Pacific Gas and Electric Company

Pacific Gas and Electric Company is the San Francisco-based utility serving roughly 16 million people across northern and central California, and one of the largest owners of hydroelectric infrastructure in the western United States. Its generation portfolio includes dozens of dams, powerhouses, canals and regulating reservoirs, much of it built between the 1900s and 1950s and now carrying a heavy capital renewal load as dam safety standards tighten. PG&E procures large civil contracts to keep that fleet in service. In July 2026 the utility awarded Granite Construction a $50 million contract to replace the spillway crest structure and chute at the Tiger Creek Regulator Dam in Amador County, a slab-and-buttress structure originally built in 1931 on the Mokelumne River system.

Numbers first: 106,681 circuit miles of electric distribution line, 18,466 circuit miles of interconnected transmission, 42,141 miles of natural gas distribution pipe and 6,438 miles of gas transmission pipe. Those are the utility’s own published figures, and they describe the physical plant that PG&E’s contractors and engineering firms spend their days on. The territory holding all of it runs about 70,000 square miles, from Eureka in the north to Bakersfield in the south and from the Pacific coast east to the Sierra Nevada, carrying 5.5 million electric accounts and 4.5 million gas accounts. Roughly 23,000 people work for the utility.

The company was incorporated in California in 1905 and is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission, a body the state legislature created in 1911. That relationship governs the procurement calendar more than anything else does. Every four years PG&E files a General Rate Case asking the CPUC to fund its operating and capital program, and the outcome determines what the utility can spend on the poles, pipe and civil work that follow.

Headquarters is 300 Lakeside Drive in Oakland, not San Francisco. PG&E began occupying the building in 2021, completed tenant improvements through 2023, and finalized the purchase from Bay Area developer TMG Partners on June 3, 2025, with TMG staying on to manage the property under a six-year agreement. The move consolidated four major Bay Area offices into one and cut the utility’s major Bay Area office space by about half compared with 2020. Sale of the former San Francisco headquarters is expected to return roughly $400 million to customers over five years through 2026. About 7,000 of the corporation’s 28,000 workers are based at Lakeside.