The following is a transcript of the October 26, 2026, 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 Scott Rogers, the Chief Utility Engineer for City Water, Light and Power, the public power utility that serves Springfield, Illinois.
Scott has served in his current role since spring of this year, and he's worked for the utility since December of 1995.
Scott, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Scott Rogers
Paul, it's a pleasure to be here.
Paul Ciampoli
So Scott, for listeners who may not be familiar with City Water Light and Power, could you provide an overview of the utility?
Scott Rogers
Yes, and I'll start the overview going all the way back into the 1860s where we initially provided water for Springfield residents.
And then around that same period, shortly thereafter, we provided street lighting for the residents of Springfield.
So that was kind of the start of Springfield providing residents water and electrical lighting. At that point, it was gas lighting.
Then as it grew over the years, in 1920-ish, we had our own electric generation.
We were sued by a private entity that was providing electric energy also to the residents of Springfield.
And that court case went all the way to the Supreme Court where we won that case, which was, as far as we're aware of, the first case of where municipalities have the right to serve their customers from an electric energy standpoint.
So I think that's the landmark case of really providing public power to customers in the United States.
Since then, currently today, we have 70,000 electric meters, 50,000 water meters, and we provide water to some other customers in small villages around the city of Springfield.
We currently have one coal-fired unit. We have one combustion turbine and a couple small peakers.
And we can cover our load currently about 95% of the time without any additional power supply.
Paul Ciampoli
So Scott, I just wanted to drill down to some recent news, which we actually covered in our newsletter, and that's related to integrated resource planning.
And as you know, the utility recently kicked off the process of developing a new IRP to help guide Springfield's electric resource decisions for the future.
The IRP will also meet a requirement under the state's new Clean Reliable Grid Act, which took effect July 1st of this year, requiring utilities to develop an updated IRP every five years.
The initial IRP development under the new law must begin by 2027.
So Scott, in late August, as you know, the utility presented the proposed IRP process to the Springfield City Council.
Can you provide an overview and additional details on this proposed IRP process?
Scott Rogers
An integrated resource plan is really an important opportunity for us to take a look at what our future energy needs are. The hard part of an IRP is managing expectations.
When you start looking at an IRP, looking at scenarios that are 20 years out and building those scenarios, really then in 20 years, we don't have crystal balls, so we don't know what that's going to look like.
But it gives us a picture of what it may look like.
And then the outcome of an IRP realistically is more a five-year action plan, which is actually what's required through the Clean Reliable Grid Act is to provide a final five-year action plan that will be published for the public and everybody else to see.
Part of the IRP, where we're at today, we issued an RFP. We are evaluating the submissions of that IRP or RFP.
And hopefully by the end of this month or within a couple weeks here, we'll have an ordinance ready for council approval to approve that agreement and start working with the selected vendor.
And the initial, we've been through an RFP before, so the initial will be some data requests from the vendors and a discussion on the plan and moving forward.
And we've been through that, so we're already working on some of that background information we know they're going to want.
Then once we get through that, part of it also is public input.
So part of the RFP that we put out was for this vendor to manage that public outreach and the required public meetings with Q&A sessions.
So ultimately, this will be probably about a year scenario or a year-long process.
We have to have it published by January 1 of ‘28.
So we're well on our way. We should be in good shape to be able to have that done sometime mid to late next year.
Paul Ciampoli
And so you mentioned public input and that kind of is a nice segue into the other question, another question I had, which is, did you want to elaborate in terms of how the utility plans to engage with customers as the IRP’s developed?
Scott Rogers
Yeah, public input's important to the process.
Not only are our customers basically our owners, but we want to hear what their expectations are.
And when you look at that, we've done some outreach in the past and we do it periodically just to see what our customers want.
And the primary response we continually get is affordable, reliable power.
And so that's always our goal as a public power entity is we're trying to keep our rates as low as we can and be reliable as we can for our customers.
So part of that, like I said, is there's outreach, there's in CRGA, there are two mandatory Q&A sessions.
It defined points. One is when we have the scenarios built and two is the preliminary output of the IRP.
So there's two defined and there'll be other presentations.
