PG&E and the wildfire-prone grid of northern California
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is the largest investor-owned utility in California. It delivers electricity to roughly 16 million people across 70,000 square miles of Northern and Central California, from the Oregon border down to Santa Barbara County. Its grid serves the Bay Area, San Francisco, the Central Valley and the Sierra foothills, and is one of the most exposed networks in the U.S. to wildfire-driven blackouts. The PG&E outage map is the tool most customers check first when their power goes out.
- The size of the PG&E network and the regions it covers
- Why power outages happen on PG&E lines and how often
- The wildfire mitigation programs that now drive most planned shutoffs
- The investments and technologies PG&E uses to detect and restore power faster
A 70,000-square-mile network from the Pacific coast to the Sierras
PG&E's territory stretches across Northern and Central California, covering 70,000 square miles and about 27% of the state's land area. The company runs both a gas and an electric utility, but the electric system is what determines how power outages happen and how fast service comes back.
Key figures for the electric network:
- Roughly 5.5 million electric customer accounts.
- About 16 million people served, including residents and businesses on PG&E delivery lines.
- 27 California counties contain high-fire-risk parts of the PG&E network.
- The grid serves the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Valley, the rural northern coast and the Sierra foothills, all with very different geographies and different exposure to outages.
PG&E is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and is a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE: PCG).
Why a single windstorm can trigger a Public Safety Power Shutoff
Outages on the PG&E system fall into a few well-defined categories. The mix is unusual compared with most U.S. utilities because of California's geography and fire risk.
Wildfire-driven outages
This is the largest source of disruption on the PG&E network and the reason for most planned shutoffs. Two distinct programs apply:
- Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) : PG&E proactively de-energizes lines during high-fire-risk weather, typically when strong dry winds combine with low humidity. PSPS events can affect tens or hundreds of thousands of customers at a time, sometimes for one or two days.
- Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings (EPSS) : a more targeted protection. PG&E reports that EPSS now protects about 2 million customers and around 47,000 miles of powerline in high-fire-risk areas. When a fault is detected, the line is cut within one tenth of a second, which prevents ignition but causes short, localized blackouts.
Severe weather
Outside the fire season, the main outage drivers are atmospheric river storms, heavy snow in the Sierra, high winds along the Bay Area coast and occasional flooding. PG&E's territory regularly experiences multi-day winter storm events that bring down lines and damage substations.
Equipment and aging infrastructure
Like most U.S. utilities, PG&E operates equipment built over several decades. Older transformers, overhead conductors and poles fail more often, and replacement programs are running in parallel with the wildfire mitigation work.
Vegetation
Trees and branches falling on overhead lines remain one of the largest sources of unplanned power outages on the network. PG&E reports nearly 960,000 tree inspections or removals per year as part of its vegetation management program.
Heat and demand stress
During heat waves, the entire CAISO region (where PG&E sits) can be pushed close to its capacity limits, with localized rolling blackouts possible if statewide supply runs short.
Wildfire mitigation: the largest grid-hardening effort by a U.S. utility
Since 2018, PG&E has been running what the company describes as the largest wildfire mitigation program ever undertaken by a U.S. utility. It is the single biggest factor reshaping the network's outage profile.
Wildfire mitigation in numbers (PG&E, October 2025)
1,000 miles of powerlines undergrounded in high-fire-risk areas as of October 2025, with a target of 1,600 miles by end of 2026.
Around 1,400 miles of strengthened poles and covered conductors installed.
Roughly 1,600 weather stations and over 650 HD cameras in operation.
Around 8.4% of system-wide wildfire ignition risk permanently removed since 2023.
Cost per mile of undergrounding has fallen from $4.0 million to $3.1 million between 2021 and 2025.
The program combines several layers of protection. Undergrounding eliminates nearly all wildfire ignition risk on the lines that are buried, but it is expensive and slow. In parallel, PG&E hardens overhead lines with covered conductors and stronger poles, increases vegetation management around lines, and operates a 24/7 Hazard Awareness and Warning Center (HAWC) that combines weather data, satellite imagery and AI fire-risk models.
