How PG&E Identified $60M in Avoidable Costs and Accelerates Design with CivilGrid

About PG&E

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the United States, providing natural gas and electricity to 16 million people across northern and central California. The company manages thousands of capital projects annually.

Across these programs, PG&E’s portfolio planning, engineering, and field teams share the same goal: deliver safe, affordable, and on-time infrastructure.

But even the most capable teams face structural industry challenges: accessing high-quality site data and efficiently executing work.

When portfolio planning is executed without complete site context and engineers wait months for basemaps before designing, projects churn, costs compound, and schedules delay.

PG&E needed a way to get accurate, complete site data into the hands of every stakeholder at the start of planning, not months into a project, so teams could execute confidently and keep work moving.

The Challenge: Data Access Created Inefficient Work and Compounding Costs

Utilities and infrastructure teams across the country face the same structural challenge: site data exists but it’s spread across asset owners and siloed systems (USGS, 811, USDA, EPA, DOTs, etc.). For PG&E, this gap hindered planning, scoping, and design workflows.

This obstacle impacted high-level portfolio planning, down to project-level design across Gas Distribution, Gas Transmission, and Survey teams. The Gas Distribution’s Program Management team had blind spots in portfolio planning without access to project site data. This meant that project teams also waited on data to begin work.

Sequential Workflows Created Dead Time and Cost

Before CivilGrid, it was common for Brad Carr’s Gas Transmission engineering team to wait 2 to 4 months for survey basemaps before starting design work. On the electric side, turnaround times stretched to 7 to 9 months. During that wait, project teams met biweekly with no substantial progress on the project.

“CivilGrid lets me continuously make progress. I’m not stuck waiting three or four months for survey.” — Brad Carr, Director of Gas Transmission Engineering, PG&E

Every day a project stays open adds cost. Team members charge time to projects where they cannot make headway, overhead accumulates, and compliance windows do not extend to accommodate delays.

The pressure isn’t just internal. External stakeholders, like cities and local agencies, are requiring longer and longer lead times for permitting which compresses the window available for design work even further.

Broad Survey Scope Drove Unnecessary Cost

Without preliminary data to narrow focus, survey crews covered entire intersections, multiple lanes, and alternative routes to create basemaps. In urban environments, sending a survey crew starts at $20,000-$30,000 and grows exponentially with size. Add on traffic control and costs add up quickly.

When every project begins with a broad, unscoped survey, the aggregate spend on unnecessary field work becomes substantial.

The Solution: Data Access Enables Better Planning

PG&E evaluated multiple options to solve their data access timing challenges. They chose CivilGrid for three critical capabilities:

1. Site data sourced directly from asset owners, available in seconds rather than months
2. Collaborative geospatial design workflows for every stakeholder
3. Execution risk analysis and resource planning for portfolio and project planning

CivilGrid streamlines PG&E’s records research process so project management, engineering, survey, environmental, land rights, and SUE can all start their work on day one. The result: faster, safer, and more affordable designs.

Project Data Availability and Timing for Portfolio Optimization

The Gas Distribution Main Replacement team had limited visibility into project paving and moratoria site data. The gap created blind spots in portfolio planning.

This crucial data mostly lived in people’s heads. This required staff continuity and individual initiative to surface these insights at the right time. In addition, new agency paving plans were not always communicated to the appropriate contacts or routed back to the project and program teams for consideration.

As a result, projects often advanced through planning, design, and permitting before paving moratoria, restrictive restoration requirements, or agency paving plans were identified.

This delayed visibility reduced opportunities for construction coordination, scope alignment, and cost sharing. In many cases, these constraints did not surface until the permitting process or even the pre-construction site walk with the city, long after resources and budgets had been committed.

This forced difficult late-stage decisions to either proceed with construction and costly restoration or revise plans. Both choices often led to portfolio churn, design rework, permit resubmittals, and sunk costs.

