What a utility safety certification requires
Public Utilities Code section 8389(a) lists seven conditions an electrical corporation must document to receive a safety certificate from the Director of Energy Safety. Six are governance and plan approval. The seventh is implementation, evidenced by quarterly notifications filed February 1, May 1, August 1 and November 1. The certificate is valid 12 months.
On March 2, 2026, the Director of the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety signed a seven-page letter issuing Southern California Edison its 2025 Certificate. The request it answered had been filed on December 2, 2025. Exactly 90 days separate those dates, which is the full period section 8389(b)(2) allows. Six of the letter's seven findings concern plan approval, board governance and executive pay.
The seventh rests on four quarterly filings of implementation progress. Five months later, the equivalent filing for the second quarter of 2026 reported whether a vegetation work management system was carrying a mandatory field for how wood slash had been removed from a job. That is the whole distance from a liability certificate to a crew's paperwork, and it is short.
Seven conditions, renumbered in September 2025
Public Utilities Code section 8389(a) opens with a mandatory verb:
The Director of the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety shall issue a certificate to an electrical corporation if the electrical corporation provides documentation of the following:
The word is "shall." Energy Safety has no discretion to withhold a certificate from a utility that documents all seven. Its judgment runs to whether the documentation demonstrates each condition.
Paragraph | What has to be documented |
8389(a)(1) | An approved wildfire mitigation plan under section 8386.3(a) |
8389(a)(2) | Agreement to implement the recommendations of the most recent safety culture assessments |
8389(a)(3) | A board of directors safety committee composed of members with relevant safety experience |
8389(a)(4) | An executive incentive compensation structure approved by Energy Safety, with measurable and enforceable safety performance metrics |
8389(a)(5) | Board-of-director-level reporting to the CPUC and Energy Safety on safety issues |
8389(a)(6) | A compensation structure for new or amended executive contracts meeting four stated principles |
8389(a)(7) | That the corporation is implementing the mitigation strategies in its approved plan, with quarterly notification |
Paragraphs (4) and (6) both turn on the definition of "executive officer" in section 451.5(c), which reaches "any vice president in charge of a principal business unit, division, or function of the public utility." Paragraph (2) turns on section 8386.2, which puts two assessments on two different clocks.
The CPUC requires an independent third-party safety culture assessment with updates at least every five years, and the utility may not charge its cost to ratepayers. Energy Safety runs its own wildfire-focused assessment at least once every two years. A utility has to agree to implement the recommendations of both.
Those paragraph numbers are new. Senate Bill 254, Chapter 119 of the Statutes of 2025, amended section 8389 effective September 19, 2025. Before that date the seven conditions sat in subdivision (e) and the 12-month validity rule sat in subdivision (f)(1). Energy Safety flagged the change on the face of the SCE letter:
Recent legislative changes from Senate Bill 254, signed into law and effective on September 19, 2025, amended the Public Utilities Code sections for Certificates. This decision is based on the Public Utilities Code sections and uses those section numbers for Certificates that existed at the time Energy Safety's Safety Certification Guidelines Version 1.0 were published on April 25, 2025. Future Certificate decisions will be evaluated by Energy Safety under the newly amended Public Utilities Code sections.
For anyone reading a compliance matrix, a flow-down schedule or an older scope of work, the practical rule is that 8389(e)(7) and 8389(a)(7) are the same obligation. The renumbering is visible in the dockets. Bear Valley Electric Service's fourth-quarter 2025 notification is captioned under section 8389(e)(7); SCE's second-quarter 2026 notification is captioned under section 8389(a)(7).
One substantive change rode along with the renumbering. The old (e)(2) required the corporation to be "in good standing," satisfied by agreeing to implement safety culture assessment findings. The new (a)(2) drops the good-standing framing and states the agreement itself as the condition.
What the certificate is worth once issued, and why a missing one on an ignition date costs a utility its reimbursement cap, belongs to AB 1054 and the plan behind it.
What the request contains, section by section
Energy Safety adopted Certificate Guidelines Version 2.0 on September 3, 2026. The draft had been published on August 6, 2026 with a comment deadline of August 26, 2026. No comments were filed and nothing changed between draft and final.
The Guidelines prescribe the request's section headings word for word. There are six of them for seven statutory conditions, because paragraphs (4) and (6)(A) are answered together.
Required section title in the request | Statutory condition |
Section 8389(a)(1) - Approved Wildfire Mitigation Plan | (a)(1) |
Section 8389(a)(2) - Agreement to Implement Recommendations from the Most Recent Safety Culture Assessments | (a)(2) |
Section 8389(a)(3) - Board Safety Committee | (a)(3) |
Section 8389(a)(5) - Board of Director Reporting | (a)(5) |
Section 8389(a)(4) and 8389(a)(6)(A) - Approved Executive Compensation Structure | (a)(4) and (a)(6)(A) |
Section 8389(a)(7) - Wildfire Mitigation Plan, Safety Culture Recommendations, Safety Committee Recommendations Implementation Progress | (a)(7) |
Most of those sections are satisfied with dates and hyperlinks. The board safety committee section is not. It calls for five separate things.
