"Power with Purpose" Happy Hour with Director Eric Williams on November 5th
Director Eric Williams is asking the community to join him downtown on November 5 for drinks and casual conversation about the future of public power.
“Power with Purpose” Happy Hour: Tuesday, November 5th, 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm, at Annie's Irish Pub Omaha located at 1101 Davenport Street, Omaha. Cash bar available.
OPPD is accepting public comment through Friday, November 8th, on a new utility-scale solar (400 to 600 MW) array and natural gas assets.
Omaha Public Power District has recently proposed several significant elements for future direction; such as setting a Strategic Directive goal of Net Zero Carbon by 2050, and Power with Purpose capacity updates, including a large, utility-scale solar array with natural gas backup. Director Eric Williams is an elected public representative who wants to hear from the people that he represents. “Public engagement is essential to public power,” Williams said.
“Power with Purpose” Happy Hour is free and open to the public.
public comment through Friday, Nov. 8
In October 2019, President and CEO, Tim Burke shared the need for OPPD to add accredited generation capacity to meet legal and regulatory obligations to serve OPPD customers. The combination of increasing demand across the service area, expiring capacity contracts, and future plans to retire North Omaha Units 1-3 and convert North Omaha Units 4 and 5 to gas-only generation requires that OPPD begin planning now to maintain system reliability and resiliency through these changes.
This recommendation is based on an extensive modeling process to identify a combination of technologies that optimizes three objectives: affordability, reliability/resiliency, and environmental sensitivity. The recommendations for new utility-scale solar (400 to 600 MW) and natural gas assets is to uphold OPPD’s commitment to no general rate increase through 2021.
Public comment will help gauge the level of understanding around the problem we’re trying to solve, the framework that shapes our decisions, the clarity of generation technologies included in the analysis and the understanding of factors in our tradeoff analysis. If providing a comment, please have your feedback include answers to:
Is the problem we are solving for understandable?
Is it clear how OPPD’s Mission, Strategic Directives and legal and regulatory obligations shaped our approach?
Do you have clarity on what generation technologies were included in our analysis?
Do you understand the factors in our tradeoff analysis?