA programs. That's gonna be roads, bridges, water projects, you know, semiconductor manufacturing, lithium extraction, and yes, a ton of clean energy projects. For those of you, I'm gonna focus more on this because of the audience.
You probably know that we have set a very ambitious goal in California of an 100% clean grid by 2045, with an interim target of 90% clean by 2035. That's ambitious. It's right around the corner. We're actually well on our way. I think we were at 59% clean just in 2021. We hit our goal of 1.5 million electric vehicles on the road two years early, just this year.
One assist of those are in our service area.
Yes. One of them's in my garage. All very exciting. We're making progress. We have a huge ramp. We have a long ways to go. I think the estimate is that to just meet that 2035 interim target in California is gonna take we'll have to 3x our clean resources in California, and we're doing that in partnership with PG&E, the IOUs, and our other load-serving entities. I think lots and lots of exciting building happening in California. You know, one of the things I think that the Governor has recognized is also a priority is, you know, one of the biggest operational risks that we face to getting that work done in California is our complex regulatory environment in California.
Last week, I don't know if you all saw, but he announced a package of about 12 bills to streamline permitting, expedite environmental review, and speed project delivery across infrastructure projects. These are tools we've used in the past. We use them to build stadiums. Now we're gonna use them to build clean energy projects, and we're gonna use them to build other infrastructure projects for California. I guess I'd end by just saying, you know, we have a lot of great work to do, a lot of investments that we're making, and the administration is just, you know, focused on rolling up its sleeves and getting the work done.
Well, thank you. That was a very exciting announcement last week as well.
Yeah.
We're excited about that. We're also, as you know, pursuing some of the federal funds.
Yes.
-for some of our projects, and so appreciate the State's support with that.
Absolutely.
As I mentioned in your intro, you have seen PG&E through some of our best days and some of our not so best days. What are your observations of PG&E post-bankruptcy, and how do you think the company is doing?
I actually started my career in the administration with PG&E. Did not expect that to be the case. I think it was like week two, I was over there in the legal unit, and somebody said, "Hey, how much do you know about bankruptcy law?" I was not a bankruptcy lawyer, but I did some insurance insolvency. I was like the most prepared person on the team for that. Fortunately, we brought in some really good experts, so I was not rowing all by myself on that. You know, I would say I'm probably gonna say that overall, my sense is that PG&E has become an incredibly important partner for us on a whole variety of problems that we're trying to solve. I'll focus on two, and I'm not gonna start with wildfire. I'm gonna start someplace else. Diablo Canyon.
Reliability is important. Meeting these clean energy goals and transitioning our grid is not gonna be easy. Not everybody's rooting for us to succeed. We know we're doing something new and that the world is watching. Doing it well, doing it reliably, keeping the power on is incredibly important so that we can show the world that this can be done. When we came last year to PG&E and said, "What do you think about potentially keeping Diablo Canyon online a little bit longer?
My jaw had to go up when you said that.
The company was honest that this was not part of its strategic plan at the time. Patti was very clear right out of the gate, "If this is something that's important to California, we will dig in, and we will figure out how we can do it and if it can get done." We have partnered incredibly successfully over the last year to create a pathway for that to happen. You know, right now, as you said, it's, you know, nearly 20% of our clean energy resource, and I think extending it really reflects a pragmatic recognition that you can't take resources like that offline until you know you've got the resource behind them to back it up. We're really appreciate the partnership on that one.
I'll also say, reliability and summer reliability, last year going into the summer, we recognized that we were not in the position we needed to be in terms of having the resources, procured to get through some of the, you know, expected demand. We came to PG&E and the other IOUs like in March. It was late. I mean, it was late and said, "Can you go out and procure some more resources for us, please?" and PG&E led the way. You got us, I think, nearly 1,000 MW of power that we really needed to get through the summer, particularly that extreme event in September. I think the partnership, you know, when we call, you answer the call.
You know, I will, you know, kinda on the wildfire mitigation, also seeing a great partnership and a lot of progress. I'll mention a few things. You know, this is always an important balance between safety and reliability and customers, right? And the work that you guys have done over the last two years to refine the PSPS process has just been incredible. I think OES holds you all up as really as an example of how well that's working. Refining the model to be more accurate, but also, you know, maintain, you know, the risk mitigation, but also help make sure customers are only out when they need to be out and using technology to try to get them back online faster. That has been a real success.
