Here's a scenario I walk into a few times a year: a multifamily project is about 30% into design. The architect has a clean site plan. Parking's figured out. Landscaping is laid out. The electrical engineer has a one-line. Everyone's feeling good.

Then somebody asks: where does the transformer go?

Silence.

The transformer pad for a 50-unit apartment building is roughly 6 feet by 8 feet. PG&E needs 8 feet of clear working space on the front, 3 feet on the sides and rear, and the pad has to be within about 10 feet of a road or access drive so their truck can reach it. It also can't be directly under a balcony, next to a gas meter, or where the landscape architect put a protected oak. And by the way, PG&E's preferred location is usually the one spot the architect decided to put the bike room.

That's dry utility consulting in multifamily. It's not glamorous., if you don't sort it out early, it costs you parking spaces, delays your PG&E service agreement, and occasionally requires moving a building entrance.

What "Dry Utilities" Actually Means

Dry utilities are the underground electrical, telecom, cable, and fiber systems that serve a project — as opposed to wet utilities (water, sewer, storm drain). In California, dry utility work for multifamily involves coordinating with PG&E for electric service, AT&T or Frontier for telecom conduit, Comcast or Astound for cable, and whatever fiber provider is active in the area.

On a single-family project, this is relatively simple. On a 60-unit density bonus project in Oakland or Walnut Creek, it's a full coordination exercise with multiple agencies, specific conduit sizing requirements, and a PG&E design and estimating process that takes longer than most developers expect.

The civil engineer is typically the one who draws the joint trench plan — the underground conduit system that carries all of these utilities from the street to the building. We coordinate with the electrical engineer on the service entrance location, with the architect on the transformer pad footprint, and with each utility company on their specific conduit counts and specifications.

The Joint Trench Problem on Tight Sites

Joint trench gets its name because multiple utilities share the same trench. PG&E's conduit, AT&T's conduit, and cable conduit run together underground, typically in a common trench with specific separation requirements between each utility.

On a suburban infill site — say, a 1.2-acre parcel with a 5-story stick-frame building in Concord or Fremont — routing that joint trench from the street to the transformer location is a real puzzle. You're threading through:

We do this routing in AutoCAD or Civil 3D as part of the site planning phase. The earlier we get into the project, the more routing options we've. By the time a project is in permit review, the trench path is usually locked in by everything else that's been designed around it.

PG&E Coordination: The Timeline Nobody Plans For

Let me be direct about this: PG&E's design and construction timeline for multifamily projects in Northern California isn't fast. Here's a realistic sequence for a Bay Area project:

  1. Pre-application meeting — 4 to 8 weeks to schedule
  2. Load calculation submittal and service agreement — 6 to 12 weeks
  3. PG&E design release — 8 to 16 weeks after agreement execution
  4. Customer-installed conduit inspection — 2 to 4 weeks after conduit is in the ground
  5. PG&E cable pull and transformer set — 4 to 10 weeks after inspection

That's potentially 9 to 12 months from first contact to energized service, and that assumes no revisions, no load calculation disputes, and no change in transformer sizing. If the project picks up density bonus units halfway through design — which happens — the load calc changes, the service agreement may need to be amended, and you're back in the queue.

The fix is to start PG&E coordination during schematic design, not after permit approval. We submit a preliminary load calculation based on the unit count and appliance assumptions, get the pre-application scheduled, and lock in the transformer location before the rest of the site plan hardens around it.

Density Bonus Projects: More Units, Same Footprint

California's density bonus law (Gov. Code §65915) lets developers add units beyond base zoning in exchange for affordable unit commitments. That's good policy. It also means the electrical load goes up, the transformer may need to upsize, and the site that was already tight is now tighter with more units crammed in.

A project that started as 40 units might finish permitting at 56 units after density bonus. The difference between a 500 kVA transformer and a 750 kVA transformer is meaningful — bigger pad footprint, different clearance requirements, sometimes a different vault configuration. If the transformer location was already a compromise, upsizing it can break the compromise.

We've also seen density bonus units added to upper floors that shift the meter bank configuration. More units means more meters. PG&E requires individual metering for each dwelling unit, and the meter bank has to be accessible from the street without going through the building. On a project with 50+ units, the meter bank can be 20 to 30 feet wide. That's a wall of real estate on the street facade that the architect and owner need to account for early.

EV Charging Conduit: Design It Now, Thank Yourself Later

California's Title 24 building energy code (Part 6) requires EV-ready or EV-capable parking spaces depending on project size. For multifamily projects, the 2022 code requires a significant percentage of spaces to be EV-capable — meaning conduit, panel capacity, and raceway from the panel to the parking structure or surface stalls.

The practical problem is that EV conduit needs to be designed in coordination with both the electrical engineer and the dry utility plan. If you're running joint trench through a parking garage, the EV home-run conduit from the subpanel to the stalls is often in conflict with the same structural bays the utility conduits are passing through.

We coordinate EV conduit routing as part of the dry utility plan — not as a separate exercise at the end. This is the piece that most often gets deferred and then causes retrofit headaches. Pulling conduit through a poured garage deck after the fact is expensive. Routing it during design adds a few sheets to the civil drawings and saves the owner real money.

Telecom and Cable Demarcation

AT&T and cable providers each need a demarcation point in the building — typically a telecommunications room or a wall-mounted backboard in a utility area. The joint trench has to terminate at that location, and the room has to meet minimum size and ventilation requirements set by each provider.

On multifamily projects, this gets complicated when the building has multiple entries or when the ground floor is retail or commercial. Each provider has opinions about where the demarc goes and how their conduit enters the building. We get those requirements in writing during the design phase and show the entry points on the civil drawings so the architect can coordinate the interior room location.

The worst outcome is a telecom conduit that terminates at a building corner where the architect put a leasing office. We've seen it. It's fixable, not cheaply.

How We Coordinate Between the Players

On a multifamily project, the dry utility consultant sits between the architect, the electrical engineer, and the utility companies. Here's what that actually looks like:

With the architect: We need the building footprint, the transformer and meter bank locations confirmed on the floor plans, the telecom room location, and any below-grade conditions that affect trench routing. We give back: the joint trench plan, the transformer pad layout, and any utility easement requirements that need to show on the site plan.

With the electrical engineer: We coordinate service entrance location, conduit sizing from the transformer to the main switchboard, EV conduit routing, and the load calculation that goes to PG&E. The electrical engineer designs the internal distribution; we design the external service connection.

With PG&E: We prepare the preliminary design package, attend pre-application meetings, respond to design comments, and track the service agreement through execution. When the civil contractor is ready to install conduit, we make sure the inspection request is submitted on time so we don't hold up the schedule.

This is the coordination work that doesn't show up on any single sheet of drawings, determines whether the project gets power on schedule. It's also where things fall through the cracks when nobody owns it explicitly. That's the role dry utility consulting fills on a project team.

What to Get Right in the First 30 Days

If you're a developer or project manager starting a multifamily project in the Bay Area, here's what we'd tell you to lock in early:

None of this is technically complicated. It's coordination — getting the right information to the right people before everyone's drawings are done and nobody wants to move anything.

Our Experience in the Bay Area

We've worked on multifamily projects from Richmond to San Jose, mostly in PG&E's service territory, with some Pacific Gas work in outlying areas. The jurisdictions vary — Walnut Creek's planning department handles utility easements differently than Oakland's —, the PG&E coordination process is consistent. We know the process, the timelines, and the specific requirements for the Bay Area service territory.

If your project is in design and the transformer location still isn't confirmed, give us a call. It's the kind of thing that's easy to solve at 30% design and genuinely painful at 90%.