In an interview with APPA, David Reyes, General Manager of Pasadena Water and Power in California, provides details on the installation of a utility scale battery energy storage system and discusses the utility’s community engagement efforts including an interactive community open house held by PWP.
Reyes was appointed as the new General Manager of PWP, effective May 5, 2025. He brings over two 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.
In the interview for APPA’s Public Power Now podcast, Reyes discussed an interactive community open house the utility held in 2025.
“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,” he noted.
“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,” he said.
“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,” Reyes noted.
PWP staff focused 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,” he noted.
“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.”
The utility is 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.”
It was a success “and we look forward to doing it again and meeting with community in that way.”
He also discussed other ways in which PWP engages with the community.
“We're really excited and proud of what we do with 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.”
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 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.”
He added, “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.”
The utility is pursuing the installation of a utility scale battery energy storage system within the utility's existing Glenarm power plant.
Reyes noted this will be the first storage project in the city.
“We're excited about this utility scale battery system,” he said, noting the size of the system is 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.”
The system is 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 PWP has secured a grant to do a pilot program for a long duration storage system.
Other topics discussed in the interview were the Pasadena City Council’s goal of sourcing 100% of Pasadena's electricity from carbon-free resources by the end of 2030 and the utility’s work on time of use rates and introduction of its AMI system.
On December 15, the Pasadena City Council unanimously approved the Optimized Strategic Plan (OSP), a forward-looking framework that will guide PWP to meet the goals of Resolution 9977, sourcing 100% of Pasadena’s electricity from carbon-free resources by the end of 2030 while optimizing for affordability, rate equity, stability, and reliability of electricity while achieving this goal.