We'll keep the council members abreast and we'll do periodic presentations through that. We don't have all that defined yet. We'll work with the vendor to define all of those exact points that we will have presentations in the public input.
Paul Ciampoli
So Scott, CWLP's last IRP was completed in January 2020, and the utility has noted that since then, significant changes have occurred in the power industry and in the utilities resource portfolio.
Can you offer additional details on these power industry changes and how the utility is addressing these changes as part of its IRP development?
Scott Rogers
We completed our last one in 2020. Since then, you look at industry-wide, the different technologies that are coming out.
You've got significant changes in batteries -- currently the state of batteries, there's a lot of batteries out there. The cost of them is continually dropping.
So there's additional resources that I think are beneficial.
I've been involved in a lot of discussions with battery vendors over the years, over the last five years. The problem we always run into is the affordability piece.
When you start looking at it, it didn't make sense for us especially with our current portfolio to enter into batteries. And so there's changes there that are moving forward.
I was recently at a conference, a battery conference, and some of the better technology of lithium ion batteries that are out there, they're telling us at that conference, they told us that it's at least 2030 before that is utility scale battery.
So now you're back to looking at the lithium polymer batteries. And the cost of them are coming down.
The lithium ion batteries have benefits long term, but there's so many other changes, not only from technology of resources, but you also have regulatory requirements.
And so obviously there's different federal regulations that have changed three or four times over the last five years, or significant amount of time.
In Illinois, the Climate Equitable Jobs Act, what we call CEJA, that limited what anybody or any power producer in Illinois can provide. Basically, it limits coal-fired generation to 2030 currently.
Now, CWLP is a municipality. There's another plant down south that supplies a lot of municipalities. We have an exemption until 2045.
So when you start looking at that, one of the reasons we haven't really done a lot of resource planning in this scenario lately is because we can provide, our current portfolio can provide 95% of our power all the time.
And so we've been over the last seven years, we've hedged a lot of power as we needed working with the Energy Authority who is one of our partners in MISO in providing information to MISO and our market participant with MISO.
So there's been a lot of changes in the industry and it's hard to plan long-term projects when the landscape's changing every year or so.
That's one of the reasons we haven't done anything with it. But now going forward, I think it's very clear where we're at.
The output of the IRP is only a five-year plan.
Even though we're looking 20 years out, that is information to see how the landscape changes with the next IRP.
How close were we? What other opportunities are there in the future that weren't available in the past one?
Paul Ciampoli
And so with respect to battery storage, and that's all good information.
I mean, is it safe to say at this point in time, based on your description of the current landscape, that energy storage is not something that you guys are looking at, at least immediately at this point?
Scott Rogers
No, as I've said before, to the council and to other questions that come up with this, from the utility standpoint, we're agnostic to what the energy source is. The primary goal of ours is to be able to cover our energy needs in a reliable and sustainable manner and at the cheapest cost.
That is the important part from any public utility is trying to keep rates low as you can for your customers.
Paul Ciampoli
And I would assume it's safe to say that, kind of just bigger picture, obviously resource planning has always been a challenge, but I mean, I think it's safe to say in my discussions with you and other public power officials that the level of variables and kind of unpredictability has kind of spiked in recent years.
So as you communicate with the city leaders and customers, I would imagine that's going to be something that's kind of a core element of communicating things related to the process, right?
Scott Rogers
That's correct. Being able to, as I said, managing the expectations and that's part of the public outreach.
It's not just the public telling us what they want us to do or what their ideas are.
Part of it is also us managing those expectations of what are the limitations currently out there that we have in place.
And fundamentally, like I said before, a five-year action plan is realistic.
If you get out beyond five years, the landscape's going to change again and it's hard to plan anything beyond that.
Paul Ciampoli
And then part of the education process too, I imagine is okay, so customer X may want 100% renewables, but he or she may not understand, there's practical engineering challenges with that, but there's also some costs involved. So, those are elements that are communicated to them.
Scott Rogers
That's correct. And the other part too is being affordable and like I said, being able to cover our energy needs, 24-7, 365. That's the goal. That's our goal.
Paul Ciampoli
So we talked about affordability and that's a nice transition to what I also want to talk about.