The EPSS, I think you guys know what that is also really. I mean, we're seeing it work, from an ignition reduction, process. That one also, I think we're working creatively to try to figure out how we deal with those like customers who keep getting hit over and over with that because it tends to be the same neighborhoods, right? Lots of collaboration to try to make sure we get the benefits of that risk mitigation also, help customers.
I think, you know, across the board, obviously, the undergrounding work long-term an incredibly important investment and one that, you know, we're watching you work to push for new technologies, new ways to do that so that we can reduce that cost, and price point over time, which is really important to both get the safety benefits and also try to maintain affordability. Lots of great opportunities. I just, you know, overall, just a good partner.
Thank you, Ann. Well, I'll say I appreciate you for noticing the progress. We always talk about we appreciate our progress, but we're never satisfied. I think about just with Diablo Canyon Power Plant, that plant took a stand to operate at its highest quality until the very last day.
Yeah.
When we got the call, it was never a question, could this plant operate. It was a matter of just, let's get the relicensing in place.
Right.
It's for moments like that that you have to be ready.
Yes.
I think a few folks in here might be interested in the AB 1054. Let me ask you a question about that. A key topic of continued interest, is the AB 1054 fund. What are your thoughts on AB 1054 now three years after its adoption?
It's working.
Yay.
No, it's really, it's actually kinda cool. It's up, it's running. It's, I think it has $10.3 billion of cash on hand at this point, $21 billion in claims paying capacity. We were really lucky, in having the Earthquake Authority as a kind of state-affiliated entity that knew a lot about reinsurance, knew a lot about, you know, investing money and kind of being an insurance company. We were able to tap them, and they just, like, set that thing up. They knew what they were doing. They understand the market, particularly the reinsurance markets, but really were able to do an amazing job getting that money out and invested conservatively. They've been, you know, mitigating for interest rate risk, unlike some people.
I also oversee the banks and it's been a busy couple of months. I would say, you know, they've also got the claims administration process all set up. Can you still hear me okay?
Yes.
Sorry about that. Which is really designed. I mean, the way AB 1054 works is the claims are still settled by the utilities, and then they're submitted to the Wildfire Fund who will, you know, evaluate them for, you know, reasonable business judgment and then pay those claims. They've set up that entire process, designed around both making sure that the claims are settled prudently, but also really to try to efficiently and expeditiously get the claims processed and the money distributed back 'cause we recognize liquidity is an important function that can play. They have not had their first claim yet. I think they might next year. I think we'll all watch and see, and I think I'm really optimistic that that process is gonna be really e fficient and well-administered over there.
It is, you know, I think I'm just gonna say out loud there have been a couple of people out there saying, "Oh, why don't we use the fund for this? Why don't we use the fund for that?" It's not the same budget year we had before. There's no situation at all in which we would ever touch that fund. First of all, it's not our money. It is ratepayer money, and it's the IOUs money, and so it will sit there to be used for this purpose and only this purpose. I just wanna, you know, dispel any rumor or concern that people might have that it won't be there. We designed that fund to last at least 10-15 years. We're three years in without having a claim submitted.
The purpose for those people who weren't there of the 10-15 year modeling and horizon was that was gonna give the utilities the runway to make the investments that they needed in wildfire mitigation, so that we really would, you know, run out the need to have that fund there. So far, we're watching that really work. The theory of the case is working. We're making the wildfire investments, not just the utilities, but I think as Brian talked about, the amazing $2.7 billion that the state has put in, you know, helicopters that can fly at night, technology and modeling that help, you know, make sure that we're able to put out fires when they do happen quickly.
I was just up taking a little vacation, w e were up at Joseph Phelps in the Napa Valley. I looked out, and there's this hillside that's burned. I asked the folks what had happened because obviously there was a pretty big fire up there a couple of years ago. They said, "Well, the state of California, CAL FIRE, came in and saw where the wind was blowing, waited for it to blow this way, burned that fire break, and saved our winery.
Wow.
Thank you to the people at CAL FIRE. They're doing amazing work. It is very well appreciated by the people up there. You know, just incredible investments that are happening that really are, you know, helping us to kind of realize really the theory of that, of that fund from the beginning, which is that we would make the investments and hopefully over time, need the fund less and less.
