People In Power

“On our priority list is siting and permitting. If you want to have the benefits of the two major legislative initiatives that have passed over the past couple of years, you’ve got to be able to do siting and permitting more efficiently.”

“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.”

“The PSC makes decisions independent of electoral politics. The history of the Commission is the PSC is a spinoff of the legislature. Go back to 1907, and the functions were exclusively legislative. They were not executive.”

“My hope is everyone will have the same vision. I believe there’s resistance to a clean-energy future. I’m not sure we’re at the hearts and minds yet. If you are a utility and you are getting things done, it’s hard to let go of traditional ways.”