And this just jumped out at me as I was preparing for the interview is in the area of rates.
And in July, as you know, the utility noted that its electric rates remained affordable in the latest 12-month review.
So I wanted to give you a chance to tell our listeners about how the utility continues to maintain affordable electric rates for its customers.
Scott Rogers
Well, for us, as I said earlier, we have our own generation. That is a big impact on us being able to control our rates.
The other thing is when you start looking at other options, specifically in Illinois, Illinois being deregulated, some of the other providers in Illinois, they cannot provide their own energy. The state of Illinois buys that energy and capacity for them.
So the biggest impact that's happened in Illinois recently is the capacity markets.
With capacity prices spiking, especially in, we're in MISO zone 4, which is downstate Illinois, there's very limited, it's limited generation in Illinois downstate. So those power or those capacity prices keep spiking.
So one, we've been able to control our rates from the energy standpoint by our own generation.
And two, we have been active in, currently we have a long-term contract for capacity only from a wind farm in Illinois, just north of us.
We have a contract currently that expires this year from some capacity off solar farms in Illinois.
But then like I said earlier, we have two projects connecting to our system that we're buying some energy off of, but we're also buying capacity off of them also.
So that's what we've done over the last seven years, managing our capacity portfolio in addition to hedging energy when we know it's cheap for times when we know we're going to need additional energy to cover our peaks.
Paul Ciampoli
And in this day and age where you're seeing increasing a lot of headlines nationwide about the high power bills that customers are facing, I'd imagine you guys are not being shy in terms of kind of just letting your customers know that, hey, we're different in terms of being able to keep rates affordable and here's why.
Scott Rogers
Yeah, and that all comes down to the local control for a public power utility.
Paul Ciampoli
Yeah, and that's a great segue to the other question I had, which is giving you the chance to talk about the importance of local control when it comes to public power.
Scott Rogers
Yeah, we as a municipality, we answer to obviously the mayor and we have a city council.
And so for us to be able to keep them abreast of where we're at, they see our rates because they live in the city.
They see where we're at compared to some of their friends and neighbors who don't live in the city and have either a co-op or an Ameren or some of the other utilities in Illinois.
So it's just making sure that everybody sees where we're at with our rates compared to what other customers in Illinois are paying.
Paul Ciampoli
And is the generation, the ownership of generation, do you feel like the average customer has some sense at least in general, as to how important that is, as it relates to, keeping rates affordable.
Scott Rogers
Yeah, and that is a primary, the primary, one of the primary reasons that our rates are so affordable is we have our own generation.
So when you start looking at, like I said earlier, with the capacity pricing that's out there now in zone 4 for MISO, with our own generation, we can cover most of our capacity needs with that generation, as I stated earlier.
So that helps us shield our customers from those high costs because we have our own generation, we have our own capacity built into our system.
Paul Ciampoli
So Scott, I wanted to talk about the topic of safety.
And again, as I was preparing for the interview, one of the things that jumped out at me is the fact that in January of this year, your utility announced that its employees achieved a major safety milestone in 2025, recording the lowest accident rate in the utility's history and sending more employees home safely at the end of each workday.
So what are the steps the utility's taken to maintain high levels of safety for its employees, including the role of the utility's safety leadership council?
Scott Rogers
So this goes all the way back to 2007. We had a safety leader, it was a safety council that was some of the high-ranking officials in the utility.
We took a deep look into our accident history and we started going out and not just electric industry, we started meeting with different companies and these some Fortune 500 companies that have very, very good history of low accidents.
And just talking to them and seeing what they were doing and how they were doing it. And like I said, this went across multiple industries. It wasn't just the electric industry.
But we took that information and started putting a plan together and part of that plan led to the Safety Leadership Council.
So our Safety Leadership Council is comprised of not just electric, but it also includes water. And it's all of our division heads and all of our main directors for every department. So we meet once a month and we share information.
And that group also has the ability, there's also an executive leadership committee, which are the division managers of all the departments.
So that safety leadership council sharing those ideas, talking about accidents and how other people or other departments manage the personnel and manage the accidents and all the way from daily toolbox talks to monthly safety meetings and just putting different small pieces in place over the years.
