2008 Corporate Responsibility Report

How we are creating a smarter foundation for a sustainable future
Investing for the Future: Smart Grid
Photo: Lewis Stewart

Energy customers today demand more than reliable service at a reasonable price. As the threat of global warming increases, more customers also expect their energy to be delivered in a sustainable manner.

PG&E aims to reconcile these potentially competing objectives by working smarter. By leveraging the power of information to better understand and control every section of our grid—from generation, through transmission and distribution, to the customer’s site—we believe we can build a "smart grid" to increase service reliability, lower costs by improving system efficiency and smoothly integrate the next wave of renewable resources.

A smart grid doesn’t consist of a defined set of components or procedures that utilities can buy today from vendors and install tomorrow. Rather, it represents a vision for continuously upgrading the efficiency and effectiveness of electric system operations through greater and more refined use of sensing, communications, computing and control technologies.

For example, if sensors detect a sudden drop in electric generation due to a change in wind energy output, that information can be communicated instantly to a computerized control device on the grid, which trips relays to protect key circuits or triggers a customer demand response event to reduce loads on our system, maintaining reliability.

PG&E is laying the foundation for a smart grid with its SmartMeter™ program. Last year, these meters allowed PG&E to successfully deploy our SmartRate program, which rewards customers for shifting or reducing energy usage during periods of peak demand. And our new generation of SmartMeter™ electric meters include essential smart grid technologies, such as remotely upgradeable computing capability, home area networking gateways to help control appliances and energy displays and remote connect/disconnect switches.

We are also investigating the impact on the grid of charging electric vehicles—and how to implement a robust "smart charging" infrastructure to enable vehicles to recharge batteries automatically when ample electric supply is available.

In the coming year, PG&E plans to conduct a series of smart grid technology pilots, including a major one in San Francisco, to test the integration of demand response, distribution automation and distributed generation. We are also actively involved in industry efforts to develop technology standards to allow easier integration of diverse solutions from multiple vendors and greater economies of scale.

While the journey will take many years, PG&E is committed to realizing value for our customers and communities each step of the way toward a smart grid.

Laying the Foundation: PG&E’s SmartMeter™ Program

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PG&E’s SmartMeter™ program is a critical component of our effort to dramatically enhance the way we deliver service to our customers and an essential foundation upon which we are building a smarter grid.

Our award-winning SmartMeter™ program is the nation’s largest deployment of advanced metering infrastructure to date. By year-end 2008, we installed more than 1.7 million high-tech gas and electric meters for our customers, up from 278,000 at the end of 2007. We expect to install nearly 10 million of these meters by early 2012.

The program provides our customers with a number of benefits, including better information and the ability to make cost-saving choices about the way they use energy. It will also give PG&E new rapid-response capabilities to restore service following an outage, as well as opportunities for enhanced, more personalized customer service.

The program experienced a number of important highlights in 2008:

  • We began to provide participating customers with online access to their energy use data through pge.com. These customers can now review their detailed energy use on a day-after basis—daily data for gas, and hourly or at 15-minute intervals for electric. Over time, we will provide them with an expanding set of tools for analyzing their energy use.
  • We launched the SmartRate pricing plan, the nation’s first broad-based critical peak pricing plan for residential and small and medium business customers. Customers can save on their cumulative summer electric bills by lowering usage on up to 15 critical peak events, typically hot summer afternoons. More than 10,000 customers participated in 2008. On average, these customers reduced their electric use during nine critical peak periods by 17 percent.
  • We adopted the latest automated metering technology for our SmartMeter™ electric system, including programmable digital meters and a robust radio frequency mesh network. This feature-rich and flexible technology provides a solid platform for future innovation.
  • We maintained our commitment to reuse existing meters whenever possible, and we recycled 380,000 unusable meters, totaling more than 2.7 million pounds of scrap metal and glass.