A cleaner future

Climate change is almost exclusively thought of on a global scale – perhaps inevitably, given the scale of its impact.

In popular culture, the focus tends to be on government policies, international climate conferences or corporate ESG stances, with the actual communities that are affected – both by the direct impacts of climate change and the government policies seeking to address them – widely ignored.

San Diego and southern Orange counties, nestled at the bottom of the state of California, is one such area of the country.

For San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), a company responsible for providing natural gas and energy services to 3.7 million residents over a service area of more than 10,600 square kilometers, the urgent task is to provide safe, affordable and reliable energy, while limiting the risk of climate disasters and achieving carbon neutrality.

Since August 2020, SDG&E has been led by CEO Caroline Winn, who has long been a loyal and passionate energy servant to the region.

“I started at SDG&E as a junior engineer right out of college and I’ve had the great fortune of growing my career at the same company for over three decades,” she says. “I think we have a great opportunity to make a lasting difference in the communities that we feel so privileged to serve.”

Overcoming crises

Top of the agenda for SDG&E as a Californian natural gas and energy provider is the transition to net zero carbon emissions, driven by the need for sustainability.

“California has set some of the most ambitious climate goals of any state in the nation. The goal is to have a hundred percent zero-carbon electricity or carbon neutrality by 2045,” Winn says. “Our commitment goes beyond reacting to climate challenges. We are focused on anticipating and preparing for them.”

And despite the protestation of critics, these targets are not hollow posturing – just ask the locals. Around 75 percent of people in San Diego and Orange County say climate change has been a contributing factor to recent extreme weather events, and more than 70 percent support the goal to achieve net zero by 2050 at the latest.

In collaboration with

Logic20/20

The company is working with utilities to improve data analysis and efficiency. The company is working with utilities to improve data analysis and efficiency.

These attitudes have been shaped by many residents’ unfortunate familiarity with the diabolical effects of climate change.

“We were probably one of the first utilities to see the impacts of climate change when we had catastrophic fires here in 2007,” Winn recalls.

At the time, the region had faced extreme heat, droughts and freak high winds that had damaged power lines. Tragically, SDG&E equipment was the unintentional spark for this tinderbox, with devastating consequences.

“It was a very low point in our history. Lives were lost, and the economic impact to those communities was historic,” she says. “It really has set the company on a different path, a journey, if you will, and I think that’s allowed us to be successful in how we’re managing these challenges in the future.

“We want to continue to build a safe and reliable grid and ensure that it can withstand the impacts of the types of changes that we’re seeing.”

Planet-friendly innovation

Central to this mission to ensure a safe and reliable grid is SDG&E’s proud culture of innovation.

“We have to be innovative and creative in terms of how we solve problems,” Winn says. “We’ve built a world-class, state-of-the-art wildfire and climate resilience center that is using AI and weather data to forecast and prepare for large events, and to make sure our communities and our customers are prepared.”

The use of AI in particular has been a game-changer, yet despite its impact, Winn has ensured it is being harnessed in a responsible manner.

“It has especially improved our situational awareness. We have 10 years of weather data about different areas within our service territory, and we’ve been able to use AI to better predict and respond to emergencies,” she explains.

“With AI and generative AI as the next frontier, we needed to make sure that we had governance around that across the company, so we set up a center of excellence to make sure that there is a very coordinated approach to implementing AI.

“I don’t want our employees to think that this is about taking their jobs. This is about helping us be a better company. We’re excited about it and we’re doing it, but we have to make sure that we’re doing it in a thoughtful and disciplined fashion.”

Technology partners, such as consultants Logic20/20, are a key part of SDG&E being able to achieve its climate goals. But with the same spirit of self-awareness, Winn is ensuring that this progress does not make the department complacent.

“Every day we’ve got to be better than we were yesterday because the climate isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse,” she says.

Community focus

Unsurprisingly, tackling climate change is not without its challenges. The transformation of energy grids to achieve carbon neutrality requires phasing out fossil fuels and a significant investment in renewable energy. The task for Winn and SDG&E is to make sure that customers do not shoulder this cost burden in their energy bills.

“We’ve had to rebuild 60 percent of our system to be able to withstand some of the impacts of climate change,” she says.

“To get to a carbon neutral future, we’ve had to retire natural gas power plants or peaker plants and replace them with large batteries and large solar fields. So we’re really changing the energy mix, investing in the grid and making sure that the lights will stay on when the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing.

“The biggest challenge is how do we do all of this while keeping energy affordable. We have to work with urgency to connect customers faster, to restore service safely, but in a way that meets customers’ expectations.”

This requirement to get the balance right by mitigating climate change’s destructive impacts, while continuing to provide reliable and affordable energy for communities, is at the heart of SDG&E’s mission and is an objective its staff will continue to rally around.

“It’s an expectation of all of our employees that we have to do the right thing. We are making sure that we are giving back to the communities that we’re so privileged to serve,” Winn says.

“I’m energized by the potential of our industry and what it can do to make a lasting difference in our communities, to be able to clean up the air and provide safer and more resilient energy to customers.”

In collaboration with

Logic20/20

The company is working with utilities to improve data analysis and efficiency. The company is working with utilities to improve data analysis and efficiency. Read More