PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

David Arcaro : That’s clear. Thanks for that color. And then separately looking at the $5 billion bucket of potential incremental upside CapEx opportunities you’ve added a bit more tail around where some of those opportunities could come from. I’m wondering if you could give us a sense of if there are any near-term opportunities to pull any of those programs into the CapEx plan or just a little bit of color around the cadence and the timing for when those opportunities start to crystallize?

Carolyn Burke : Yes, David I’ll take that question. So I would say the two areas that we see the most potential in terms of working our model to see that they’re going to be affordable is in the transmission area and new customer connections. So we are looking at partnerships. We are looking at additional new customer — we’ve made a significant progress in terms of looking at our overall process of bringing those connections online sooner. And so there’s — I would say those are the two areas that you could expect more insight in over the coming earnings calls.

Patti Poppe: And David all of that is contingent upon affordability for our customers and do we in fact have headroom to go ahead and add additional capital. And so all of our waste elimination work all of our cost savings work some of our big strategic efforts to reduce cost and get more streamlined and then the little itty-bitty ideas that all add up give us an opportunity to then deploy that more — that capital for the benefit of customers when we can be sure that they can afford it. So that’s always the equation that we’re running.

David Arcaro : Understood. Makes sense. Thanks so much.

Patti Poppe: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question is from the line of Julien Dumoulin-Smith with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Julien Dumoulin-Smith : Hey, good morning, Patti and Carolyn. Thanks for the time.

Patti Poppe: Good morning, Julien.

Julien Dumoulin-Smith : Hey, good morning. Just following up on the last one actually I’ll pivot to this direction. The DOE headlines here. Maybe we could talk a little bit about how you think about is that incremental or not? How do you think about that in terms of the projects that you already have underway versus being incremental? Does that displace some other projects? Just kind of think about the financial impacts of pulling down on that DOE money obviously clearly beneficial in any regard for customers?

Carolyn Burke : Julien, this is Carolyn. Thank you for the question. So it is not incremental. We believe that we’re going to use this financing to fund the programs that we have already in place. We have a very well laid out plan. We have more than enough to invest into our system. And so this financing is simply going to allow it to be more efficiently financed.

Julien Dumoulin-Smith: Okay. All right. Fair enough. I’ll leave that there. Maybe just tipping to another subject real quickly here, how do you think just the capital structure, again this is more a financing — do you no longer need or expect to need the capital structure waivers, you think about kind of a normalization, we talk about dividend today, do you think about capital structure tomorrow, et cetera?

Patti Poppe: Yeah. I think — two things just to recall I mean I’ll reiterate the no new equity in 2023 and 2024. And we have a commitment to pay down the parent debt of about $2 billion plus by 2026. So in terms of that waiver, we’re monitoring that. We’re on track. We’ve made improvements over the last couple of years and we continue to foresee those improvements. And we don’t — if the waiver is in place until we’ll be able to make that waiver until June 2025, yeah, I thought it was 2025 sorry. Couldn’t it remember it was June or March?

Julien Dumoulin-Smith: Wonderful. Okay, excellent. I’ll leave it there. I will see you guys soon. Thank you.

Patti Poppe: Great. Thanks, Julien.