A resume for each committee member showing relevant experience.
A summary of each member's safety-related education and experience.
A description of how the committee functions in the company's governance structure.
A report on the significant topics the committee covered since the last certificate issued.
A description of the committee's recommendations, and whether the utility implemented them.
SCE filed the resumes for its five-member Safety and Operations Committee as Addendum 1 to its 2025 request, on January 27, 2026.
The board reporting condition is satisfied in public and in person. Energy Safety and the CPUC jointly host a meeting before certificate requests are due, and a board member plus the chief safety or risk officer must brief both agencies on safety performance.
SCE's 2025 request pointed to the August 19, 2025 meeting on utility safety practices, where the chair of its Safety and Operations Committee appeared alongside its chief operating officer and its vice president for enterprise risk management. The request then has to carry the slides used at that meeting.
Every document in this chain is public by statute. Section 8389(b)(3) says so plainly:
All documents submitted pursuant to this section shall be publicly available on the commission's and the office's internet websites.
The quarterly notification is where contracted work appears
The seventh condition is the one that consumes field records. Section 8389(a)(7) requires the utility to file a notification of implementation with Energy Safety and an information-only submittal with the CPUC every quarter, and it closes with an enforcement hook that the other six conditions do not have:
If the office has reason to doubt the veracity of the statements contained in the notification or information-only submittal, it shall perform an audit of the issue of concern.
A quarterly statement built on completion data that will not stand up is therefore an audit trigger written into the certificate statute itself. What such an audit looks like when it arrives is covered in Energy Safety's audits.
Table 3 of the Certificate Guidelines fixes the calendar.
Notification period | Submission date |
Q1 | May 1 |
Q2 | August 1 |
Q3 | November 1 |
Q4 | February 1 |
A date falling on a weekend or holiday moves to the next business day, and the rule gets used. August 1, 2026 was a Saturday, so SCE, PG&E and Bear Valley Electric Service filed their second-quarter notifications on Monday, August 3, 2026 in docket 2026-Cs. November 1, 2025 was a Saturday, and the third-quarter notifications went in on Monday, November 3, 2025.
Each notification has to state the date of the utility's non-spatial tabular Quarterly Data Report for the same quarter, report progress against every safety culture assessment recommendation in a prescribed table, and list the board safety committee's meetings and recommendations in a second prescribed table. That second table is where contractor performance most often surfaces. Energy Safety's own worked example in the Guidelines uses this recommendation:
Report on vegetation management contractor safety performance over the last four quarters
That row is an illustration Energy Safety supplied, not a recommendation any utility actually made. It still indicates what the agency expects the table to hold.
The real entries are more specific. SCE's second-quarter 2026 notification tracks 50 wildfire-related activities for 2026, of which six were complete at the end of Q2 and one, fire resistant wrap deployment, was behind schedule. Activity VM-11 in the attachment is titled Wood and Slash Contractor Management, and its target reads:
Implement work management system mandatory fields to document the removal method for all wood slash (debris) and implement mandatory QC fields for sample-based verification
A required field in a work management system, filled in by whoever closed the job, is a line item in a filing that keeps a utility's certificate current. That is the level at which this statute reaches a crew. How the same obligation travels into a subcontract is covered in flow-down clauses, and what the utility keeps afterward in recordkeeping and retention.
What happens when a target is missed
Section 8389(a)(7) asks for documentation that the corporation is implementing the mitigation strategies in its approved plan. It does not ask for proof that every target was met. That distinction decided a real case.
In the March 2, 2026 letter, Energy Safety recorded that SCE had met its commitments on 17 of the 36 mitigation initiatives in its 2023-2025 Base WMP as of the end of the third quarter of 2025. It recorded that SCE reported six initiatives off track, and that SCE stated it would not meet year-end targets on four of them: Early Fault Detection, Tree Attachment Remediation, Inspection and Maintenance Tools InspectForce, and REFCL grounding conversion. Energy Safety issued the certificate anyway, with this:
Energy Safety will continue to monitor and assess the implementation of the remaining initiatives as part of Energy Safety's performance assessment activities.
Missed targets moved into a different track. They did not defeat the seventh condition.
One thing does defeat the whole request before it starts. The Certificate Guidelines state it in a single sentence:
An electrical corporation is ineligible for a Certificate if it received a denial of its most recently submitted WMP.
A denial is one of the three exits from a plan review, and what produces one is set out in the three-year WMP cycle. Short of that, the statute gives the agency room to keep a certificate alive while paperwork catches up. Section 8389(b)(4)(B) permits Energy Safety to extend a certificate's expiration date where either it or the CPUC has not yet acted on an element of the request. A pending executive compensation approval does not have to strand the certificate.
