PG&E for Cannabis Facilities: B-Schedule Placement, Agricultural Rates, CCAs, and a Crowded DA Waitlist

Service area and where cannabis sits in it

PG&E's electric territory runs from the Oregon border to Bakersfield and covers the Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley, most of the San Joaquin Valley, and the North Coast counties of Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity that make up the Emerald Triangle. That footprint holds the bulk of California's outdoor and mixed-light cultivation and a large share of its indoor canopy, as well as the Bay Area's dense retail market. Two large municipal utilities sit inside the footprint as islands: SMUD in Sacramento County and a handful of smaller munis. Those are not PG&E customers and have no CCA or DA.

The grid operator for all of it is CAISO, where PG&E is a participating transmission owner. There is no ISO seam to manage between a Humboldt greenhouse and a Fresno warehouse.

Climate varies more inside PG&E territory than in most whole states. The statewide normals of 929 cooling degree days and 2,814 heating degree days [noaa-cag-california] average together a coastal strip where dehumidification is the year-round problem and an interior valley where summer cooling dominates. A grow's delivery schedule is the same either way; its demand profile is not.

Delivery schedules and how placement works

PG&E's non-residential rates are the B series, which replaced the legacy A and E schedules when new time-of-use periods adopted in D.18-08-013 became mandatory in March 2021 [pge-sched-b19]. Placement is by demand, with some judgment on new accounts.

Schedule	Applicability	Demand charges
B-1 Small General Service, B-6 Small General TOU	Small accounts [pge-tariffs]	None
B-10 Medium General Demand-Metered	Assigned to new accounts PG&E expects to run between 75 and 499 kW; no minimum demand; transferred to B-19 or B-20 if demand exceeds 499 kW for three consecutive months [pge-sched-b10]	Maximum demand
B-19 Medium General Demand-Metered TOU	Mandatory if maximum billing demand has exceeded 499 kW for at least three consecutive months in the most recent 12 months and the account does not meet B-20; available voluntarily below 500 kW; returned to voluntary B-19 or another schedule after 12 consecutive months without exceeding 499 kW [pge-sched-b19]	Maximum demand plus peak-period demand
B-20	Maximum demands of 1,000 kW or more [pge-tariffs]	Maximum demand plus peak-period demand
AG-1, AG-4, AG-5, AG-F, AG-R, AG-V	Agricultural power, including TOU and large TOU variants [pge-tariffs]	Varies

The "expects to run" language on B-10 matters for a new build. When you apply for service, PG&E asks for the expected load. A grow that estimates 300 kW starts on B-10; if the meter then reads 520 kW for three months it moves to B-19 and stays there for a year even if you scale back. Give PG&E an honest estimate, and if you expect to cross 500 kW, ask about starting on B-19 directly, since the voluntary option exists [pge-sched-b19].

B-10, B-19, and B-20 all require an interval meter that PG&E reads remotely [pge-sched-b10] [pge-sched-b19]. That is also the source of the 15-minute interval data you will want for any rate or supply analysis.

The 70 percent agricultural test

Both B-10 and B-19 say the same thing: an account whose energy use is 70 percent or more for agricultural end uses is served under an agricultural schedule instead [pge-sched-b19] [pge-sched-b10]. For a cannabis operator this is the most consequential placement question in the territory, because the AG schedules were designed around pumping and crop production loads rather than 24-hour commercial buildings.

Growing plants for sale is agricultural. Drying, curing, trimming, and packaging are processing. Extraction is manufacturing. Retail is retail. If one meter feeds all of them, the agricultural share is likely to fall below 70 percent and the whole account is billed on a B schedule. If cultivation has its own meter, that meter can qualify on its own. The design implication for a new facility is to separate the cultivation service from everything else at the switchgear, and to ask PG&E's agricultural customer service group to confirm eligibility in writing before the pro forma depends on it.

Demand charges and TOU periods

Demand-metered B schedules bill a maximum demand charge on the highest 15-minute interval in the month and, on B-19 and B-20, a peak-period demand charge on the highest interval during the peak window [pge-sched-b19]. The current $/kW values are on the individual schedule sheets in the tariff book [pge-tariffs] and change with rate filings, so we do not reprint them.

