PG&E’s Vision for Energy Efficiency: Delivering for Customers and Supporting Decarbonization

By: Pacific Gas and Electric Company via Business Wire

February 17, 2022 at 12:57 PM EST

PG&E Outlines Strategies to Help Customers Reduce Energy Use and Save Money, Enhance Grid Resiliency and Support Clean Energy Goals

This week, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is outlining strategies to broaden access to energy efficiency programs, improve customer affordability and continue supporting a carbon-neutral energy transition in its Energy Efficiency (EE) Plan for 2024- 2031. PG&E’s plan, submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), proposes to deliver $2.1 billion worth of electric and gas system benefits to customers, while also supporting equity and long-term development of EE in California as well as advocating for improvements to building codes and appliance standards.

“This proposal thoughtfully supports customer affordability and embraces a decarbonized future by providing customers with a variety of energy efficiency tools and solutions. Our programs are focused on our triple bottom line of supporting the customers we are privileged to serve, healing the planet, and driving California’s prosperity. All the initiatives outlined in the EE plan are done with one focus in mind: to better serve our customers,” said Aaron August, PG&E’s Vice President of Business Development and Customer Engagement.

PG&E’s EE proposal focuses on three driving principles:

Delivering Excellent Customer Experiences: PG&E’s plan provides for a broad array of energy-saving solutions to help meet the diverse needs of its customers across all customer sectors to help reduce energy use and save money. The plan makes it easier for customers to participate in energy efficiency programs and drives increased engagement in these solutions through more personalized customer experiences.

Environmental Stewardship: PG&E embraces its role in achieving California’s goal of carbon neutrality and transitioning the state to a decarbonized and more climate-resilient economy. The plan commits to achieving 35 million metric tons of lifetime CO2 emissions reductions by 2031—equal to removing 650,000 cars from the road.

In support of decarbonization, the plan highlights PG&E’s equipment incentive and financing programs, support for all-electric and electric-ready new homes and buildings, customer education, workforce education and training, and advocacy to improve appliance standards and building codes.

Being a Hometown Leader: The plan will help serve hometowns by expanding customer access with more equity-based program offerings, support customer resiliency in High Fire-Threat Districts by pairing new energy efficiency solutions with backup generation and microgrids, as well as enabling the workforce of tomorrow through education and training.

Over the next few weeks, the other utilities in the state will be filing similar EE strategic business plans with the CPUC. PG&E is committed to working with them to create complementary EE programs that will serve California.

In development of the plan PG&E prioritized affordability and the potential impact on customer bills. PG&E forecasts the plan will result in a small decrease in electric bills and a small increase in gas bills. The application proposes $1.4 billion to be collected in rates over a four-year period from 2024 through 2027. This includes costs to be collected on behalf of community choice aggregators and regional energy networks’ separate EE programs. The amount included in the application is less than the amount currently included in electric rates for energy efficiency programs, resulting in a potential rate decrease for electric customers.

About PG&E

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE: PCG), is a combined natural gas and electric utility serving more than 16 million people across 70,000 square miles in Northern and Central California. For more information, visit pge.com and pge.com/news.