PG&E CEO Geisha Williams Highlights California’s Clean Energy Progress and Key Challenge for the Future

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–In a keynote address today in New York City, PG&E Corporation President
and CEO Geisha Williams offered a progress report on California’s
clean-energy goals, as well as a preview of how the changing climate
could complicate the ability of the state’s energy companies to continue
their pursuit of those objectives.

Speaking at the 2018 Investor Summit on Climate Risk, co-hosted by Ceres
and the United Nations Foundation, Williams described the rapid growth
of clean-energy technologies in California as “extraordinarily
successful.” “We’ve gone farther than many thought possible, and we’ve
done it in record time,” Williams said.

Collectively, the state’s three largest investor-owned utilities are
running well ahead of schedule in providing their customers with
electricity from qualified renewable sources – primarily solar and wind.
PG&E now expects to show that the company reached the state’s target for
33 percent renewables in 2017 – three years early.

“In terms of greenhouse-gas emissions, the news is even better. When you
add in large hydro and nuclear, nearly 70 percent of the electricity on
PG&E’s grid is now GHG-free – something we’re very proud of,” Williams
said.

Yet Williams cautioned that California still has much farther to go in
meeting its longer-term GHG-emission goals for 2030.

“We’re talking about cutting emissions nearly in half – in the next 12
years – for the sixth largest economy in the world … That’s not a
transition in our energy economy, that’s a transformation,” Williams
said.

Success, Williams said, will require an intense effort to electrify the
transportation sector through the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles
and the charging infrastructure needed to fuel them, as well as a fully
modernized electric grid able to integrate an ever-expanding supply of
clean-energy technologies.

“We at PG&E are deeply committed to the California vision of a
sustainable energy future … We see the electric grid as a climate
solutions platform that offers the scale to support this
transformation,” Williams said.

What could stand in the way, Williams explained, is the financial
exposure to climate risks that California energy companies are now
facing in the wake of 2017’s devastating wildfires.

The fires “exposed a hidden and terrible irony,” Williams said. Because
the state allows investor-owned utilities to be held responsible for all
of the combined losses from such an event, even if all laws and
standards were met, it could undermine the industry’s efforts to further
reduce the GHG emissions that are driving climate change.

“This policy isn’t affordable, and it isn’t sustainable. Ultimately, it
carries grave implications for the industry’s financial health and our
ability to attract the investment the state needs to fulfill its climate
goals,” Williams said.

The lesson that the wildfires revealed is that “climate change doesn’t
just pose a threat to life and property. It also has the potential to
disrupt climate action. We need to think about this broadly as a
society. We’re going to have to look at climate change and its
consequences differently,” Williams said.

The answer, Williams suggested, will have to include a greater emphasis
on managing the climate risks to California’s communities and vital
infrastructure, and strategies for recovering quickly from extreme
weather events.

The urgency of the problem offers “an opportunity for California
policymakers, who have led the way on climate change, to ask ‘How can we
be a leader on climate resilience?’” Williams said.

She also expressed optimism about the outcome.

“The fact is, we’ve seen this kind of problem before. We’ve seen it with
flood risk. We’ve seen it with earthquake risk. And we’ve solved it. …
We’re Californians. We’re used to tackling big challenges.”

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 energy companies 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.

Contacts

PG&E Corporation
Media Relations, 415-973-5930