OAKLAND — Key PG&E executives, including the utility’s top boss, received reduced total pay during 2024 compared to the year before, even as the company said it’s making progress to combat wildfire disasters.
In 2024, PG&E awarded a reduced amount of total direct compensation to six top officials of either the PG&E Corp. holding company or the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. utility subsidiary, and higher total direct pay to one executive with the company, a new regulatory filing shows.
Work crews for PG&E endeavor to replace a power pole and connect electricity equipment on Camden Avenue in south San Jose, Feb. 19, 2025. (George Avalos/Bay Area News Group)
Several executives harvested multi-million-dollar gains from the sale of stock they had previously received through grants of stock options, a PG&E filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission discloses.
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“In 2024, we achieved a second consecutive year of zero major wildfires caused by company equipment,” the PG&E board chair and the PG&E chief executive officer stated in a joint letter issued April 10 to the company shareholders.
Oakland-based PG&E awarded reduced total direct pay in 2024 compared with 2023 to the PG&E Corp. CEO, the chief financial officer and the controller; and to the Pacific Gas & Electric utility’s chief customer officer, chief operating officer, and the primary executive for engineering, planning and strategy.
Here are some details of the total direct compensation that PG&E awarded in 2024 to its CEO Patricia Poppe.
— In 2024, Poppe received $15.82 million in total direct pay, which was down 6.9% from the $16.99 million in total pay Poppe was awarded in 2023, the SEC filing shows.
— CEO Poppe’s total direct pay included $11.72 million in direct stock awards, up 0.3% from the year before.
— The PG&E CEO’s base salary of $1.4 million was unchanged in 2024 compared with 2023.
Separately from Poppe’s total direct pay, the PG&E CEO also realized a gain of $10.96 million through the vesting of previously awarded stock, the SEC filing shows.
The utility’s efforts to turn around its wildfire-related mitigation contrast sharply to years of fatal company-triggered blazes, a fatal explosion that destroyed a San Bruno neighborhood, and the company’s conviction on federal felony charges for crimes PG&E committed before and after the San Bruno blast and fire.
PG&E also outlined an array of accomplishments related to its efforts in wildfire prevention.
The utility stated that it has buried 875 miles of power lines in the highest fire-risk areas, installed over 630 artificial intelligence-enabled wildfire cameras and added more than 1,500 devices to narrow the impact of wildfire safety outages.
“Our layers of wildfire protection are working,” PG&E stated in the letter to its shareholders.
