The States

“We must find ways into resources that provide baseload power. If we can define a real path to the future, perhaps we can slow down the transition to where we can protect the consumer, not just residential consumers but the commercial and industrial consumers, and keep the economy flowing.”

“If I had one wish, we would have more interregional transmission planning and be addressing the seams issue. That is a need and can be the solution for the number of renewables that need to come online across our country, particularly to address reliability issues and extreme weather events.”

“The one issue bringing all western Commissioners together is being asked to engage on how to design markets in the west. There are two organizations proposing competing day-ahead markets.”

“The Office of Resilience and Emergency Preparedness team is working with utilities now on their forward-looking climate vulnerability studies that they’re going to be preparing and submitting to the Commission, and the subsequent risk-mitigation plans.”

“We had a goal of 3 GW of energy storage by 2025, but in early 2022 the Governor requested a plan to expand it to 6 GW. We worked for close to a year on developing a roadmap to getting to 6 GW of storage by 2030.”

“In the spring of 2021, the legislature enacted the Broadband Connectivity Act, which required us to develop a map of broadband availability across the state on a more granular level than had been available. In June of 2022, we presented the first-of-its-kind broadband map.”

“For my folks who pick up the phones in the call center and in OCS, we’re the most public facing of all of the divisions of DPS. They get a lot of negative reinforcement from the outside world, which is a shame. It’s important to tell them what they do is valuable. I’m saying thank you.”

“For some of these water rate cases, the Staff has had to go to people’s residences and go through shoe boxes full of receipts in order to build a rate case for them, so that the companies can set the rates to appropriately cover their costs.”

“We will continue to face real challenges regarding reliability. Just and reasonable rates is another way of saying affordability. There is a lot of pressure around affordability issues, not exclusive to our Climate Law.”

“If we need to build 140,000 MW of new generation, in excess of 15 MW of storage, and related transmission, this is a ginormous cost. The legislature that passed the law has the goal, but no one communicated the price tag. I think every Commission around the country is now bumping up against the price tag.”