Batavia is getting an updated energy policy meant to guide how the city will provide electricity to residents in the future, after the City Council OK’d a revised version of it at its meeting on Tuesday.
The policy is meant to address considerations like whether the city should own its power generation assets or contract for them, whether the city should get its power locally, and how and if Batavia wants to diversify the sources it gets its power from, according to past reporting. Among the major concerns discussed by the council for the policy were reliability, cost and sustainability.
Batavia has its own municipal electric utility, according to past reporting. The Batavia Municipal Electric Utility gets its energy via a power sales agreement with the Northern Illinois Municipal Power Agency, or NIMPA, a joint action agency made up of Batavia, Geneva and the city of Rochelle.
NIMPA is a partial owner of the Prairie State energy campus, according to its website. Power from Prairie State is distributed to NIMPA members, including Batavia, City Administrator Laura Newman previously said, meaning the plant is the source of Batavia’s electric power.
Prairie State is a coal-fired power plant in southern Illinois. It has been ranked one of the top 10 biggest polluters in the country, according to 2023 data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
The use of power from Prairie State by municipalities that are part of a different joint action agency for electricity — the Illinois Municipal Energy Agency, or IMEA — has generated some backlash recently, as municipalities like Naperville and St. Charles weighed whether to remain members of IMEA.
Now, Batavia’s considering what it wants its energy future to look like.
The city hired an economic consulting firm, the Brattle Group, to create an integrated resource plan, resiliency study, cost of service study and rate plan for the city, according to past reporting. The energy policy approved Tuesday is meant to guide the Brattle Group on what the city’s energy priorities are.
At its Aug. 18 meeting, the Batavia City Council considered the policy, but some council members wanted to wait to vote until further additions were made to it.
So, the council voted to table a vote on it, then brought it back up at its Committee of the Whole meeting on Aug. 26.
At that meeting, Assistant City Administrator Max Weiss said he revised the policy to incorporate some elements of the Greenest Region Compact and Kane County Climate Action Implementation Plan. He noted the policy’s stated climate goals and support for energy efficiency policies like demand-response programs, which essentially incentivize electricity users to use less power in general or during times of high demand.
The revised policy approved Tuesday prioritizes things like local energy generation and storage resources, diversifying the city’s resource portfolio and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.
At the Committee of the Whole meeting last month, Ald. Jennifer Baerren said some aspects of it seem more like goals rather than a policy.
“That just doesn’t seem right in there, that we’re spelling out a specific goal,” Baerren said, “because we don’t know what could be changing in the next 10 years.”
Weiss said the policy can be amended on whatever timeline the council chooses, and that it was drafted to make clear that this is a goal for the city.
“You’re going to find that trying to balance all the things you find important is rather difficult,” Weiss said.
Ald. Christopher Solfa agreed that policies are meant to be guidelines used for making decisions, and Ald. Sarah Vogelsinger called it an “amendable starting point.”
“It’s an ideal world thing,” Vogelsinger said at the meeting, “and we can change it if we need to.”
The revised policy was recommended for approval by the Committee of the Whole. Then it went back before the City Council, where it received final approval on Tuesday.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the council reiterated that the policy will need to be reviewed over time, but it offers a useful beginning point for the city.
“It’s a good start, I’ll say that,” Ald. Alan Wolff said on Tuesday. “And I believe it’s something that we can utilize and review on a regular basis so we stay current with what the reality of the world is.”
And only time will tell what that looks like, according to Batavia Mayor Jeff Schielke.
“There’s probably some parts of this we don’t really know yet totally,” Schielke said. “And we need to get further down the road.”
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com