For decades, utility planning has depended on disconnected processes, with generation, transmission, and distribution planned in isolation. But in today’s high-risk energy environment – marked by climate-driven wildfires, extreme weather events, and rapidly growing demand – those silos are now a serious vulnerability.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), one of the largest utilities in the United States, delivers natural gas and electricity to more than 16 million customers throughout Northern California. With California’s clean energy transition accelerating and pressing demand from AI data centers and electrification impacting the entire industry, PG&E determined that existing grid planning structures were insufficient to manage projected demand growth and risk exposure.
Legacy operational silos were replaced with an integrated grid planning model, reshaping how the utility assesses, prioritizes, and delivers grid investments.The utility industry is entering a period of major transformation. 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 operational and capital planning challenges requiring accelerated action.
“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.”
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. Following the pilot, PG&E expanded the use of Integrated Planning to manage its complex portfolio of assets, enabling better resource allocation, measurable cost benefits, and improved reliability outcomes.
Tu emphasizes the operational importance of the initiative: "I really believe that integrated grid planning, the framework that we are developing 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 better address customer needs.”
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. 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.
“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 to transition from siloed planning to a unified, data-driven approach.”
A unified planning platform allows utilities to aggregate 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.
As Tu explains, “Now with IGP we can aggregate all of our investments in one place, value them consistently, and plan for the next decade—something we 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.
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.
PG&E’s experience illustrates how integrated planning can shift utilities from program-based investment decisions to coordinated, portfolio-level governance and provides a reference point for utilities evaluating integrated planning approaches.
As demand growth accelerates and risk exposure increases, utilities may find that planning integration becomes less an efficiency initiative and more a governance requirement.
Wen Tu is Senior Director of Integrated Planning at PG&E. Marc Lamoureux is Principal Product Manager at IFS Copperleaf.