And it took a while for us to gain any traction on that. It's changing culture. And that is not something that's going to happen overnight. And we knew that going in.
But just the dedication and continued commitment from the top down, from my position all the way down to supervisors in the field, being able to get that information and know that we are the upper management supporting them and providing whatever they need to do that.
And so we've dropped our incident rates significantly over the years and what you look at our trend and what you'll see is you'll see some significant drops, then you see a plateau.
So once we see that plateau, okay, now we’ve got to reevaluate what's causing the plateau.
How are we going to move forward to drive this down again?
And so that's the beauty of the Safety Leadership Council and the executive leadership group is we can have those discussions and we can talk about it openly and be able to figure out what we can do to help provide that information to our field workers and make sure that they're staying safe, not trying to rush a job, make sure safety's first.
And so we've done that in multiple ways.
Like I said, we did toolbox talks, we do daily job briefings. Now we're doing job hazard analysis before they go out to every job.
So those are some of the processes and steps we've taken over the years to get to the point we are today.
Paul Ciampoli
And one thing that stuck with me in your response is the fact that you guys went beyond the power sector to kind of look at lessons learned from other industries.
It sounds like you would be in a position where you'd recommend at least considering other public power utilities considering such a step.
Scott Rogers
We went to different companies, different industries, because everybody's, not everybody has the same, even across electric divisions, electric utilities, not everybody operates the same manner.
So when you start seeing the different industries and how they manage different things, then you come back and look at that as a whole and compare it to your operation, how can you make this work? And that's kind of where it started.
Paul Ciampoli
Do you have any sense as to how unusual that is in terms of public power utilities?
Scott Rogers
Talking to others, yes.
I don't think a lot of them do the outreach that we initially did.
Our incident rates were very high back in the early 2000s.
And so when you look at it from a broad perspective, any information we could gather was good information.
In the end, it turned out to be great information and enable us to put the pieces in place and drive it, help drive and manage that to the position we are today.
Paul Ciampoli
So Scott, for my last question, I want to give you the opportunity to talk about any recently completed or ongoing utility projects you'd like to highlight.
Scott Rogers
Yeah, like I said earlier, we have entered into two purchase power agreements for solar energy and capacity.
And the other thing we're working on is we're getting ready to roll out the AMIs, going to automatic metering infrastructure.
Part of the plan with that going forward also is with the changing landscape of capacity pricing and as a load serving entity, trying to manage our peaks.
So part of that is getting the ability to manage customers or help customers manage their energy usage.
Could be time of use rates, it could be incentives for certain time of day to not charge your vehicle on peak, charge your vehicle off peak for electric vehicles, and just combining all that together.
One of the things that I, my personal opinion coming out of the IRP we're getting ready to do, I think we're going to have the first five-year action plan, I think part of that's going to be managing energy reduction in our system from the customer standpoint and also distributed energy resources.
I think that's going to be a big picture that is going to be one of the outcomes that we're going to be pursuing to help manage our needs for our customers.
Paul Ciampoli
And with respect to AMI rollout and things like time of use, it goes without saying that the education and kind of walking customers through the process is going to be a key element of all that.
Scott Rogers
It is. And that's always the difficult part of any time you make a change, especially to customers' rates or give them options, is making sure they understand the options and how that works.
And a lot of the concern that the customers are going to have. What's that going to impact me?
How's that going to impact my daily lifestyle?
I come home to work and I want to walk into my house in the middle of summer and it's 72 degrees.
How can I manage that and still have that?
That's the education piece that would be a major impact to be able to push those out and get the customers to understand how that benefits them and benefits the utility at the same time.
Paul Ciampoli
Well, Scott, thanks so much for taking time. It's really been an interesting conversation.
And I would love to have you back at some point in the future to, at a minimum, talk about kind of where things stand with the IRP process, perhaps around this time next year.
Obviously, there's other topics we could discuss as well that we didn't discuss today.
So thanks again so much for taking the time.
Scott Rogers
Absolutely, Paul. I appreciate it. It's my pleasure.
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 with more from the world of Public Power next week.
