Energy efficiency programs report annual incremental MWh savings — the electricity avoided in the reporting year from programs installed that year. PG&E saved 1.58 million MWh in 2024 — equivalent to 2.12% of their total sales, one of the highest ratios in the dataset. California utilities generally lead on EE intensity due to the California Public Utilities Commission's long-standing efficiency mandates and decoupling mechanisms that remove the utility's financial disincentive to reduce sales.
The median savings of 27,715 MWh per utility in 2024 represents roughly the annual consumption of 2,500 average residential customers. The % of sales metric is the most meaningful for regulatory comparison — it normalizes for utility size and shows how aggressively each utility is pursuing load reduction relative to its total throughput.
EE programs serve a dual regulatory function: they reduce customer bills by avoiding consumption and they defer capital investment by reducing peak load growth. For utilities seeking to recover EE program costs in rates, the % of sales metric and the cost per MWh benchmark are the primary performance metrics regulators use to assess whether the program merits cost recovery.
| Utility | Annual MWh Saved | % of Total Sales | Peak Savings (MW) | MWh Saved per Customer |
|---|
| Year | MWh Saved | % of Sales |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | — | — |
| 2023 | — | — |