The following is a transcript of the Sept. 15, 2025, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA's News Director.
Our guest on this episode is David Reyes, who was appointed as the new General Manager of Pasadena Water and Power in California, effective May 5th, 2025.
David brings over 2 decades of public sector leadership experience to the role, including the last 12 years serving as the City of Pasadena in several key executive roles.
Most recently, he served as Interim General Manager of the utility since February 2024 and previously as Assistant City Manager and Director of Planning and Community Development.
David, thanks for joining us.
David Reyes
Paul, thank you for having me.
Paul Ciampoli
David, just to get our conversation started, I wanted to give you the opportunity to detail how the various roles you've held at the City of Pasadena and the utility have helped to prepare you to serve as general manager of the utility.
David Reyes
Yeah, maybe not the most traditional path to GM for a utility, but you know, as assistant city manager here in the city of Pasadena, I really was able to gain a citywide perspective looking at -- we've got 16 different departments.
We're pretty complex in Pasadena, one of three cities in California to have our own health department.
Most cities rely on counties for that responsibility. We also have the Rose Bowl, the Rose Parade, a full service city with police and fire, and we produce our own power and we've got a great water department as well.
And I think I was able to really look at this citywide perspective working across departments, looking at the various needs of the department heads and really trying to balance those needs with the needs of the city as a whole. I also got to work with the utility a little bit and understand what their needs were and that was helpful.
As Director of Planning, I really got to understand the growth impact on our utility system that multifamily development was having. We're largely a built out city, but we do have new multifamily coming in.
And I got to really understand that impact. But more importantly, I think as director of planning, I got to work with community and community engagement was really, really important.
And I got to do things like climate resiliency, working on the California Environmental Quality Act and trying to understand the role between sustainability and power and as interim general manager, I got that first-hand experience of working with staff, of working with the various business units, understanding how the utility operated at a high level and unfortunately during that time we experienced the Eaton fire and in my interim role, I think this is really where we came together as a team.
My executive team, the AGMs for the various business units, are second to none and I would say that really goes across our department from the top to the bottom.
We have folks that are really dedicated to our community and the Eaton fire was really a testament to that. It brought us together as a family and we really learned that we had each other's back and the most important aspect of what we do is serving our community and serving the public.
So I think that that really prepared me for the role I'm in today and I'm really excited and happy as the utility changes and seeks to be more public facing as we seek to meet some of our climate goals with respect to power transition to clean energy. I'm really excited to lead the organization at this time.
Paul Ciampoli
So now you mentioned community and community engagement, which as you know is kind of a core focus of public power obviously.
So against that backdrop, a couple of things that I want to talk to you about – one, specifically, as you know, the utility recently held an interactive community open house.
So the first question is could you provide additional details on the open house and discuss how customers and the utility benefited from that event?
And second, can you provide other examples of how the utility successfully engages with the community and its customers?
David Reyes
Sure, I think that we as a society benefited in a few ways from COVID, and I think one of those was the ability to work virtually to connect in different ways and ways that we hadn't previously.
And so a lot of what we do as a city, not just as a utility, but as a city, is communicate with the public via Zoom, via Teams, via other virtual outlets to meet community where they're at.
But we decided that we need to get out into the community and really be there with them to see them in person, to interact with them in a person to person way and this was our first ever open house as a department, as a utility.
We had about 150 attendees -- which was exciting -- from the community and we got a really good response from community and city leadership for putting that on.
We took over one of our local rec center’s basketball gym there and we had 10 different stations.
We had PWP staff focusing on everything from clean energy goals to billing to understanding solar, looking at our rebates and incentives and really just being there to answer questions.
I walked around with my executive team from station to station, introducing ourselves, trying to put a face to a name, listening to concerns and really trying to get as much feedback as we could in terms of what we were doing and how we were doing it.
As I said, we are in a time of growth and transition where we are looking to really get to clean energy goals and at the same time ensure that our rates are competitive.
So we wanted to hear from our customers and I thought that was a great opportunity. I thought it went well. It was a lot of work to do.
So I had the idea of doing it quarterly. I think staff has other ideas and maybe it's semi annually or annually, but it was certainly a success and we look forward to doing it again and meeting with community in that way.
