PG&E outlines remediation progress, new 'trigger' tracking and cautions on reporting scope

PG&E used the CPUC quarterly ICA workshop to summarize its remediation plan status and to announce a new circuit 'trigger date' tracking field designed to show when a circuit is flagged for re‑analysis.

PG&E presenter Gabriel walked through remediation work addressing input‑data and equipment‑setting problems, generation nameplate logic, and the new trigger‑date field. He described the new field as a way to show, on a circuit‑by‑circuit basis, when a circuit was first triggered for refresh and therefore how 'old' ICA values are in practice. Gabriel said the field is not retroactive because the utility only began recording it recently.

"We don't refresh every single circuit on the system every month ... We only refresh circuits that are triggered," Gabriel said, explaining the utility's prioritization and triage approach for computational and staffing resources.

Stakeholders pressed PG&E for an explicit count of circuits refreshed within one month (statute language stakeholders cite). PG&E said it will be able to report per‑circuit trigger and refresh intervals once a few months of trigger‑date data have accumulated and will publish those metrics in the next bianual report.

PG&E also described remediation steps already completed (corrections in the source model, vendor equipment libraries and automation to reduce recurring errors) and noted outstanding items such as loop‑circuit modeling and certain concordance tracking questions that require additional data or CPUC guidance.

Why it matters: The CPUC requires monthly refreshes for circuits that have changed; stakeholders said reporting that only shows broad three‑, six‑ and nine‑month buckets does not answer whether the utility meets the one‑month expectation for triggered circuits. PG&E said the new trigger‑date field will enable fine‑grained reporting but only after several months of data are recorded.

Stakeholder concerns and next steps: Parties asked PG&E to include small‑project concordance (applications that bypass engineering review) in its reporting or to explain precisely why doing so is impractical; PG&E said some very small projects automatically pass and do not produce the engineering review data needed to compute concordance. PG&E and other utilities agreed to provide more explanation in future bianual reports and to work with the commission on how to present these metrics.

Ending: PG&E said it expects to publish richer trigger and freshness metrics in the next bianual report and to continue incremental remediation work; stakeholders asked CPUC staff and utilities to coordinate a cross‑utility discussion to reconcile methodological differences and to clarify reporting expectations.