Drafter
Clerk 09/11/2024
Title
AN ORDINANCE authorizing the executive to execute an extension from ten to twenty years for a service agreement approved under Ordinance 18472, for the purchase of renewable electricity with Puget Sound Energy.
Body
STATEMENT OF FACTS:
1. King County is a major electricity customer of Puget Sound Energy, purchasing more than ten million dollars a year in electricity to operate county buildings and facilities within Puget Sound Energy's electricity service territory. Approximately forty-six percent of the electricity supply in the Puget Sound Energy electricity service territory through its standard electricity offerings is supplied by carbon-based sources, including twenty-three percent coal and twenty-three percent natural gas.
2. The 2020 Strategic Climate Action Plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from government operations by fifty percent by 2025 and eighty percent by 2030, through measures including increasing the percentage of energy from renewable sources used in county operations to seventy percent by 2020, eighty-five percent by 2025, and ninety-five percent by 2030.
3. Puget Sound Energy developed and received approval from the Washington state Utilities and Transportation Commission in September 2016 for Tariff Schedule No. 139 Voluntary Long Term Renewable Energy, known as Green Direct, offering one hundred percent renewable electricity to municipal and large commercial electricity users from the Skookumchuck wind facility in western Washington that began operation in November 2020 and the Lund Hill solar facility that went into operation in eastern Washington in December 2022.
4. Ordinance 18472 authorized the executive to enter into a service agreement for the purchase of one hundred percent renewable electricity with Puget Sound Energy through Green Direct for a term of ten years.
5. Purchasing renewable electricity through Green Direct has reduced direct greenhouse emissions for King County ope...
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