Power grid from Nevada to Lake Tahoe: Find electricity elsewhere

from Malena CaroloCalMatters

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A utility serving 49,000 Lake Tahoe customers has just over a year to find a new source for 75 percent of its power. Liberty Utilities, one of California’s three smaller investor-owned utilities, warned regulators this month that its main energy supplier would not extend its contract beyond May 2027.

Liberty, whose territory straddles the California-Nevada border, generates about 25 percent of its energy from solar facilities in Nevada. The remainder was purchased through Nevada-based NV Energy, which said it would not be able to continue that arrangement because of its “own resource needs,” Liberty told regulators this month.

“Our absolute goal is twofold: We want to meet our renewable energy requirements in the state, and we also want it to be as affordable as possible,” said Eric Schwartzrock, president of Liberty.

Most likely, replacement power will come from sources outside of California. Liberty is not physically connected to the California energy market that serves the state’s other electric companies. Instead, its transmission lines come from Nevada.

Liberty’s deadline for replacement capacity is tied to a major transmission project—Greenlink Nevada—that NV Energy is completing; when that ends, NV Energy will stop providing power to Liberty, but Liberty will get the rights to use that transmission infrastructure to reach other sources of replacement energy.

In a statement, NV Energy said it was “aware of Liberty Utilities’ advisory letter to California regulators and is currently reviewing it.”

The data centers have prompted requests to triple the company’s peak capacity, NV Energy’s director of business development said at a regional business event in Septemberas first reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “These are unprecedented times,” he said during a panel discussion of the centers, adding, “we’re excited to serve this load” but “we can’t impact our existing customer base.”

Liberty’s letter to the California Public Utilities Commission about the change also asks for approval to undertake a power replacement process and how it will rank the proposals it receives, namely a search for lowest-cost power. Once the commission approves its requests, commission spokesman Terry Prosper said, Liberty will select its new energy supplier and seek regulatory approval for the final contract.

Liberty, Schwarzrock said, plans to offer its contract to “anyone and everyone,” focusing first on meeting its renewable energy requirements set by California. The company’s unusual peak season, he said, makes it a favorable partner for energy suppliers. While most utilities in the region peak in the summer when it’s hottest, Liberty’s peak season is around Christmas, when people with second homes on Lake Tahoe arrive for the winter ski season.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.