Pasadena Water and Power Becomes More Transparent With Electrical Sources Posting

Pasadena Water and Power announced late last week it is now posting its Power Content Label, an annual report that shows from which sources electricity supplied to customers was generated during the previous calendar year.

Posting the PCL is required by the California Energy Commission. Now, as an added service, PWP is preparing to provide copies of the PCL to customers by mail.

The new information feature is in line with new regulation passed by the CEC on July 13. The new requirement will still have to be approved by the California Office of Administrative Law, but once approved, PWP will include the PCL in a utility bill insert by the end of the year, according to PWP’s Interim General Manager Bucharan S. Bawa.

Bawa said this will encourage customers to learn more about Pasadena’s power supply mix.

According to the 2015 PCL now posted on PWP’s website, PWP sourced 34 percent of its power supply from coal-fired power plants and 29 percent from renewable energy sources, which include biomass and waste sources, geothermal, solar and wind.
Nuclear power accounted for seven percent of PWP’s supply, while “unspecified sources of power,” meaning transactions not traceable to specific generation sources, made up for about 21 percent of the supply.

In May this year, PWP commissioned the 20-megawatt Kingbird A Solar Project and added a capacity of 56,000 megawatt-hours to the Pasadena power mix. This is enough to serve the annual energy consumption of about 9,400 Pasadena homes.

Aside from Kingbird, PWP has secured contracts with several other solar facilities and a landfill gas-to-energy project that will help increase PWP’s renewable portfolio by an additional 30 MW.

The addition of the new 71MW combined cycle unit at the Glenarm Power Plant will also help diversity Pasadena’s renewable energy portfolio.

For more information about PWP’s Power Integrated Resources Plan, visit www.pwpweb.com/irp.