Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report 2020

Our Approach

PG&E is committed to expanding the use of clean distributed energy options to meet customer energy, resiliency, and affordability needs, while supporting California’s greenhouse gas reduction and other environmental goals.

PG&E provides a variety of tools and resources for customers who want to use solar energy, other distributed generation, and storage. Our website provides information on the process of adopting solar and helps customers determine if solar is right for them. PG&E also offers incentive programs for low-income solar, solar thermal water heating, fuel cells, wind and battery storage.

Customers who want to invest in solar, but are unable to install on-site generation, can enroll in PG&E’s community renewables programs, which give customers the option to purchase up to 100 percent of their electricity from a program generating solar power within California.

2019 Milestones

In 2019, PG&E reached a milestone of nearly 465,000 customer solar systems—more than 4,400 megawatts (MW)—connected to PG&E’s electric grid. During the year, PG&E connected 60 percent of customer solar systems to the electric grid within three days.

An increasing number of customers are adding storage to their solar systems or installing stand-alone storage. As of year-end 2019, there were more than 8,000 customers with battery storage at their homes or businesses (125 MW of capacity). In 2019, installed customer storage capacity more than doubled compared to 2018.

In addition to facilitating solar adoption, PG&E continued to support clean energy technologies through direct incentives and customer education:

• Supported emerging distributed technologies. As of year-end 2019, PG&E had provided financial incentives for more than 4,200 projects through the Self-Generation Incentive Program, representing $668 million in incentives and approximately 350 MW of capacity for energy storage, fuel cells, wind turbines, biomass and other distributed generation technologies.
• Supported customer solar water heating. We provided average incentives of about $3,400 each to single-family residential solar water heating projects, and an average of $54,000 for multi-family residential and commercial solar water heating installations. These incentives have helped support nearly 2,200 gas-offsetting projects of all types since the program’s inception, which, in total, are expected to avoid more than 2.1 million natural gas therms annually. The solar water heating program is scheduled to run through July 31, 2020 or until the budget of $250 million is exhausted, whichever occurs first, though state legislation may further extend the program.
• Raised customer awareness of solar power and other clean generation and storage technology options. Through our Pacific Energy Training Center, we offered a wide range of training opportunities on solar and other technologies for different audiences and education levels, both live and simulcast. We held 44 classes on solar and other technologies in 2019 with nearly 1,500 attendees in total.

Measuring Progress

PG&E’s service area has seen consistent growth in customer solar adoption in recent years, averaging more than 60,000 interconnected solar systems per year over the last five years.