PG&E reports that no major wildfire in 2023 or 2024 was caused by its equipment, after a series of catastrophic fires in 2017 to 2019 that pushed the company into Chapter 11. The 2026-2028 Wildfire Mitigation Plan, submitted in April 2025 to California's Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, plans to add nearly 1,100 miles of undergrounding and 570 miles of overhead hardening over three years.
Burying 10,000 miles of power lines underground
Beyond wildfire-specific work, PG&E is running a broader grid modernization program funded both through its own capital budget and through federal support.
Federal funding milestone
In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy approved a conditional $15 billion loan to PG&E for grid modernization. It is one of the largest federal loans ever approved for a single U.S. utility, and supports the integration of clean energy, transmission upgrades and reliability improvements across the network.
Major investment areas include:
- Transmission and substation upgrades to support a faster-growing California load, particularly EV charging and electrified heating.
- Distribution automation, with reclosers, sectionalizing switches and FLISR-style fault location and isolation systems being deployed across the territory.
- Grid software and outage management systems, paired with the company's smart-meter rollout (PG&E was one of the first U.S. utilities to deploy advanced metering at scale).
- Storm hardening on the coastal and northern parts of the network, where high winds and saturated soil increase the rate of overhead failures.
AI-powered weather stations, drones and the Wildfire Safety Operations Center
PG&E uses one of the most extensive utility-operated weather and detection networks in the U.S.
Weather stations and HD cameras
The roughly 1,600 weather stations across the territory feed real-time data into PG&E's fire-risk models, which decide when EPSS settings are activated and when PSPS events are triggered. The 650-plus HD cameras in high-risk areas are used to detect early ignitions and confirm conditions on the ground before re-energizing lines after a shutoff.
Drones and aerial inspections
PG&E uses drones to inspect equipment in steep or remote terrain. In 2024 alone, around 220,000 poles were inspected from the air, and a new aerial span inspection program is being piloted in 2026 to 2028 to look at conditions between poles, where many ignitions originate.
AI for weather and asset monitoring
The company uses AI models to refine fire-risk forecasts and is in the early stages of deploying real-time monitoring sensors that can detect vibrations, sounds and light patterns indicating an anomaly on a circuit before it causes a power outage.
Smart meters and outage detection
PG&E was an early deployer of advanced metering and uses smart-meter data to detect outages at the address level. Crews can confirm restoration without customer phone calls, which speeds up event closeout after large storms or PSPS events.
Battery storage on the grid
PG&E has been one of the most active U.S. utilities in connecting grid-scale battery storage. Batteries on the system help cover evening peaks when solar drops off, support reliability during heat waves, and reduce the risk of supply-driven outages across the broader California grid.
Outage map, PSPS alerts and CARE rate assistance
PG&E outage map
PG&E publishes a public outage map updated in near real-time. Customers can check the status of an outage by address or zip code, see estimated restoration times and watch crew progress on each event. The PG&E outage map is the primary tool used during major storms and PSPS events.
PG&E mobile app and alerts
The PG&E mobile app gives access to the outage map, lets customers report a power outage at their address, and pushes proactive SMS, email and app notifications when service is interrupted in their neighborhood. Alerts include estimated restoration times and updates as crews progress.
Wildfire Safety Progress map
A separate public map shows where undergrounding, overhead hardening and other mitigation work is planned, in progress, or completed, county by county across the Bay Area, the Central Valley and the high-fire-risk Sierra foothills.
EV charging programs
PG&E reports that around one in eight EVs in the U.S. plugs into its grid. The utility runs both public charging build-out programs and managed charging incentives that reward off-peak charging, with the goal of avoiding new evening peaks on local distribution lines.
Income-qualified discounts
The California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE) program, run through PG&E and other California IOUs, provides bill discounts to income-qualified customers. PG&E reports about 1.39 million customers enrolled in CARE.
2026 rate change
PG&E announced a 5% reduction in 2026 electric rates, applied to bundled customers (those who buy both delivery and generation from PG&E, about one third of total customers). Customers using a Community Choice Aggregator pay PG&E only for delivery and are not affected by this specific reduction.
Northern California's main ISPs
For a wider view of how the U.S. electric grid works and why outages happen, see the U.S. power outage page. For internet outages across the same California footprint, the most common providers are AT&T, Xfinity, Spectrum and Verizon.