PG&E Joins White House Climate Initiative, Says Modern Electric Grid is Vital to Long-Term Clean Energy Goals

In a show of support for the Obama administration’s push for a strong
international agreement on climate change, Pacific Gas and Electric
Company (PG&E) stood with the president and senior administration
officials at the White House today as they announced new pledges by
major companies to reduce greenhouse gases and address the impacts of
global warming.

PG&E was among the companies signing on to the administration’s American
Business Act on Climate initiative, which is aimed at rallying U.S.
companies behind the need for action on climate change ahead of
international climate talks in Paris next month. The utility’s pledge
outlined a series of actions it plans to pursue.

PG&E Corporation Chairman, CEO and President Tony Earley was one of a
handful of business leaders who met this morning with President Obama
and top administration advisers for a roundtable discussion on climate
change.

During the discussion, Earley highlighted PG&E and California as
evidence that smart energy policies can fuel innovation and drive
significant emissions reductions. Earley emphasized that modernizing the
electric grid is vital to achieving the nation’s clean energy goals. He
said that an advanced grid is the platform for integrating and
maximizing the benefits of a range of clean, efficient new energy
technologies—from solar panels to electric vehicles, batteries and smart
devices.

“A modern grid is absolutely essential to integrating and optimizing all
of the new clean energy technologies we’re seeing today and to our
success in achieving our shared goals for reducing greenhouse gases,”
Earley said.

Earley cautioned, however, that existing regulatory policies that
support investment in the grid are not keeping pace with changes driven
by technology and innovation.

“We have to get the policies right—both at the state and federal level.
Tax policies, permitting policies and ratemaking policies. If we get
them right, utilities will make the right investments to not only
achieve our climate change goals but to create good jobs as part of a
clean energy economy,” he said.

Such investments were among the elements spelled out in PG&E’s pledge,
which also includes actions over the next five years to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, improve infrastructure resiliency and enable
the utility’s customers and employees to contribute as well.

Below is the full list of proposed actions PG&E pledged to pursue:

• Facilitate deployment and integration of low-carbon, clean energy
  technologies:
  • Provide PG&E’s nearly 16 million customers with an electricity
    supply that is more than 60 percent carbon-free, making it one of
    the cleanest electricity supply portfolios of any investor-owned
    utility in the country.
  • Support the implementation of the Clean Power Plan by working with
    the state of California and other stakeholders to ensure its
    effective implementation.
  • Invest approximately $3 billion a year through 2020 to both
    modernize the grid to make it more resilient and facilitate PG&E’s
    vision of the Grid of Things™—a grid that will integrate
    distributed solar, energy storage, electric vehicles and other
    low-carbon technologies.
  • Expand the system-wide deployment of our mobile gas leak detection
    system that uses the most sophisticated, cutting-edge technology
    to find more natural gas leaks faster—helping to improve our
    ability to prioritize repairs and replacements, which enhances
    public safety and reduces the amount of methane released to the
    atmosphere.
• Support our customers and communities:
  • Continue to lead and innovate on energy efficiency by helping our
    customers save approximately 4,400 GWh of electricity and 90
    million therms of natural gas, avoiding about the same amount of
    power used by 600,000 homes in PG&E’s service area.
  • Weatherize 500,000 homes to help low-income customers reduce
    energy use, better manage energy costs, and increase safety,
    health and comfort.
  • Facilitate the rapid adoption of rooftop solar installations by
    improving upon our current ability to interconnect a solar system
    in three days or less—among the fastest process times in the
    nation—to the point where our interconnection process is fully
    automated.
  • Dedicate more than $5 million over the next five years to continue
    to invest in partnerships that support clean energy deployment in
    underserved communities, including support for solar and renewable
    energy education and funding for solar panel installations in
    underserved communities, working in partnership with non-profit
    organizations.
  • Work with regulators to agree on programs that will allow
    continued acceleration of repairs and replacements to eliminate
    non-hazardous methane leaks in our natural gas distribution system
    to maintain a near zero “workable” leaks backlog and further
    reduce other minor leak backlogs.
• Take action in our operations and encourage our employees to do the
  same:
  • Expand our fleet of alternative-fuel vehicles—one of the nation’s
    largest among electric and gas utilities—by investing at least
    one-third of our annual fleet procurement spend in electric
    vehicles, totaling more than $100 million.
  • Achieve top decile performance in facility energy and water
    reduction among industry peers—reducing the environmental
    footprint of our facilities (as reduced energy and water use
    translates into greenhouse gas savings), while also providing an
    enhanced workplace for our employees.
  • Build upon our existing employee incentive programs that offer
    discounts for rooftop solar installation and the purchase of
    electric vehicles to encourage employees to take action at their
    homes.

About PG&E

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E
Corporation (NYSE:PCG), is one of the largest combined natural gas
and electric utilities in the United States. Based in San Francisco,
with more than 20,000 employees, the company delivers some of the
nation’s cleanest energy to nearly 16 million people in Northern and
Central California. For more information, visit www.pge.com/
and www.pge.com/en/about/newsroom/index.page.

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Note: The statement in this press release about projected annual
capital expenditures is a forward-looking statement that is necessarily
subject to various risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ
materially. The forecast of capital expenditures for 2020 is consistent
with the electric portion of the annual capital expenditure forecast
through 2019 that was previously disclosed by PG&E Corporation and
PG&E. (See their joint Current Report on Form 8-K dated September 8,
2015.) Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially
include:

• whether regulatory agencies authorize the capital expenditure
  forecasts and associated rate recovery;
• changes in cost forecasts or the scope and timing of planned work
  resulting from changes in customer demand for electricity and natural
  gas or other reasons;
• whether PG&E Corporation and the Utility can continue to access
  capital markets and other sources of debt and equity financing in a
  timely manner on acceptable terms;
• the impact of any changes in federal or state tax laws, policies,
  regulations, or their interpretation; and
• the other factors disclosed in PG&E Corporation’s and the Utility’s
  joint Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2014
  and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended March 31 and
  June 30, 2015.

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