SACRAMENTO REGION, CA (MPG) – With temperatures and utilities costs soaring across Sacramento, SMUD Ward 7 Director Heidi Sanborn spoke Thursday afternoon at the monthly “Lunch Bunch” event held at the Pancake Palace in North Highlands.

Sanborn represents Antelope, Foothill Farms, North Highlands and parts of Arden-Arcade and Carmichael within the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.

“We give more to our community I think than any other utility that I know of,” Sanborn said. “We go to a lot of national conferences and there’s actually a thing in the utility industry called ‘SMUD envy.’ Most utilities are really jealous of our status as far as energy efficiency, customer relations, we score the highest in J.D. Power in just about everything.”

Despite being a community-owned electric utility, SMUD’s biggest competitor in the Sacramento region is PG&E, an investor-owned utility with publicly traded stock. According to Sanborn, SMUD’s rates are 45% below PG&E.

“And we appreciate that, we had PG&E before!” Shouted out multiple audience members at the monthly gathering.

Sanborn said the number one reason the Sacramento community has been losing power is distracted drivers running into SMUD poles.

“We are losing one pole a week,” Sanborn explained. “Not just driving off the road and banging into it. But literally plowing it over in half until the entire thing falls and costs us about $30,000 to replace. That is happening every single week and six people die a year in this county hitting our poles. That’s how much distracted driving is going on.

“The reason I say that is it’s a real thing. Please be safe out there and please encourage people not to be on their phones when they’re driving because they get hurt and they’re also knocking the power out.”

One of the main topics that Sanborn dove into was SMUD’s 2030 Clean Energy Vision.

“Since I saw you last, we’ve already procured [and] expanded our Solano wind farm in the Solano area which has the best wind resource in the nation, really, and we bought that land in the 70s,” Sanborn said. “We just took our 23 windmills and we’re expanding those blades to be way bigger and produce a lot more power off the same system. That will now produce enough energy for almost 350,000 homes.”

The Zero Carbon Plan also includes: a project near Roseville to build a utility scale solar project that will produce local power, six commercial battery units by Mather that will store renewable power and creating our own hydrogen power in the Sacramento region that can be stored and used as needed.

One question that was posed at the gathering was in regard to how the 2030 Clean Energy Vision will align with California’s 2035 electric vehicle mandate.

“Thank you for bringing this up, because this gets asked a lot, it’s a great question,” Sanborn said. “We’re trying to get people to create their own power, store it on site and use it on site. That is great because if you ship it to the grid then the grid has to handle it. If you pull from the grid, then the grid has to handle it. Whether it’s coming or going, that adds stress.

“On the going side, adding all these electric cars a lot of people are worried, is the grid able to handle it? Our grid is able to handle it. We are the first in the nation that can literally tell [that] Len is producing power right now and sending it to the grid. Charlea is pulling juice with her car. All the comings and goings, we can tell by the house at the millisecond what is coming and going. We can tell how to manage this grid and balance it so we’re in a way better position than others to handle it.”

The SMUD app can help customers track their power use and receive notifications when they should reduce their use. As temperatures skyrocket into the triple-digits, SMUD has requested for their customers to minimize their utility use during peak hours from 4-9 p.m.

“When it comes to generation, we’ve always said, ‘Please don’t overstress our units if we don’t have to.’ If you’re going to run your dishwasher, please just fill it up and run it after nine, don’t run it at five. We’re not saying don’t do your things, we’re just saying please shift a couple of hours. If we have to build systems to handle everybody doing everything at the exact same time, you will not like the rate. We’re trying to keep the rates low.”

SMUD offers several incentives beyond free trees. One of the incentives is to become a Clean Power City champion. SMUD’s goal is to double their enrollment to 50,000 people who will be the first to be alerted about rebates after signing up at cleanpowercity.org. Other incentives include weatherization opportunities; heat pump, water heater and induction cooktop rebates; and solar panels with an inverter rebate.

For more information about SMUD, visit smud.org.