Date
01/16/2026
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Wen Tu, Senior Director of Integrated Planning at PG&E
The electrical grid is at a crossroads. Explosive demand from power-hungry data centers, electrification from new EVs and other new transportation methods, plus the urgent need for climate resilience, have meant utilities across North America are facing a level of grid complexity that traditional planning methods just cannot handle.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), is one of the largest utilities in the U.S., serving natural gas and electricity to 16 million people across Northern California. With clean energy transitions across California taking shape, PG&E recognized that to help build the grid of tomorrow, it must fundamentally change how it planned today. Out went the operations silos, in came new and pioneering integrated grid planning to transform how it evaluates, prioritizes, and executes grid investments. Marc Lamoureux at IFS Copperleaf and Wen Tu, Senior Director of Integrated Planning at PG&E, explain how today, the company is building the consumer services of tomorrow.
Traditional utilities methods have heavily relied on siloed planning processes—generation is separate from transmission, and transmission is separate from distribution. But in today’s high-stakes energy landscape, which faces climate-driven wildfires, extreme weather, and surging energy demand, those silos are becoming a liability.
Global pressures raise the utility stakes
The utility industry is entering a period of major transformation whether it likes it or not, and it needs an electrical grid today that can keep up with tomorrow’s challenges. Recent Deloitte research “2026 Power and Utilities Industry Outlook” puts the challenges into perspective, “Utilities are under pressure to meet the energy demands of the AI economy while maintaining affordability. Driven by AI training workloads, alongside electrification in transportation and industry, peak demand is projected to grow by approximately 26% by 2035, testing today’s grid limits. At the same time, new supply is not coming on fast enough and reliability pressures are mounting.”
PG&E faced pressing issues that needed addressing, quickly.
“Across the U.S., and even across the globe, the utilities industry is being forced to evolve, quickly,” explains Wen Tu, Senior Director of Integrated Planning at PG&E.“Electrification, EV growth, a pressing need to focus on renewable energy, and the impacts of climate change are all impacting how utilities operate. Today’s customer needs are multidimensional, and it was important that we met and addressed these changing needs efficiently.”
New frameworks required to plan for the grid of tomorrow
In response, PG&E, began an integrated grid planning (IGP) initiative in 2024, applying for the first time a comprehensive, enterprise-wide framework to capital and asset strategy that allows its business leaders and decision makers to prioritize the right work at the right time, optimize limited capital, and dynamically adapt to change. IGP provided a strategic decision-making layer that enables PG&E to answer critical questions such as “What work should we do? When should we do it? And how can we execute it most efficiently?”
The company trialed work bundling across its grid portfolio. With IGP, PG&E grouped projects and coordinated execution across multiple programs. The results were impressive and PG&E now uses Integrated Planning to manage its complex portfolio of assets, enabling better resource allocation with significant cost benefits, and a more reliable, consistent service to its 16 million customers.
The partnership is business critical, as Tu stresses: "I really believe that integrated grid planning, the framework that we are developing with our partners allows us to be agile. We piloted integrated planning across a $100 million portfolio and were able to see a 20% unit cost efficiency. This allowed us to reinvest millions back into the business, and therefore customers to better address their needs.”
Fixing the siloed approach
Prior to integrated grid planning, PG&E relied on a patchwork of spreadsheets, Power BI reports, and homegrown tools for investment planning. While functional for individual lines of business, these disconnected systems made it difficult to see the full picture. PG&E isn’t alone—still, many utilities continue to struggle with fragmented planning processes, siloed data, and disconnected teams across finance, operations, and asset management.
“Before our deployment of integrated planning, we had a diverse set of tools that we utilized for asset planning—but we lacked an enterprise tool that helped us efficiently manage system planning. The disconnect in our systems meant that we regularly faced challenges to do with capital efficiency and ensuring every dollar was directed to the highest-value work, reliability and customer outages, and strategic alignment when it came to execution with long-term goals,” Tu explains.
The new planning era is here: Integrated grid planning
“We knew that we needed a more holistic, data-driven approach that would allow us to align resources across multiple programs and lines of business. Wildfire risk, capacity growth, and aging assets were all pressing concerns, and it’s what led us transition from siloed planning to a unified, data-driven approach.”
By moving to a unified platform, utilities are able to aggregate all investments in a single system of record and value them consistently. For example, companies can evaluate diverse investments—from wildfire mitigation to capacity upgrades—on a common economic scale, ensuring that every decision aligns with corporate strategies and regulatory commitments.
Optimize planning, then optimize again
As Tu explains, “Now, we can aggregate all of our investments in one place, value them consistently, and plan for the next decade—something we simply couldn't do before. We’ve been able to avoid redundant field work, reduce outages, and deliver measurable financial and operational benefits.”
“For example, by consolidating more than 80 data sets across 20 systems into a single source of truth, and creating over 17,000 bundled investment decisions, we’ve now established a transparent, scalable model for investment planning.”
From here on, scenario modeling and continuous re-optimization enable PG&E to assess asset risk, generate investment plans, and optimize portfolios in alignment with strategic objectives, regulatory requirements, and resource constraints.
…and here’s what they didn’t know before!
As a result of the successful pilot, PG&E identified millions of customer outage minutes avoided, measurable cost savings, improved customer reliability, and a clear pathway to long-term system resilience.
The future is integrated
PG&E’s journey is a living example of the importance of utility management—moving from fragmented, reactive decision-making to a unified, strategic engine. The company is now better positioned to deliver a resilient, reliable, and sustainable energy system for its Californian customer base. In an era defined by rapid electrification and climate volatility, the old ways of planning are no longer sufficient. For the industry, PG&E represents a blueprint for the future.
