How Carla Peterman is trailblazing, with empathy and AI.
When Carla Peterman became chief sustainability officer at PG&E in 2021, she asked CEO Patti Poppe about her environmental ambitions for the California utility. Patti said, “Well, I want to heal the planet,” recalls Peterman. “I thought, OK, I can work with that.”
Shortly thereafter, Peterman parlayed the challenge into a plan to bring the company’s bold mission to life while anchoring its sustainability and charitable strategies in a new purpose statement: “Delivering for our hometowns, serving our planet and leading with love.” Peterman says, “All our work, including our climate commitments, has to be grounded in our communities, and we have to do it in an empathetic and caring way.”
The purpose statement was also a starter pistol in the race to beat a looming environmental deadline, inspiring PG&E’s Climate Strategy Report in June 2022. It details some of the most ambitious climate goals in the country for a power company, like going beyond net zero to become climate positive by 2050. “We aim to take more emissions out of the environment than we are putting in,” explains Peterman. “And we're not just focused on the decarbonization of this system. We're acutely focused on helping our communities adapt to climate change.”
To achieve its aggressive carbon-reduction goals, PG&E is lowering its own operational carbon footprint and enabling customers and communities to do the same through energy efficiency, electrification programs and converting harder-to-electrify customers to cleaner fuels. Among Peterman’s superpowers is her keen eye for spotting environmental opportunities in groundbreaking technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI).
Mitigating wildfires across its more than 70,000-square-mile service area is a top priority in PG&E’s climate strategy. In just eight years, the company’s high-risk coverage zone has increased from 15% to more than 50% due to climate change and development of forested areas. So, along with physical safety improvements, like burying 10,000 miles of power lines, PG&E uses AI to monitor grid problems in remote forests. It deploys drones to photograph far-flung areas, and then machine learning models automatically identify issues on towers and lines. “Reviewing photos can take a long time by the human eye, and it’s also prone to error,” Peterman explains. “We are always looking for opportunities to use AI and technology to get work done faster, to get it done more affordably and actually get it done more safely.”
As a result, the utility has already mitigated 90% of wildfire risk caused by its equipment, and it’s projected to reach 94% by the end of the year.
And that’s just one area where deploying AI accelerates goals while directly addressing government and customer concerns. It also helps predict the remaining life of electric assets, like distribution transformers, so they can be replaced before they fail and disrupt service. AI supports the utility’s interactions with its 16 million customers, too. “It allows us to analyze calls and complaints,” Peterman says. “We can spot larger trends, elaborate answers to common questions and even analyze customer satisfaction.”
Of course, bringing to fruition the mission to “heal the planet” will take more than a single technology, no matter how groundbreaking. Fortunately, Peterman’s unique blend of inspiration and qualifications are equally informed by scientific study, technical knowledge and hands-on experience. The New Jersey native spent six years as a regulator for California Public Utilities Commission before transitioning to the private sector. Her passion for preserving the planet was sparked in high school by environmental classics, like Aldo Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac.” “His book left me with what has been the guiding light of my career: the importance of maintaining balance and being mindful of trade-offs,” says Peterman, a Rhodes scholar with a science doctorate from UC Berkeley. “I think that made me a better regulator and a more holistic utility leader.”
Beyond AI, Peterman has many more innovations in her utility belt, such as leading the charge with her colleagues to turn electric vehicles into a grid resource. The average electric vehicle is only driven 10% of the day, she says. Most of the time it’s parked. Once charged, it could feed power from its battery back into the grid system, relieving strain in peak periods. One in seven EVs sold in America are in PG&E’s service area. Together, they could return up to 8.6 gigawatt hours of power annually—more than all the power created by the utility’s sole nuclear plant, she says. Doing so will require new technology, for which PG&E has partnered with car makers—and deployed AI—to optimize distribution.
“PG&E is on track to have a carbon-neutral electric and gas system by 2040,” she says. “And battery storage is now cheaper than gas, which people once said couldn’t be done. So, we have already made progress beyond what anybody thought was possible. It’s just a matter of time. The challenge is, we don’t have a lot of time.”