Thank you. Well, thank you for your leadership on item AB 1054. It is an important financial risk mitigation for us. As you said, you've seen it from Sumeet Singh's presentation, the investments that we're making. Let me just ask you one final question, if you don't mind. That's about this summer, what to look forward to. What is your thinking right now about summer reliability and roles that, like, Diablo Canyon Power Plant will play in that?
We by the way, plan now for summer reliability all year round.
We're meeting weekly.
Yes.
So.
Weekly meetings with the CPUC and the Energy Commission and CAISO, modeling and forecasting for the summer. I think that there was actually a press release, a press call today with those agencies and the Governor's office to talk about our kind of most recent forecasting on the summer. The good news is we've had a lot of rain, so we got a lot more hydro than we did last year, which is good. We also are just in a much better position in terms of procurement, for expected demand, than we were last year. I think we're a little bit over-procured, for what we expect demand to be. The challenge, of course, is just those tail events like the extreme weather that we had, that heat wave back in September. You can't really procure for that.
We've developed a series of different contingencies to get us through that. I think we've, you know, through demand response and backup generators and a bunch of other, you know, strategies, we've got about 2,500 MW of contingencies that we can deploy to get us through those events. We may also be trying to procure a little bit more, but I think we're in pretty good shape overall. We also, the Governor put aside or I think with the legislature, we had about I can't remember if it was $2.7 billion or $3.7 billion. I think it was $3.4 billion for a strategic reliability reserve.
That reserve is helped us to build the 2,500 MW for this summer, but we also used it to enter into contracts with the ones through cooling nuclear natural gas plants that we have that were going offline at the end of this year, that are now part of the strategic reserve. Next summer they will be available, and we can turn those on just as a contingency resource if we need them to get through, you know, kind of those really extreme events that we can't completely plan and procure for. Overall, really feeling like, you know, knock on something, we're in pretty okay shape. We'll have to see what mother nature throws at us.
Well, thank you. We are here ready to support, as you know.
Oh, you asked me about Diablo too. I kind of think of Diablo as certainly it's a lot of power. It's 4,400 MW. Is that right? It's, it's important for the summer. We need those 4,400 MW probably, you know, every day.
About 2,200 MW .
2,200 MW . I'm sorry. Well, you need those megawatts all the time. I really see the value and the importance of it, not just for summer, but year-round as part of this longer term, midterm transition to the clean grid. Both summer reliability, but just broadly getting us through the next 10 to 15 years as we're bringing other resources online.
Well, thank you. Please express our thanks to Governor Newsom for his leadership. Maybe you get one more day of vacation. I don't know.
Hoping. We're headed back up to Napa after this.
Thank you. Everyone, join me in thanking Ann Patterson.
Thanks so much. Good to see you.
Good to see you as well.
Oh, yeah. I'm so sorry.
Well, don't go far.
Oh, no, I'm just gonna go here.
As we go to our Q&A for our virtual audience, you have a Q&A box at the bottom right of your screen where you can enter questions, and we will get to them, as we go. We're going to start, I think, in the room here. Just assemble the team on the stage.
Okay. I am joined on stage, by the team, and we would love to take your questions. Jonathan, we have mics in the room, and so we'll want to make sure that when you ask a question, we have a mic available. I see Julian up here in front.
All right, we'll kick this off. Thank you all again. Appreciate the time. Julien Dumoulin-Smith, Bank of America. Thank you again. Let me just start off with another elephant in the room, if you will, dividend. Let's talk about how you think about that over time. Carolyn, I'll probably throw this one in your direction here. How are you thinking about you threw us the financing plan, you kinda laid it out, but there was one little piece missing there. Can you talk about the timeline here? Obviously, there's certain considerations, thresholds, but also critically how you think about ramping that, right? I mean, the CapEx numbers you throw in the back half of that decade are really quite meaningful. Big ramp would imply that perhaps you want to retain some more cash. Just latest thinking here as best, as best you see it.
Yeah. We know a dividend is important to our investors. Right. As we mentioned at the earnings call, we will hit our eligibility threshold in the third quarter. We'd like to have audited financial statements, and so we expect to be able to announce at the third quarter that we will be reestablishing a dividend. Now, it will be, as we've said before, low and slow. The way we think about that is because of our capital program and the needs that it requires to meet all the demand is that's our priority. It'll be low. I don't necessarily have a time frame for you, but we are not targeting a dividend yield necessarily. We are looking to grow our dividend with our earnings.
Got it. Any heuristic you'd offer even yet?
