Case Study: Pacific Gas and Electric Company achieves 50% cost reduction in substation modeling with Bentley

Pacific Gas and Electric Company - Customer Case Study

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) operates more than 1,000 transmission and distribution substations across California and was spending 95% of its USD 1 billion substation budget on brownfield work. Faced with time‑consuming manual conversion of 2D drawings to 3D models for retrofits, PG&E turned to Bentley solutions — including ContextCapture and Bentley Substation (with Descartes, MicroStation, and ProjectWise) — to adopt reality modeling from image capture.

Using UAV imagery processed with Bentley ContextCapture and integrated into Bentley Substation, PG&E created highly accurate 3D reality models that are shared via ProjectWise. Bentley’s approach cut substation modeling costs by 50% and reduced modeling time by one‑third, provided a single centralized source of information, and enabled real‑time measurement of electrical and physical clearances to eliminate costly construction conflicts.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company