2025 California Power Summit

Join us as the Vice Mayor of Burbank welcomes attendees to the California Power Summit and highlights the city’s commitment to innovation, sustainability, and clean energy leadership. This address sets the tone for a dynamic two-day gathering focused on powering California’s energy future.

As California accelerates toward its 100% zero-carbon electricity target under SB 100, utilities face a complex balancing act: ensuring compliance with ambitious clean energy mandates while managing resource adequacy, rising costs, and system reliability.

This session will examine the latest regulatory developments shaping utility planning and investment, with a focus on SB 100 implementation strategies, the CPUC’s evolving Resource Adequacy rules, and broader policy considerations for maintaining affordability amid increasing electrification and extreme weather impacts.

Key Topics:

• SB 100 implementation and compliance strategies
• CPUC resource adequacy rules and cost impacts
• Policy considerations for reliability & affordability amidst rising prices

• Balancing investments in wildfire mitigation with affordability concerns
• Infrastructure hardening and undergrounding transmission lines
• Managing insurance, liability, and regulatory compliance risk

As the transition to clean energy accelerates, expanding and upgrading transmission infrastructure is critical to integrating renewables, reducing congestion, and ensuring grid reliability. This session will explore the investments needed to support large-scale renewable deployment, strategies to address interconnection challenges, and innovative approaches to optimizing existing infrastructure, including brownfield development. Experts will discuss policy solutions, financing mechanisms, and technology advancements that can streamline grid expansion while maintaining affordability and resilience. Attendees will gain insights into overcoming bottlenecks and unlocking the full potential of a modernized transmission network.

Key Topics:

• Investments needed to support renewable integration
• FERC Orders and their impact on interconnection and transmission planning dynamics
• Addressing interconnection challenges and congestion
• Role of brownfield development and existing infrastructure utilization

• Meeting the increasing electricity demand from AI and cloud computing
• Transmission and substation expansions to support high-density loads
• The role of DERs and microgrids in reducing peak demand
• Impact of data centers on rates, system stability, and resource adequacy

As climate extremes and rising energy demands strain California’s aging infrastructure, innovative collaboration is essential to build resilience. This session explores how utilities, industry partners, and private capital are driving localized solutions like microgrids, virtual power plants (VPPs), and EV fleet depots. Attendees will learn how these partnerships optimize the grid, control costs, and accelerate sustainability and community resilience—delivering reliable power faster and at scale.

This session will explore how PG&E is advancing electric vehicle adoption through a comprehensive portfolio of programs, including residential EV incentives, fleet electrification, and LCFS initiatives. Attendees will gain insights into program design, implementation challenges, and lessons learned from deploying EV infrastructure across diverse customer segments and geographies.

Tour of the MPP perimeter in which the main components will be shown—this includes the Combustion Turbine Area, Heat Recovery Steam Generator, Emissions Stack, Steam Turbine Building, and the Zero Liquid Discharge Facility.

Tour of BWP’s EcoCampus, which is home to three LEED Platinum Buildings, an award-winning sustainably landscaped courtyard featuring adaptive reuse structures, innovative water capture systems, green roofs, architectural solar canopies, an iron-flow battery, and electric vehicle charging. The EcoCampus also hosts a combined cycle power plant operated by BWP and jointly owned by six utilities.

Note: Attendees should wear comfortable, closed-toed shoes while on the tour.