Any what?
Any heuristic, right, on payout ratio or what have you? Not, not yet.
We're not ready for that.
Not yet. Also the timing is obviously dependent on our general rate case. That's a huge forward look, and so the timing of the general rate case will drive and could very much contribute to the dividend timeline.
Quick follow-up here. You guys have a lot going on already in terms of CapEx. However, there's an upside case. There's an opportunities bucket that you described. There's a few bullet points described there as well. How do you think about that materializing? Obviously, lots of different things moving around in California. Let's address that just super quickly, if you don't mind.
Yeah. This is at the heartbeat of our Simple and Affordable Model. The thing that we know is that the appetite for capital on this system is extraordinary. Our customers want and expect a cleaner grid. They want a more reliable grid. They want safer communities and hometowns. The investments that we're able to do deliver all of that for customers. We have to do that in a way that's affordable for customers too. All of the cost savings that we generate create the ability to invest faster. That's what our goal is, to be able to fund that investment by experiencing the load growth as we see forecasted, doing the efficient financing, improving our credit ratings, so then our interest expense goes down, and then we can invest more for customers.
There's a benefit both to customers and investors of that Simple, Affordable Model day in and day out. That's the driver. Look, there's more work than we can do and than our customers can afford. That's our job. Of all the things that Marlene and the team talked about, this is why our Performance Playbook is so essential. Team, that's all upside. That's the potential for the company. The Simple, Affordable Model has all the runway in the world here at PG&E, and I hope you're feeling that momentum. It's not just the leaders you see on the stage right now or even the ones you saw just a little bit ago. We're infusing our culture with this mindset of continuous improvement and delivering performance, and we're excited about that. That bodes well for customers and investors.
Thank you. Angie Storozynski with Seaport .
Welcome, Angie.
I'm just wondering, you've done so much work. You keep investing in your systems. There's lots of dialogue with customers and there is obviously a lag effect. How does that translate into customer satisfaction scores? I mean, we see some... especially the J.D. Power, it seems like those scores are still low.
Yes. Marlene, you want to talk about that?
Sure. You saw the picture of my customer operations center. Customer satisfaction is something that we are looking at every single day. We have metrics. We've, we've now come up with 18 different drivers. We have now customer transactional scores on each of our key transactions. We are working it. We're using our lean operating system every single day to make improvements to our customer experience. Really excited about what we're seeing there. We're doing a project on outage, so where we're reimagining our whole outage communications to our customers because we know how important the outage, that moment, right, is so important to our customers. Lots and lots of work around our customer experience. Really excited.
Yeah. I think, just to put a finer point on that, during this historic weather events, I think we look across the nation. There's a lot of utilities under a lot of pressure based on all of the weather and the experience. Nobody experienced worse weather than our customers. There is no doubt about that. Yet the satisfaction during an outage went up during that time because of the way that we handled the outages, the speed of restoration that our teams. As I like to say, safety is always first, and then restoration and communication in equal measure.
Our communications team, Marlene's entire team, and all of us really, were put into action to communicate with our customers. That helps because so often you just wanna know, What's the plan? What do I need to do? What can I expect? We delivered on those expectations, and we saw the satisfaction scores be much more improved than in previous outages. We're really making a big difference. The work that Marlene just talked about is yielding real results. All that to say, Angie, if I could just add.
Look, our customers have a long way to go to fully trust us again. The culture that we're working on here in the company is fundamental to changing the minds of our friends, our families, and our neighbors who are our customers. The thing that gives me the most optimism, and I know there will continue to be a lag because we have to earn the right for customers to be satisfied with us, our coworkers have to believe first that something has changed here. When they believe that will parlay and translate to their neighbors and their families, and the communities will start to experience a different PG&E. We look very much forward to gaining the trust from our customers again.
Thank you. Just on an unrelated note on the financing plan for that, the CapEx. Two things. One, what is the big reason for the step-up in the cash flow from operations within the next four years, right? More than 2.5 x increase versus 2023. That's one. Two is, you're not a cash taxpayer. It doesn't seem like gonna be anytime soon. I mean, is there a rule of thumb at that, you know, how you're gonna finance your CapEx? Should we assume that, say, 30% of all CapEx comes with from equity or is financed with equity?