Generally in what we do as a publicly owned utility, not-for-profit, right? We're here for our residents, for our customers, we do engage in lots of other ways.
We're really excited and proud of what we do with our schools, our local schools. We provide resources for education starting in second grade and then we continue that and we provide scholarships for high school students going to college.
And that is really an important aspect of what we do. But other than that, the community holds lots of different events, whether it's our council districts holding one of their community events, whether it's another department hosting an event, we always like to have a table at those events and share the latest information.
Whether it's again about billing, whether it's information on solar, how to be involved, how to engage. And so we try to send staff out. We've got a dedicated team.
Our external affairs team is just wonderful and dedicated to our community, so I think we've developed a lot of trust and I think that's what's expected of us as public employees, as public servants and we continue to look to new ways.
We're going to continue outreach through virtual means and platforms and do all of those things, but we also want to continue to provide as many opportunities to meet the public face to face as we can.
Paul Ciampoli
Irrespective of the ultimate pacing or scheduling of those open houses, I would imagine that just the fact that the open house is being held is a great way of communicating to customers that the utility and you and your leadership staff and the rest of the employees at the utility really care about what is of concern for your customers.
David Reyes
Paul, yeah, I think that's right.
The council member for the district -- when he showed up -- he was surprised first at the number of residents that were there from across the city, surprised at the number of staff that were there and was really encouraged by the questions that were being asked. I mean some of these events -- it easily could be taken over by folks that have one set agenda that they want to get across.
This was not that. This was really a true and I think open communication between public and staff where we could just be honest and actually have -- it's not over the phone.
It's not a chat, it's really face to face and I think that that was appreciated not only by the residents but by our staff as well.
It was exciting for them to be able to do that. It's not something they all get to do all the time, so we enjoyed it.
Paul Ciampoli
As you know, the Pasadena City Council set a goal of sourcing 100% of Pasadena's electricity from carbon-free resources by the end of 2030.
Can you offer additional details on how the utility is helping achieve this goal?
David Reyes
Yeah, really ambitious goal, Paul.
And you know it's our job to implement council policy and we are working very diligently towards doing that.
We have an IRP that was adopted in 2023 and that's the power integrated resource plan. It really sets forth how we're going to go about some of these larger key initiatives and it starts with procuring green energy and we've been doing that I would say probably since 2019, really trying to ensure that any new contracts that we enter into, anything that we're looking at is clean energy, is carbon free and we've spent over a billion dollars in contracts since 2020.
And that's not cheap, but energy itself is going up. It's not just clean energy, so these are things that we knew that we had to do and that we are continuing to do, but beyond that, we are really, really focused on ensuring that we're meeting the state's goals.
We've got to meet the state goal and that's an SB100 goal of 100% renewables on zero carbon by 2045. We're going to hit that by 2030, 15 years ahead of schedule without any issues.
We are very confident and very proud of that fact and we are currently finalizing what we're calling an optimized strategic plan that's going to give us a road map to define really the key actions and future decision points [of] how best to meet those goals because those goals that council set, they were also done so that we would look at affordability, rate equity, stability and reliability.
So how can we do all those things and still be carbon free, right? It's this sort of impossible task, which I think is really great that we would be ambitious and really push ourselves in this way.
And so I think beyond the contracts we're really looking at we have Glenarm [power plant], we are a producer of power. We have 5 turbines and we're looking at trying to use those just as peakers to the best we can.
But we're getting solar, we're getting geothermal, all of the contracts that we're getting, we're trying to vary. We have wind energy and we're also locally doing some things with respect to incentives.
For residential local solar, the City Council recently adopted some rules and regulations to allow folks to oversize their systems to meet the future demand of what their energy consumption might be, given that EVs are not going away, given that energy consumption we figure is going up.
We are working on time of use rates and introducing our AMI system, our advanced, our smart meters if you will. And so these are all things that are in the works and that we're doing and I really want to credit our supply team.
They are just really doing a fantastic job…as I said earlier, we've got a fantastic group of AGMs and our power supply team has just done a bang up job of really trying to get there. So we're not there yet. We are definitely on the path and are excited about continuing forward.
Paul Ciampoli
David, I had a quick follow up question if I could for you with respect to the time of use rates -- is there a timeline for a roll out of those rates and also could you discuss how the rates are being communicated in terms of the benefits for customers?
