Saving over $66M in design costs by Standardizing design and accelerating delivery to meet wildfire mitigation goals
Overview
Faced with the challenge of undergrounding 10,000 miles of electric distribution infrastructure to reduce wildfire risk, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) knew that traditional design processes wouldn’t scale. To meet its ambitious goals, PG&E implemented Automated Utility Design (AUD). This enabled a streamlined, standardized, and model-based design approach that accelerates projects and reduces capital costs.
Challenge
Historically, PG&E’s design process was fragmented and manual. With 13 design centers and over 900 estimators working across different standards and templates, inconsistency and inefficiency were common. This often led to rework, especially as projects moved between regions or teams.
“As long as the design met engineering standards and was constructible, people just did things their own way,” said Gary Parker, Estimating Supervisor at PG&E. “But when one estimator in Fresno is working on a job in Santa Rosa, local requirements can vary and that led to a lot of rework.”
These limitations became more serious as PG&E accelerated its undergrounding efforts. “Before the Camp Fire, we were doing maybe 1–2 miles of electric hardening a year,” said Jaisun Evans, Program Manager at PG&E. “Now we’re designing and installing 400 miles a year, on our way to 1,000. We had to do things differently, and that started with standardization.”
Solution
PG&E engaged with SBS and began deploying AUD, a 2D and 3D digital design and modeling tool integrated with AutoCAD. AUD enables designers to automate manual placements and calculations, apply standards consistently based on a configurable template, and generate construction-ready documentation from a single model.
Estimators in the central design team, helped pilot the system. “AUD automates and standardizes the design process with built-in validation rules to prevent user error,” one Estimator said.
“When materials or equipment are updated in the model, the design updates automatically, saving time and ensuring accuracy.”
Key features of AUD identified by the PG&E team include:
- Automated Material Updates: Changes in design automatically update associated materials, eliminating error-prone, manual tabulation across EES, spreadsheets, and standards.
- All-in-One Drawings: AUD allows designers to apply different stylizations to a single model for schematic and construction drawings. This reduces duplication and translation errors.
- Voltage Drop and Cable Pulling Calculations: Calculations once performed in Excel are now automated, including factors like elevation that spreadsheets cannot compute.
- Automatic Revisions: Minor changes such as transformer relocation automatically update related values, saving hours of manual recalculation.
- Consistent Equipment Labeling and Location Numbering: Labels are auto-generated from model attributes and synchronized across EES and OCalc to maintain quality control.
Implementation Strategy
PG&E focused on a subset of roughly 200 to 300 underground estimators before expanding further.
“We learned from others. If the team’s not ready, a big rollout can backfire,” said Gary Parker. “We’re starting small, building momentum, and bringing in subject matter experts from each office to help lead the way.”
PG&E also laid the groundwork with governance, training, and documentation before implementing AUD. “If we’d tried to jump straight into AUD without standardizing first, we would’ve failed,” said Jaisun Evans.
The team established a CAD committee, published a formal CAD manual, launched monthly training sessions, and created centralized resources on SharePoint. They also instituted a governance process with 30-60-90 percent design phase gates, field validation with survey staked designs, and QC reviews.
Results and Outlook
PG&E is seeing improved consistency, fewer design errors, and a more scalable process for underground design. Since their implementation and subsequent expansion to additional estimators and AEC firms, they have saved more than $66M in real design costs.
The approach has also earned strong support from external engineering partners. “Our AEC firms love the standardized templates,” said Gary Parker.
Looking ahead, PG&E will expand AUD to overhead hardening, subdivisions, and other work types. The company is also enhancing GIS synchronization through tools like Playback Manager and adopting Esri Utility Network and SAP S4HANA.
“This is about more than just software,” said Jaisun Evans. “It’s about rethinking the way we design so we can build safer, more reliable infrastructure faster.”