Two things. First, on why our operating cash flow is growing. First, we have the GRC, that's a big event for us. We expect that decision in the third quarter. Two, there is the recovery of the WMCE and other balancing accounts that we have, we expect to see that over the course of the coming years as well. Then, two, as I've said, you know, as we invest in capital, we will see our cash flow increase. That's what's driving the operating cash flow. I'm sorry, your second part of your question was how are we gonna finance. I mean, we are targeting a 52/48 ratio. I...
We're gonna continue to finance according to that targeted debt leverage ratio. I think that's the key. We are committed to decreasing our holdco debt by $2 billion by 2026, so that is in our plan as well. I don't know.
As we've continued to say, we have no plans to issue equity this year or next, and we plan to stick to that plan.
Yep.
Other questions? Is anyone online, Jonathan?
Yes, but I-
Okay. We'll take one in the room here, then we'll take one online.
Hi. Ryan Levine with Citi. In terms of the undergrounding CapEx per mile, what's the current thought in terms of where that could go in light of some of the technology that was highlighted earlier today?
Yes. Sumeet, why don't you take this one?
Yeah. Thank you for that question. Just historically, when you look at our unit cost for undergrounding work, it's been well over $4 million a mile. You know, some of the things that Peter and the team are materializing and what you're seeing in terms of the $70 million reduction over the 350 miles this year, it starts to get us to a trajectory of about $3.3 million a mile this year. As we continue to look forward year-over-year, and if you're joining us tomorrow, you'll see some additional innovative construction technologies and methodologies.
That we're gonna be implementing that continues to reduce our cost structure. You know, one thing that Peter highlighted was ensuring that we're using the right methods and approaching the work and innovation in the right way for every mile. Because every mile is a little bit different, right? Because of the different geographic terrain that we have, the different soil conditions that we actually have to navigate. That's what the team has actually developed is a set of toolkits that we can actually apply from a construction methods perspective, depth of cover, reducing the width of the trench itself. There's a lot more innovation, and there was a table out here as well, again at lunchtime, where our teams are looking at, and this has never been done in the utility before, right?
A pilot on a at-grade type of a construction method. There's a significant amount of additional ideas that the team is actually driving to, and we have the confidence to be able to, you know, meet the trajectories that we've actually outlined here and stated previously.
Thanks. One on financing plan. What's the current thought around holdco debt and longer-term ways to address it?
As I said, we remain committed to decreasing holdco debt by about $2 billion. $2 billion is our target, and by 2026.
John, if you want... Okay. One online. Let's take one online, and then we'll come back here to the room.
Yeah, we can take one online. This one's from Paul Patterson. He asks, given California's move to electrification, do you see any risk to stranded gas assets or the need to change gas infrastructure depreciation rates?
That's a great question. You know, we are working hard to make, Well, first and foremost, we will always invest to make sure our gas system is safe and reliable. As we see, there are opportunities for targeted electrification, and we're supporting that zonal electrification here in California, where it makes great sense. In fact, 1 example, we had a mobile home park that we were about to replace the mains and services as part of our upgrade program for gas. We realized that we could actually electrify that entire mobile home for less, and we could then transition there.
I would say that really our priority is to, as our customers go, we'll serve them, but I think it'll be a very long time that we will have major gas infrastructure that will be serving the state of California. We'll be increasing our RNG. Every time we replace a pipe, we reduce our methane emissions. We'll continue to reduce the emissions from our gas system in line with our targets for the state. There are many applications that yet don't have a substitute fuel source.
Patti, if I can add as well.
Please, Carla.
The PUC does have a proceeding we're participating in on the gas transition, whenever that will happen, to address some of the questions that you're talking about making sure there's appropriate depreciation rates for our assets and that that transition is affordable for our customers as well. We do have a component of our rate case that's proposing looking at accelerated depreciation of some of the gas assets, just to start that conversation. As Patti said, we forecast our gas system providing service to Californians for many years to come, but we do wanna be ready if that transition happens.
Thanks. Steve Fleishman at Wolfe.
Hi, Steve.
Hi, Steve.
I guess two things. First, on the Simple, Affordable Model, one of the components is the sales growth, the 1%-3%. Could you talk about kind of latest thoughts on how that's progressing and, are you starting to see any kind of upward move in sales growth?