The time periods on B-19 are [pge-sched-b19]:

Season	Peak	Partial-peak	Super off-peak	Off-peak
Summer, June 1 to September 30	4:00 to 9:00 pm every day	2:00 to 4:00 pm and 9:00 to 11:00 pm every day	None	All other hours
Winter, October 1 to May 31	4:00 to 9:00 pm every day	None	9:00 am to 2:00 pm every day in March, April, and May	All other hours

Because peak applies on weekends and holidays too, a grow cannot escape it by shifting to weekend cycles. The lever is the daily lighting schedule: flower rooms that are dark from 4 to 9 pm avoid the peak-period demand charge and the peak energy price on their largest load. Vegetative rooms on 18-hour photoperiods cannot avoid the window entirely but can be staggered so that not every room's lights and HVAC coincide at 5 pm. Our demand charge guide covers the arithmetic.

Generation: PG&E bundled, a CCA, or Direct Access

A PG&E account takes generation from one of three sources.

PG&E bundled service is the default where no CCA operates and the fallback when a customer opts out of one. Its generation rate is the benchmark for everything else.

Twelve CCAs operate in PG&E's territory: Ava Community Energy, Central Coast Community Energy, CleanPowerSF, King City Community Power, Marin Clean Energy, Pioneer Community Energy, Redwood Coast Energy Authority, San Jose Clean Energy, Silicon Valley Clean Energy, Sonoma Clean Power, Valley Clean Energy, and WestLight Energy [pge-cca]. CCA customers get one consolidated PG&E bill carrying both PG&E's delivery charges and the CCA's generation charges, and PG&E collects payment on the CCA's behalf [pge-cca]. Redwood Coast Energy Authority covers Humboldt County, which makes it the default generation provider for much of the Emerald Triangle.

Direct Access is capped at PG&E by an Overall Load Cap of 11,393 GWh [pge-direct-access]. Entry is through the June lottery; for 2027 service the window ran from 9 am on June 8 to 5 pm on June 12, 2026, and the filing is Form 79-1117 plus an Excel list of Service Agreement IDs emailed to PG&E's DA notice mailbox [pge-direct-access]. In the 2023 cycle PG&E had 185 GWh available, received 560 valid notices, and ended the year with 836 customers and about 3,000 GWh still waiting [cpuc-da-lottery-2023]. A waitlist number is good for one calendar year and then expires [pge-direct-access]. Returning from DA to bundled requires Form 79-1011, a six-month notice, and an 18-month minimum stay on bundled service; PG&E allows three business days to rescind the return notice [pge-direct-access].

Whichever of the three you take, the Power Charge Indifference Adjustment applies to CCA and DA load. PG&E describes it as the charge that keeps bundled and departed customers equally responsible for above-market generation costs PG&E incurred on their behalf [pge-cca]; the CPUC sets it by vintage and re-forecasts it each October [cpuc-pcia]. Compare any CCA or ESP price to PG&E's bundled generation rate only after adding the PCIA.

The step-by-step filing process is in the switching guide.

Interconnection and metering notes for a new facility

Three things come up on almost every PG&E cannabis build. First, service capacity: a 500 kW to 2 MW facility in a rural North Coast or valley location can require a distribution upgrade or a new transformer, and PG&E's engineering and construction lead times on rural circuits are measured in many months, so start the service application at the same time as the DCC and local permits. Second, separate metering for cultivation versus processing, for the reason in the agricultural section above. Third, standby: if you install on-site generation or storage that regularly supplies part of the load, the Schedule SB standby conditions apply to B-10 and B-19 accounts and add a monthly reservation charge [pge-sched-b10] [pge-sched-b19]. The new build FAQ has the general checklist.

PG&E efficiency programs a cannabis facility can use

• Agriculture Energy Savings Action Plan grow-lighting rebates, run by TRC for PG&E: roughly $9 to $70 per fixture for DLC Horticultural QPL LEDs at 3.24 umol/J or better, retrofits and new construction, cannabis named as an eligible crop, limited funds, pre-approval and field verification required [pge-aesap-grow-lighting].
• Business Energy Efficiency Rebates and Incentives: first-come, first-served prescriptive and custom incentives, with agriculture and food processing programs (VFDs, insulation, pumping) run through third-party implementers and a dedicated Agricultural Customer Service Center [pge-business-ee].

Apply before you buy. Both programs require PG&E's approval ahead of installation, and the grow-lighting program verifies fixtures in the field. The LED versus HPS guide shows how the rebate changes retrofit payback at PG&E's prices.

For the neighboring territory with far better DA odds, see Southern California Edison.