Letter to the Editor: Getting the Facts Straight About Clean Energy and the Budget

[Editor’s Note: The information published by Pasadena Now was in alignment with the City’s framing of the issue in the agenda.]

The April 20th Pasadena Now article about the Capital Improvement Budget repeats false and misleading information about the cost of the transition to carbon-free electric power by 2030. The truth is that most of the CIP budget is for investments that are resource agnostic, in other words, they are designed to improve the electric power no matter whether the source of the electricity is burning coal, burning methane gas, nuclear or a renewable resource like solar, wind, geothermal or batteries.

For example, the $73.2 million for Subtransmission Path 2 upgrades, $75 million for Fair Oaks and Brookside substation upgrades and $65.2 million for T.M. Goodrich intertie transformer upgrades were all planned long before the Pasadena City Council committed to the carbon free by 2030 goal. The same is true for software and other improvements in the CIP related to Advanced Metering.

The Goodrich project is a huge project that will remediate the bottleneck that currently limits how much electricity (clean or dirty) can be imported; it is not scheduled for completion until 2032-2035 and is not even designed yet. Indeed, the planned increase in local solar that IS part of the plan for the transition will actually reduce our city’s dependency on imported electricity and increase our resiliency in extreme temperatures.

PWP’s budget justification memo indulges in a logical non-sequitur. If the future distribution grid is supposed to be distributing carbon free electricity, that means that the vault concrete, transformers, wooden poles, and cables are themselves renewable resources.

This confusion is not the fault of the journalist who wrote the article. As a member of the Stakeholder Technical Advisory Panel (2023) and Technical Advisory Panel (2024-2025) for the transition to carbon free electricity, I witnessed PWP’s tendency to claim that everything it does is for clean electric power. The PWP proposal takes this statement to a new level. Why? Because PWP seeks to give the appearance that it is complying with city policy to build a clean, renewable, resilient 21st century system. In fact, the CIP budget undermines the goal by funding fruh-fruh ($33 million for a new PWP “headquarters”), while omitting critical elements of the plan for the transition.

It is time for PWP to stop going rogue from city policy, and engaging in politics with our children’s future.

Cynthia Cannady
Chair, PASADENA 100 Coalition