Pacific Gas and Electric CEO Patti Poppe has a series of monumental tasks before her.
There’s immense pressure for her company to reduce costs to ratepayers and mitigate the risk of its equipment igniting wildfires. And seven years after the utility declared bankruptcy, Poppe is under constant pressure to convince Wall Street financiers that PG&E is a safe investment.
Those three goals would appear to be in tension with each other. But Poppe says she’s found a way to tackle them simultaneously: Leverage technology to reduce maintenance costs while plowing profits into infrastructure projects. She’s calling it PG&E’s “simple, affordable model.”
POLITICO caught up with the utility executive to learn more about her financial strategy and hear her thoughts on wildfire liability, San Francisco’s push to buy its electricity grid and the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.
