Where the Money Lives: Pacific Gas & Electric B-20 Rates

This is the first installment of "Where the Money Lives," an occasional CRI feature that translates abstract rate structures and regulatory arcana into real-world financial impacts.

PG&E Schedule B-20

PG&E's Schedule B-20 is the rate structure that governs what California's largest industrial electricity users pay for power. The rate applies once your facility's demand exceeds 1,000 kW, the threshold where you graduate from commercial customer to industrial (in the utility's eyes).

On its surface, B-20 has a standard time-of-use structure: demand charges, energy charges, seasonal and hourly differentials. But the math reveals something more aggressive. The rate encodes California's grid problems in price signals. A 67% discount during spring middays is the utility telling you, as loudly as tariff language allows, that it has more solar power than it knows what to do with.

B-20 rewards operational flexibility and punishes rigidity. Customers who can shift load, shave peaks, or respond to grid conditions will see radically different economics than those running flat, inflexible processes, even at identical total consumption.

I've broken down the numbers from PG&E's current B-20 rate schedule, effective January 1, 2026. Throughout, I've modeled a 5 MW (5,000 kW) secondary-voltage industrial customer i.e., a mid-sized manufacturing plant, food processing facility, or medium data center. (Big enough to be on B-20, but not a refinery). All the figures scale linearly: a 10 MW facility doubles these numbers, a 2.5 MW facility halves them.

• The first chart shows demand charges only (the portion of the bill driven by your peak draw, before any energy consumption)
• The second chart shows the arbitrage value of load flexibility across TOU periods
• The third chart explores a rate option that looks attractive on paper but rarely pencils out
• The fourth chart covers Peak Day Pricing (PDP), an optional Demand Response program where customers accept steep surcharges during grid emergencies in exchange for guaranteed monthly credits (a risk-reward tradeoff that only makes sense if you can actually curtail when called)

Overall, the story they tell is simple: in California industrial power, the money lives in your load shape.