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Our primary responsibility is to provide safe and reliable gas and electric service to our customers. We invest more than $2 billion a year to maintain and upgrade our electrical system—poles, lines, transformers and a host of other associated equipment—to maintain public safety and minimize the cost and inconvenience to our customers as a result of outages.

PG&E works constantly to improve system reliability by improving crew training and response times, using sophisticated metrics to identify and address key problem areas, installing advanced distribution automation equipment to limit the scope and duration of outages and accelerating the replacement of equipment that has passed its useful life span.

A significant milestone in 2008 was the early completion of key work before the winter storm season arrived, thanks to the collaborative efforts of our engineers, estimators and planners, as well as our dedicated employees in the field. Throughout 2008, our crews installed more than 5,000 new pieces of protective equipment and technology to guard against and recover more quickly from power outages, including new line fuses, new line reclosers, upgrades of recloser controls and new overhead fault indicators, exceeding our annual goals.

PG&E continues to make progress in improving system reliability according to industry-accepted reliability standards, as shown by the indicators in the graph below. While our electric system reliability meets the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC’s) adequate service standard, we currently rank in the third and second quartiles for North American utilities, respectively, as measured by SAIDI and SAIFI.

Looking to the future, PG&E has asked the CPUC to approve a proposed multi-year initiative, the Cornerstone Improvement Program, to enhance reliability by increasing the available capacity and interconnectivity of our electric system, implementing more distribution automation and improving mainline protection on rural circuits. If approved and implemented, these initiatives are expected to provide significant long-term customer benefits, including a 25 percent reduction in SAIDI and a 33 percent reduction in SAIFI

Benchmarking PG&E's Reliability Performance