PG&E's power line infrastructure ignited over 1,500 fires in 3.5 years but undergrounding 10,000 miles of lines will cost $30 billion and take over a decade at current pace

Pacific Gas and Electric Company's overhead power lines and electrical equipment in high fire-risk areas continue to ignite wildfires because the utility's 10,000-mile undergrounding program—the primary long-term mitigation strategy—has completed only 1,000 miles as of late 2025 at a cost of $3.1 million per mile, meaning the remaining 9,000 miles will take approximately 9 more years and $28 billion to complete while communities remain exposed. Investigators attributed more than 1,500 fires to PG&E power lines and hardware between June 2014 and December 2017 alone. Why it matters: Each year of delay in undergrounding leaves thousands of miles of overhead lines exposed to wind events, falling trees, and equipment failure in fire-prone terrain, so additional catastrophic ignitions occur (PG&E caused the 2018 Camp Fire killing 85 people and the 2021 Dixie Fire burning 963,000 acres), so the utility faces billions in liability under California's inverse condemnation standard (PG&E paid $23 billion to exit bankruptcy in 2020), so those costs are passed to ratepayers through higher electricity bills, so California residents in fire-prone areas face a compounding burden of rising utility rates and rising insurance costs simultaneously. The structural root cause is that PG&E built approximately 25,000 miles of overhead distribution lines through forested, fire-prone terrain over decades when wildfire risk was lower and vegetation management was considered sufficient, and the physics of undergrounding—trenching through mountainous terrain, routing around geological obstacles, managing environmental permits for habitat disturbance—impose a hard limit on construction throughput that cannot be meaningfully accelerated regardless of budget.