Bay Area Builders, Homeowners Accuse PG&E of Holding Up ADUs

Bay Area residents have a major hurdle to setting up a granny flat — plugging in to the state’s largest utility.

Homeowners can wait a year or more to get power from Pacific Gas and Electric to their newly built accessory dwelling unit, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing builder and homeowner complaints.

The state’s largest utility company has held up ADU projects and created chronic delays, driving up costs for some homeowners.

A spokesperson for PG&E said the utility has been working hard to improve its processes, but that many issues are outside of its control and such complaints do not reflect the majority of its customers’ experiences.

The difficulty of dealing with PG&E is what surprises homeowners putting in a granny flat, said Katherine Anderson, founder of Danville-based Perpetual Homes, which has built more than 175 ADUs in the Bay Area.

Some of her company’s projects have been delayed by as much as a year due to PG&E requirements, she said.

“We want to move our clients into ADUs and we’re sitting around waiting for PG&E,” Anderson told the Chronicle. “A lot of times we just find ourselves apologizing over and over to the client about how long PG&E is taking.”

Cities across the state have employed new state laws to make it easier to build ADUs in order to meet state housing goals.

But builders and homeowners described recurring themes with PG&E, including weather-related delays, communication issues, inconsistent enforcement of rules from PG&E’s “Green Book,” and poor management of the contractors PG&E outsources some of its work to.

Sean Roberts, CEO of Villa Homes, an ADU building company based in San Francisco, said clients have been quoted wait times of as much as a year, even to get an underground gas line moved.

“As soon as we know a project is going to get built, we get in touch with PG&E as soon as we start the process, because we know it’s going to take so long and have so many delays and uncertainties,” he said, adding that PG&E is “one of the biggest delays we run into pretty consistently on all of our projects.”

PG&E acknowledged complaints in an email to the Chronicle, but said they are the exception, not the rule.

“Every customer matters to PG&E and we acknowledge that sometimes we don’t live up to our customers’ standards — or our own,” Jennifer Robison, a PG&E marketing and communications spokesperson, said in a statement.

“We are committed to improving every day. So far in 2025, our customer satisfaction survey results are 8.7 out of 10, which indicates the vast majority of customers are extremely pleased with their energization experience.”

— Dana Bartholomew