The guidelines are not regulations, and the version number matters
Energy Safety writes its guidelines under Government Code section 15475.6. The process is a public meeting or workshop on at least 10 days' notice, and 30 days' written notice before a substantive change is adopted. Subdivision (c) then says what these documents are:
The Any guidelines adopted pursuant to this section are exempt from the requirements of Chapter 3.5 (commencing with Section 11340) of Part 1 of Division 3 of Title 2.
The stray "The" is in the published code, left behind by an amendment. That chapter is the Administrative Procedure Act. The Certificate Guidelines are binding on certificate requests and are adopted outside the rulemaking process that governs California regulations. The consequence is that they turn over faster than a regulation would. Safety Certification Guidelines Version 1.0 were adopted on April 25, 2025. Certificate Guidelines Version 2.0 replaced them on September 3, 2026, about 16 months later, with a 20-day comment window and no comments received.
The naming moved with it. Energy Safety's docket for 2025 is 2025-SCs, titled "2025 Safety Certifications." The 2026 docket is 2026-Cs, titled "2026 Certificates." The statute still uses both words: section 8389 calls the document a certificate, while section 451.1 and section 3292 call it a safety certification. Anyone searching the e-filing system for prior-year material needs both terms and both docket prefixes.
Where this lands on a contract
The certificate cycle is an annual calendar with four quarterly waypoints, and a bidder can read all of it in advance.
Energy Safety publishes the request schedule on each year's certificate docket. The 2025 schedule went up on November 7, 2025, and all four requests were filed on December 2, 2025.
A pending item does not delay the request. The utility files a placeholder, labels it as one, and files the real thing later as an addendum named "[abbreviation]_[year]_CertificateRequest_Addendum[number]". SCE filed two in the 2025 cycle, on January 27 and February 25, 2026.
Quarterly notification dates are fixed at February 1, May 1, August 1 and November 1. Utility-side requests for completion data, QA sampling results and closeout records cluster in the weeks before each one.
Numbers in these filings get corrected on the record. San Diego Gas & Electric refiled its entire fourth-quarter 2025 notification on March 19, 2026 because it had reported 43 quantitative initiatives where the correct count was 42.
The last one is worth holding onto. A single miscounted figure, caught after the certificate had already issued, generated an addendum and two revised filings in a public docket. Whatever feeds those counts is being read by a state agency with statutory authority to audit it. Contractor scorecards are where the same data gets read in the other direction.
Further reading
How California utility Wildfire Mitigation Plans work under AB 1054: What the certificate is worth, and the two agencies behind the plan it rests on.
The three-year WMP cycle and what changes between filings: Revision notices, errata, denial, and the version a scope of work should be read against.
What Energy Safety's audits actually examine: Where a doubted quarterly statement turns into an audit of the issue of concern.
Frequently asked questions
Who issues a California utility safety certificate, and under what section?
The Director of the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, under Public Utilities Code section 8389(a). The California Public Utilities Commission does not issue it. The Commission receives the quarterly information-only submittal, co-hosts the public meeting that satisfies the board reporting condition, and requires a third-party safety culture assessment under section 8386.2(a).
Why do older documents cite section 8389(e)(7) instead of 8389(a)(7)?
Senate Bill 254 renumbered the section, effective September 19, 2025. The seven conditions moved from subdivision (e) to subdivision (a), and the 12-month validity rule moved from (f)(1) to (b)(1). Energy Safety's March 2, 2026 letter issuing SCE's 2025 Certificate still used the old numbers and said so, because the guidelines in force when the request was filed used them. Bear Valley Electric Service's Q4 2025 notification carries the old citation in its subject line; SCE's Q2 2026 notification carries the new one.
Does a utility lose its certificate if it misses a wildfire mitigation plan target?
Not automatically. In the March 2, 2026 issuance letter, Energy Safety recorded that SCE had met its commitments on 17 of 36 mitigation initiatives as of the end of Q3 2025, and that SCE stated it would miss year-end targets on four initiatives, including Tree Attachment Remediation. Energy Safety issued the certificate and said it would continue to monitor implementation through its performance assessment activities. The hard bar is elsewhere: Energy Safety's Certificate Guidelines state that an electrical corporation is ineligible for a Certificate if its most recently submitted wildfire mitigation plan was denied.
When are the quarterly notifications due?
May 1 for Q1, August 1 for Q2, November 1 for Q3 and February 1 for Q4, per Table 3 of Energy Safety's Certificate Guidelines Version 2.0. If the date falls on a weekend or holiday, the filing moves to the next business day. August 1, 2026 was a Saturday, so SCE, PG&E and Bear Valley Electric Service filed their Q2 2026 notifications on Monday, August 3, 2026.