In 2026, PG&E and CivilGrid conducted a conflict analysis across more than 1,600 planned Gas Distribution projects, mapping project boundaries against city paving plans, moratoria, and right-of-way data to identify true paved-surface conflicts. The analysis uncovered more than $60 million in avoidable paving costs across the portfolio. These conflicts would otherwise have emerged as escalated restoration requirements, permit extensions, or design and permit rework.

With CivilGrid, project and portfolio management teams can now perform resource planning and execution risk analysis to support accurate budgeting, scheduling, and resourcing.

CivilGrid’s consolidated visibility of city paving projects, moratoria, and right-of-way information enables the Energy Delivery team to assess constraints, strategically prioritize work, and confidently coordinate work timing to share restoration costs. The CivilGrid platform enables PG&E to understand their costs and timelines before crews and capital are deployed. This means more affordable infrastructure replacement and minimized community impacts.

Speed to Execution for Engineering

CivilGrid provides engineering teams with a comprehensive, instant view of site conditions. This shifts the workflow from sequential (wait for data, then design) to concurrent (design continuously, refine when survey arrives).

“CivilGrid gives us a shared understanding so we’re not correcting each other’s work.” — Brad Carr, Director of Gas Transmission Engineering, PG&E

Reference Dataset for Route Analysis, Scoping, and QC

Brad and his team use CivilGrid as their first checkpoint for every project, even before funding approval.

For route analysis and scoping, CivilGrid allows engineers to understand subsurface congestion and potential conflicts immediately before getting in the field. Instead of surveying entire intersections, engineers can use CivilGrid’s preliminary data to narrow the survey scope to only the critical alignment, reducing survey costs, traffic control requirements, and turnaround time.

Instant site data means Brad’s team can identify the correct assessment methodology every time.

Out-of-the-Box Basemaps Enable Concurrent Design

CivilGrid’s site data serves as the primary basemap for design work, fundamentally changing PG&E’s workflow.

For some projects, like small replacement programs (valve replacements, short pipeline segments, routine maintenance), preliminary scoping initiatives, and other projects not requiring major excavations, only SUE (subsurface utility engineering) QL-D is required, which CivilGrid can provide entirely on its own. This allows PG&E to skip initial surveying entirely for these projects.

“We’ll only use CivilGrid’s basemap with no survey to design for low-risk projects,” Brad said. “It saves tens of thousands on surveys.”

For larger projects, CivilGrid enables concurrent design. Designers begin active design using CivilGrid backgrounds, progressing through 30%, 60%, 90%, and Issued for Construction phases continuously. When the survey basemap arrives, they swap it in and keep progressing.

“I can start working off CivilGrid basemap and keep the design moving. When I get the survey, I just swap it out and keep working. Project cost grows every day a project stays open. CivilGrid helps us mature designs faster to meet compliance dates.” — Brad Carr, Director of Gas Transmission Engineering, PG&E

The Impact: Continuous Progress, Cost Savings, and On-Time Compliance

CivilGrid has become the essential data foundation and collaborative workspace that allows PG&E to plan portfolios with confidence and keep design work moving continuously. Through this partnership with CivilGrid, PG&E has achieved:

• $60M+ in avoidable paving costs identified across 1,600+ planned projects through portfolio-wide conflict analysis
• 3 to 4 months saved per project through concurrent design using CivilGrid basemaps instead of waiting for survey
• $20,000 to $30,000 saved per project in engineering time by eliminating dead time between design milestones
• 30 to 40% reduction in survey costs through targeted scoping enabled by preliminary CivilGrid data
• Assessment method identified at month 1.5 instead of month 5–6, avoiding costly program management changes
• 50% reduction in potential design changes by identifying conflicts during research
• Fewer RFIs during construction due to higher confidence in design data and earlier conflict resolution

These improvements reduce field time, strengthen community safety, and help PG&E maximize its return on investment for every capital project.