As it continues to weigh the future of the city’s electricity grid, the Naperville City Council will hold a series of workshops to define the city’s strategic long-term energy goals. Discussions, however, will not cover any specific contract decisions.
Council members unanimously agreed Tuesday to the workshop plan, dates for which have not been set.
The idea was suggested by Councilman Josh McBroom at the council’s last meeting. He initially posed it as an opportunity for the council to discuss energy procurement options available to the city.
Naperville’s contract with its current electricity provider, the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency (IMEA), could expire as soon as 2035. Contract terms technically extend through 2040 but the city and IMEA both have the right to terminate the it earlier with five years’ notice. Though still at least 10 years’ out from possible expiration, IMEA — citing the need for long-term planning — gave Naperville an April 30 deadline to decide whether or not to extend its contract to 2055.
For more than a year and a half now, Naperville has been preparing to make a decision.
And while April 30 has come and gone, the matter still looms. Naperville Electric Utility Director Brian Groth has said the offer for contract renewal has not closed. The IMEA Board of Directors is expected to vote later this month on formally extending the offer to August.
City staff have also stated they plan to bring the matter to council in July or August. It was in anticipation of that discussion and a possible contract renewal decision later this summer that McBroom requested a council workshop on the issue.
His fellow council members, however, took the idea in a different direction Tuesday, stipulating that any workshops be purely strategic rather than centered on IMEA’s renewal request.
The motion that ultimately passed, put forward by Councilman Ian Holzhauer, directs staff to schedule the first in a series of workshops on long-term energy options, concentrating on strategic objectives and excluding tactical decisions about any specific contract.
While the motion moved forward with full council support, nearly an hour of discussion preceded the final vote.
Where members diverged was on timing. In making his motion, Holzhauer maintained the city ought not to rush on “the most important (city) decision of the next decade,” he said. “Let’s do this the right way.”
Councilman Patrick Kelly said the “timing is totally wrong” for a workshop on long-term procurement planning in the context of IMEA’s contract renewal.
“More information is always better, so fundamentally I don’t really have an objection to a workshop but … what I think we should focus on, if we’re going to do that, is setting our priorities,” he said.
“I kind of feel like we’re making a decision before we know what we want,” Councilwoman Mary Gibson said. “So let’s pause and say what our priorities are.”
McBroom said he’d support a series of workshops as long as they bring discussions and information that have so far only been broached by advisory boards.
Earlier this spring, the city’s Public Utilities Advisory Board received hours of presentations on the issue from not only IMEA but also an outside consultant, energy market experts and the Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, all of which resulted in PUAB narrowly recommending the city stay with IMEA.
McBroom maintained that taxpayer dollars paid for a consultant and outside counsel, so residents “deserve to have these people right in front of us, answering our questions.” Asked by his colleagues if his motion would allow for that, Holzhauer said yes but that he’d want to make it clear “this is not moving forward with the next (step) towards an IMEA approval.”
The workshop vote came after the PUAB last week continued to delve deeper into the topic. Despite having already making a recommendation, the board received presentations at its May 29 meeting from Chris Townsend, energy law partner at CJT Energy Law, and Mark Pruitt, principal at The Power Bureau.
Both reviewed how the cost of electricity in Naperville compares to alternatives — from both a wholesale and consumer standpoint — and how the city could go about procuring energy without IMEA.
Townsend and Pruitt, for instance, looked at how residential rates compare for customers getting their electricity through IMEA versus ComEd, the largest electric utility in Illinois. Studying rates going back eight years, Townsend’s and Pruitt’s analysis found that from 2017 until about 2023, ComEd had a price advantage over Naperville’s electric utility but that in recent years, that price advantage has flipped.
The analysis also found that residential rates from January 2017 to July 2024 were less volatile in Naperville than with ComEd.
As for as how Naperville would tackle powering its electric grid without IMEA, Pruitt advised that it would take time and resources, but it could be done.
Unlike most other municipalities in Illinois, Naperville has for years procured electricity for residents, businesses and other users by going through IMEA rather than relying on a company like ComEd. Instead of having resources and industry expertise in-house, the city relies on IMEA, a joint action agency that sells an already assembled power supply to municipally-owned utilities across the state.
If the city chose to tackle procurement without IMEA, it would still likely have to outsource some responsibilities to an alternate provider, Pruitt said. And even then, the city’s electric utility would have to bulk up staffing, he said.
“I’m not saying you can’t do it, you just don’t do it right now,” Pruitt said. “So it’s additive. I’m sure it can get done. … But there’s very few, if any, one-stop shop solutions that we’ve identified.”
Pruitt advised that city officials should have “a very clear vision of what are we going to accomplish in doing this because the road is going to be long and it’s going to be challenging, so you’re going to need to have a well-defined goal to be able to justify the investment of time and material and money to get this done.”
Despite the additional information, PUAB members were left at something of a standstill in terms of what further role they should play in how the city ultimately approaches long-term procurement.
“We’ve kind of made our recommendation to city council, so … what happens next?” member Michelle Ackmann asked.
Board Chair Louis Halkias said the PUAB’s role now is to share information, an obligation he directed at council especially.
“I think we have many city council people that are not up on this, because they have a lot of other things going, and it’s our job … to help them understand the issue,” he said. “And right now, I don’t believe a majority of them understand the issue.”
