Electrification Strategy
A once-in-a-century energy transition is underway as we electrify power needs like transportation and heating and shift away from using fossil fuels. Thoughtful, long-term planning is essential: Seattle City Light’s electrification strategy – grounded in core values that put people and the planet first – is our roadmap towards a fully electrified, carbon-free future.
Partnering to support change is an important practice within our strategy. We partner regularly with technology leaders, customers, public agencies, community-based organizations, utility peers, and many others to plan and deliver essential activities, such as an electrification assessment to help plan for our distribution system and resources over decades to come. This work goes hand-in-hand with regular updates to our Integrated Resource Plan to meet our customers’ energy needs.
City Light also conducts extensive outreach and education on electrification topics; this helps us listen carefully to what our communities and customers need to enable their energy transition and find opportunities to collaborate.
Leading with Equity
Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), immigrants, refugees, people with low incomes, youth, and English language learners – are more likely to be impacted by the harms of fossil fuel use and to unfairly carry more health, environmental, and economic burdens as a result.
As we move toward electrification, centering the needs of communities experiencing environmental, social, and economic injustice is an opportunity to right historical wrongs and invest in an energy future that can benefit everyone. Seattle City Light partners with community-based organizations on collaborative outreach and engagement with community members to learn about their needs for electrification investments, and to help develop solutions that meet those needs.
Healthy Environment, Healthy Lives
Shifting away from fossil fuels eliminates pollution that harms the health of individuals, communities, and our environment.
Our region’s air, land, and water are heavily impacted by fossil fuels and the pollution they generate. The harms of this environmental pollution impact everyone but are not distributed equally; BIPOC communities and vulnerable populations carry extra health burdens such as disproportionately high rates of asthma, cancer, heart disease, and low birth weights. Increasing climate change, driven by fossil fuel use, causes environmental damage such as storm-related destruction or heat-driven wildfires.
Electrification is an opportunity to clean up the environment in which we live and depend on for our health, safety, and prosperity. In our region, the electric power Seattle City Light delivers comes primarily from renewable sources. Our clean electricity is a springboard of climate opportunity: when sectors such as transportation, buildings and industry electrify, they decarbonize.
A Stronger, Smarter Power Grid
Seattle City Light is upgrading our power grid to support growing electricity use and make our services more resilient, reliable, and affordable.
Modernizing our grid helps us better serve customers and protect communities by minimizing disruptions and outages, while ensuring power support to match rising demand for clean electricity.
Ensuring ample power for electrification relies on the grid being ready and flexible enough to manage increases and fluctuations in electricity consumed (known as “load”); building new and widespread infrastructure for vehicle charging and localized energy storage; and adopting new resources such as solar and battery storage, which can benefit both customers and the grid itself.