David Reyes
Let me actually start with your first question in terms of timing -- we have started the AMI project and we anticipate being able to roll that out mid to late 2027 where we can start actually figuring out on 15 minute increments where folks are in terms of their energy demand and usage.
And so we have in the city of Pasadena, we are still on our net energy metering one system. We are NEM one. We've got a great program, an incentive program for solar.
And the council has basically said this is important to us in terms of meeting our energy goals. We need to have local solar. We need to have our residents be able to engage with us and help us and be part of the solution. And I think that's important.
But I also think it's important that we develop the time of use rates in a way that's responsible so that we can get the energy when we need it, when the grid needs it and you know, getting energy at 12 noon solar energy is really not that helpful to a grid that doesn't peak until 5:00 or 6:00 PM at night, right?
So we're communicating, we've been communicating through the OSP process, through our Municipal Services Committee, the importance of time of use rates, we've not developed what those will be. We will communicate with the public.
We've shared the importance of not only the reliability on the grid and potential impacts to the grid with respect to peak demand and how important it is to try to conserve and folks can use batteries hopefully in the evening time with their solar and in furthering that effort, we have developed a rebate program that we're going to be implementing in the next couple of months to help people offset the costs of batteries.
So that it's not just solar, but it's solar plus battery and I think that that combination is really helpful in terms of grid reliability and also in terms of energy consumption and helping our residents offset some of the higher costs associated with what energy is today.
So we've not developed the exact time of use rates in terms of what they will be. We've communicated the need for them. We've communicated with council and the public that we would likely be rolling this out in late 2027 and are really excited about moving the utility forward in that way.
Paul Ciampoli
So as you know, the utility is pursuing the installation of a utility scale battery energy storage system within the utility's existing Glenarm power plant.
Any additional details you could offer on that?
David Reyes
Yeah, it'll be our first one, Paul, in the city.
We're excited about this utility scale battery system. I don't want to say it's a pilot exactly, but it's 25 MW.
It's a four hour lithium ion phosphate battery and we were lucky enough to secure a $10 million grant from the California Energy Commission to help us get that going.
That is also expected to be operational in 2027 and we've got our eye on future BESS systems and we continue to look at other innovative approaches like long duration energy storage.
We hope that that'll be something that would be commercially available in the coming years and we have secured a grant to actually do like a pilot program for an LDS.
And also thank you to APPA -- we did receive a grant for a rooftop wind micro turbine pilot project where we're going to install a wind micro turbine on one of our city-owned buildings and that was a grant through APPA and we're excited. That was a Demonstration of Energy and Efficiency Developments grant.
Again, not only the battery energy storage system, but anything that we can do to continue to be on the cutting edge of what exists so that our plant, our Glenarm power plant, which is really important for reliability -- and we are part of a grid, right? We are part of a larger grid -- but to the extent that that can really be a peaker and used only in the extreme circumstances where load is going to call for it or the grid needs it or there's an emergency, it's nice to have as a backup. It really is.
But we want to be green, we want to be burning that less and we want to rely on our carbon free energy sources. So the BESS project is something that we're really excited about.
Paul Ciampoli
So David, my wrap up question for you, I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about your long term goals for Pasadena Water and Power.
David Reyes
We've been in existence for over 100 years. Our water division -- we were one of the founding agencies for Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and we're really proud of what we do there. We are water and power.
I know this is about power. But going forward, we want to continue to provide reliable water and power for our community for the next 100 years.
We want to build and invest in tomorrow's grid today.
I know that sounds a little cliche, but we've got to do it and we're making that transition now. We're investing the resources that are needed and we're looking forward to continuing to provide the high quality, reliable services with exemplary customer service that support Pasadena's quality of life.
Paul Ciampoli
OK, great, David. Well, thanks again so much for taking the time to speak with us.
And obviously we've talked about a lot of interesting projects and activities underway at the utility.
So would love to have you back at some point in the future where we could revisit some of these topics and obviously we could talk about other interesting initiatives that that are underway at the utility.
David Reyes
Paul, thanks to APPA and you for having me and for supporting PWP and other agencies like us that promote the immense value of public power in the United States.
Thank you, Paul.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, Graphic and Digital Designer at APPA.
I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
