Road to Zero: Sharing our progress one year later

It’s been about a year since we launched our 2030 Zero Carbon Plan, and SMUD staff have been hard at work studying new emerging technologies, evaluating our resource requirements, conducting reliability assessments, connecting with our customers and communities and building critical partnerships to position the Sacramento region as a hub for a thriving clean energy economy. I’m excited to share an update on our progress.

Studying the possibilities

To ensure we can continue to provide safe reliable and affordable power, we first had to identify the resources needed to replace our gas plants. Our detailed reliability studies focused on 3 main areas to examine new clean resources already planned, and the impact of the additional resources on our transmission system.

1. Thermal plant retirement
2. Transmission planning system adequacy
3. Reliability adequacy

These studies showed we’re on track to lay-up our Campbell and McClellan plants by the end of 2025, with the replacement capacity coming from the solar and storage projects already underway or planned to be online by 2025. All told, we’ll bring 1,155 MW of new clean resources – renewables and battery storage – online by 2025. That’s enough energy to power 300,000 homes and reduce our carbon emissions by one million metric tons per year.

We also found that our transmission system is adequate to support the resources coming on to our grid to eliminate carbon emissions from our power supply by 2030.

In terms of grid-scale technology research, we’re looking closely at long-duration energy storage, the potential application of pumped hydropower storage within our existing Upper American River Project hydro system, compressed air energy storage, flow batteries and more.

One thing I’m especially proud to share is the launch of our first utility-scale battery storage project, the largest project of its type in our region. It also demonstrates the opportunity for public-private partnerships for battery storage installations in Sacramento’s clean energy future.

Creating awareness

Over the last year, we did a lot of work with our customers because we know we can’t get to zero alone, and we want and need our customers to be active participants in our journey. We won’t leave any community behind and are committed to ensuring an equitable future for all in our region. Along with our plan, we launched our comprehensive “Clean Power City” marketing, communications and outreach campaign, with the goal of building awareness of our goal and why it matters.

Our campaign focused on educating the region about the poor air quality we’re faced with and how our work to reach zero could help improve the lives of our customers, community and future generations.

Here’s a little more of what we’ve done:

• We held targeted listening sessions to deeply understand the views and priorities of specific customer groups and demographics.
• We delved into TikTok to broaden engagement with our customers of the future.

• We built broader partnerships that are supporting and helping accelerate our zero carbon efforts.
• We worked to lay the foundation and build the framework for a regional collaboration structure to support decarbonization.

All this helped reach 52% customer awareness of our goal in less than a year. And 90% of our customers who are aware of our goal support it.

Building partnerships

At SMUD, we’re acutely aware that we can’t get to zero alone, and building partnerships is another crucial piece to reach this goal. Some key partnerships we’ve established include:

• An agreement on regional funding priorities for zero emission vehicle deployment with the Sacramento Metro Air Quality Management District, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments and Regional Transit.
• Alignment and collaboration with Sacramento County and the City of Sacramento on our federal and state grants strategy through a building electrification Memorandum of Understanding.
• Support for local nonprofits with things like energy efficiency upgrades, increased access to clean transportation for youth and families and youth education in the areas of sustainability, air quality and clean energy through our Shine Community Development Awards. Through these awards, we’re especially interested in supporting our historically under-resourced neighborhoods.
• As a founding member, leading the regional effort to create and launch the California Mobility Center (CMC), a public-private venture focused on electric mobility innovation. The CMC focuses on the commercialization of new, clean mobility solutions to put more EVs on the road, advance a new industry that will drive good-paying jobs and economic growth and create workforce development and training opportunities that reach deep into our underserved communities.
• We recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding that’ll bring together cutting-edge resources and investment dollars from our partners to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of integrating bidirectional charging into the grid. This is truly a game changer, bringing stakeholders both public and private together to accelerate solutions and reinvent how we supply clean energy to customers across the nation.

The road ahead

Looking at the work ahead of us, we’re digging even deeper into reliability assessments and finalizing plans to lay-up 2 of our natural gas plants by the end of 2025.

In terms of our remaining 3 gas-fired plants, we’re closely watching the development of alternative fuels, and we’re moving forward with the procurement processes for several solar and storage projects I mentioned earlier.

The work with our customers to deeply understand their needs will continue, particularly among our harder-to-reach populations, those in historically under-served communities and with our small and medium business customers – to bring them along in our zero carbon journey.

We have a lot in the works from a program standpoint to support decarbonization. One new set of programs we’ll be launching, testing and looking to expand is to build out our Virtual Power Plant resources, in partnership with our customers.

We’ll continue to provide incentives and options for customers to participate in programs that allow us and them to share value for their Distributed Energy Resources and technologies such as smart thermostats, battery storage systems, electric vehicles and other devices. These resources can be tapped into when needed to help balance the grid and minimize the need for additional generation, or to offset fossil-fuel generation during specific times.

Electrification of vehicles and buildings is a major focus of our Zero Carbon Plan because these are the 2 largest carbon emitting sectors in California. We’re planning to launch pilots to investigate residential managed charging options, working with vehicle manufacturers and aggregators and exploring vehicle to home and vehicle to grid technologies for light, medium and heavy-duty electric vehicles.

We believe there’s a significant role for utilities like SMUD to focus on supporting installation of charging infrastructure, in a way that makes the customer experience simple and timely, minimizes grid impacts and optimizes grid infrastructure investments.

Finally, I want to thank every SMUD employee who continues to work tirelessly on every aspect of this plan. Their work this past year has built a strong foundation for the future, and I’m genuinely grateful for all the innovative solutions they’ve brought forward in such a short amount of time.