Yeah, you bet. The bulk of the 1%-3% sales growth is toward the latter end. There does increase as we achieve more electric vehicles and more building electrification. You heard Ann Patterson say that our pace of electric vehicle transition is happening even faster than planned. In fact, in our service area last year, 23% of new vehicles sold were electric. That is real load. Every two vehicles is a new household of electric load. What's really exciting to us is making sure we drive that load growth at the right time of day. I'm hope you enjoyed seeing the demonstration and really see the power of bidirectional charging and how that's a real potential enabler for additional load at a much lower societal cost.
That really will help then our unit cost drivers over time. In a household, when you switch from gasoline in your vehicle to electricity in your vehicle, your actual household envelope, the portion of your household wallet that you spend on energy goes down. As we decarbonize the economy, customers are actually better off on total dollars spent. In fact, the equivalent for us is about two and a half dollars, $2.20-$2.50, equivalent of a gas at. I don't know what it costs where you live, but where we live, it costs about $5 a gallon. It's less to switch to electricity. That's a really powerful part of the formula too. I hope that answers your question, Steve.
Yeah. No, that's great. I guess I have one other question, so we're gonna get the GRC, I guess, proposed decision, hopefully soon and the like. Maybe either for Carla or Patti. You mentioned, I think, 86% for safety and reliability. Hopefully, that's things that wouldn't get disallowed or rejected. Just in terms of just the pieces, you know, how do you think about how much debate has there been over the rate base or capital part of the case relative to kind of operating costs and other stuff? Are there any kind of big rate base or spending programs that are most on the capital side that are most debated to watch out for?
I can start with that question. Well, as Carolyn pointed out, we're not making big bets. We're investing in diversity of infrastructure and capital. Our rate case reflects that. It is a big case. As you know, rate cases are the most litigated thing at the PUC, and so there's focus on all the components, all the usual ones that you would expect. Underground is a new program, so there's questions about undergrounding. Again, I think it's about 18%-20% of our capital plan.
That's right.
I think we've done well presenting a really solid, strong case. As rate cases go, when we get the proposed decision, we'll have an opportunity to review it. There's going to be opportunity to engage with the Commission, to respond to intervener comments. We'll just be, it'll be the start of a conversation when we get that case, but we're excited for it. No surprises at this point.
Anthony Crowdell, Mizuho. Carolyn, I just wanted to reconcile, I guess, the comment to Julian's question on dividend. I think you said low and slow was your guidance, you also said in line with earnings growth, which 9%-10%, they don't reconcile. What should we be thinking of for dividend growth? Low or do you believe slow is 9%-10%, I guess maybe is a better question.
Well, I think the.
It depends on your starting point.
Yeah.
Right?
Depends on your starting point. Yeah. No, the key is that we are not targeting a dividend payout, and it will not be close to what you would, in comparison to our peers. That's what we're really trying to relay. One of the key messages here is that it will grow, but it will be slow and it will not be, we're not trying to chase-
Peers.
Chase, chase our peers.
Yeah. Your point is right.
I just want to make sure that that's the key message that we're trying to send there.
Yeah. Your point is right, though 9%-10% growth is nice, we hope people like that.
Yeah.
You know, if we end up there, we'll see where we end up. That's really the goal. Again, the balance that we are always making is balancing the needs of our customers and the system. That's our first and that will always be our first and ultimate priority. That works for investors too, because investing in this infrastructure is obviously how we drive earnings, but it's how we add value. Customers want permanent infrastructure investment solutions. So where we're debating dollars to go to the dividend, we're gonna prioritize dollars invested in infrastructure in our system, and then balance the needs of the dividend appropriately. Thanks, Anthony. Yeah.
Hi, Patti and team. It's Constantine here, Lednev with Guggenheim Partners. I had a question on the energy transition. You mentioned that some of this takes off in the later years. Do you think that there's any rate design issues that you need to work through to make sure that the kind of the adoption is done correctly and smoothly?
Yeah. Well, Carla hit on it a little bit, and I'll turn it back to you, Carla, if you want to add anything. Obviously, we do think a fixed charge is an important part of the transition here. There's been a lot of, I'd say noise about an income graduated fixed charge. It was directed by the legislature. We've participated and we're required to file a proposal with the guidance of the legislature to have the income graduated. The thing to remember is our current rates also have income qualifications. Our most vulnerable customers qualify for a special rate, and we think that's an important part of making sure that no one is left behind in this clean energy transition, that customers have access to energy that they can afford.
