Release Date: July 27, 2006
Contact: PG&E News Department (415) 973-5930

Pacific Gas and Electric Company Fully Restores Power to 1.2 Million Customers Affected by Heat Storm

SAN FRANCISCO – Pacific Gas and Electric Company crews worked through the night to restore power to the last remaining customers affected by this past week’s scorching heat. Several consecutive days of extraordinary triple-digit temperatures combined with record-breaking energy demand overheated electrical equipment and caused outages at over 13,000 separate locations affecting 1.2 million customers throughout PG&E’s service area. The hardest hit region was the Bay Area, with more than 800,000 customers affected. Within the Bay Area, the greater San Jose and East Bay regions endured the most outages with nearly 700,000 customers affected throughout the heat wave.

Overheated transformers were the primary cause of the power outages. The company mobilized more than 1,000 additional people to support the restoration efforts in the areas hardest hit, and restored more than 96 percent of affected customers in less than 24 hours. As PG&E crews worked to replace damaged transformers, they installed new higher capacity transformers at some locations. PG&E will now begin the process of assessing the week’s events and identifying the potential causes of why the transformers overheated to help ensure that this event doesn’t happen again during a comparable period of extended hot weather and high demands.

“We apologize for the extended power outages some of our customers endured, and we appreciate their understanding while our crews worked around the clock to complete a historic and heroic restoration effort,” said Jeff Butler, senior vice president of energy delivery for PG&E. “The extreme weather and its impact on our system created an unprecedented challenge. We will learn from this experience and take the necessary steps to help prevent this type of event from occurring again.”

PG&E’s Safety Net program will provide automatic payments to residential customers who were without power for a cumulative total of 48 hours or more since Friday afternoon, the time PG&E began tracking outage information associated with the heat storm. The payments will range from $25 up to $100, depending on the length of the outage. Customers do not have to call or apply for a Safety Net payment. The check is automatically generated by PG&E and delivered 45 to 60 days after today. The payment is a good faith effort by PG&E to acknowledge the inconvenience extended outages place on our customers.