We see real benefits in having a well-designed fixed charge. There's going to be a lot of discussions about that, but I think that's an important part to both equitably allocate costs and in a way that reflects that everyone uses the grid. We really, we think that's probably gonna be the biggest change in rate design that has come in a very long time. We look forward to working with the state on that. Carla, maybe you want to add some thoughts on that.
I'll just add, Pat is totally right. The fixed charge is a big component, and we're also continuing to innovate on the volumetric charge as well, on the electric charge. We have some very innovative rate designs for transportation electrification, getting people to charge at the right time of day. The state already has TOU pricing. We're looking at what is the appropriate TOU periods given the shift in consumption. Work on the fixed charge and the volumetric rate as well.
That's a very good point.
Excellent. One quick follow-up on cost of capital. I mean, a lot of folks on our side are obviously tracking kind of how the capital market conditions are evolving. With the remeasurement period at the end of the year, in the fall, do you see stakeholders paying attention to that and kind of seeing where that is trending? That's obviously trending towards a higher, to a shift higher.
I would offer a couple of things. The fact that our cost of capital and our ROE is set outside of rate proceedings is another thing to love about the California regulatory construct. It is more formulaic, and that's a good thing. We do know that this past year, when it was scheduled to trigger to reduce, the state worked with us because of the extraordinary conditions that were occurring around that. It's possible that there will be discussion about that as this triggers and has a potential to go up. I think it's really important for all of you to know is we plan very conservatively. We don't plan for the trigger. We don't expect the trigger, though formulaically it should in fact go up. We'll work through the process. I don't know, Carla, maybe you'd want to add anything.
No, I think you hit upon it. Again, the fact that we have this process where we're gonna provide our data. Just like last year, we had a very data-rich, fact-based proposal, and we saw a good outcome. I think you'll see questions at the PUC from interveners as, if this triggers. We'll be prepared to present our case at that time.
Okay. Oh, are we out of time? Time for one more. Okay, sorry. Time for one more question in the back. Yeah, thanks.
Hi, this is Sofie from Sixth Street. First of all, today's been really great and super impressive, so and appreciate you guys taking the time for this Q&A session at the end.
Thanks.
One question I had was, recently, you were in the market in relation to an amend and extend of the $2.7 billion term loan. Was just curious what the status of that is, following, I think it was shelved yesterday. Should we expect now that that is just repaid at maturity in circa two years time, or will you be coming back to market?
That loan's maturity is not until 2025. We continually look to efficiently finance or refinance, we're also very disciplined. We'll pick our time where it makes most sense. The market this past week was particularly-
It's not a good time to be in the market.
-not attractive. It was choppy, particularly with the debt ceiling discussions going on.
We'll be opportunistic.
Yeah.
You know, we'll look for the right times in the market. When it's not right, we're gonna make the most conservative choice.
That makes sense. Thanks.
Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Team, you can exit, I'll make my closing remarks.
Okay.
I think I stand between you and cocktails, so we'll make this quick. This is the end of the webcast? No. After my closing remark. I'm sorry. This is why Jonathan's in charge of logistics. Thank you. First of all, if I could, if you would please join me in thanking the IR team for all their hard work getting you all here. I was gonna make a joke about institutional investors voting for the best IR team, but I'll save that for later. Thank you to our guests. I see Brian is still here. I don't know if Ann is still here. Thank you to our presenters and our guests. I hope that you found their presentations informative and additive, so thank you. We can give a little love to our presenters.
Now I'd like to thank you. I'd like you to thank you for making the trip and for investing in our story. Look, we're up to something really special here. This isn't your normal portfolio company. I think you all know that, and I know that. We appreciate your support because your investment in us is our ability to make the world a safer place, our ability to show the world. I loved what Ann Patterson said about showing that the world is watching how we're gonna do the clean energy transition here in California, and I hope you were inspired by some of the technologies you saw today because that's the caliber of work that we have going on all over the company.
The clean energy transition is happening here, and your investment in us allows us to make that happen faster. We're so thankful for that. We are writing the redemption story of PG&E, and you are along for the ride, and we're very grateful. I'm finding a lot of joy personally in this ride, and I hope you are too. We just wanna make sure that no one misses the moment. This is gonna be a great story, and you'll be able to say that you were part of it too. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for coming to California. We can't wait. For those of you who are staying over, tomorrow's gonna be an equally impressive day. We can't wait to have you for that as well. Thanks so much, and thank you to everyone who signed on the webcast. Please be safe out there.