As Naperville weighs the future of its electric supply, a group of environmental and civic organizations are teaming up to tell city leaders to “Say No To Coal” — and they’re urging community members to back the sentiment.
The Say No To Coal consortium wants to pack seats at the Naperville City Council meeting Tuesday night to raise awareness that a big decision looms over the city: whether now’s the time for a contract extension with its current electricity provider, the coal-heavy Illinois Municipal Electric Agency (IMEA).
Consortium members and supporters will be speaking at the meeting to voice their concerns with the potential extension, organizers say. As part of the effort, organizers have invited the broader Naperville community — residents, organizations and businesses included — to attend in solidarity.
“I would love to see 200 people show up,” said Fernando Arriola, chair of community relations for the Naperville Environmental and Sustainability Task Force (NEST), one of the several organizations that are part of the consortium. “I think we just want to show the mayor and the city council … that there’s a passionate group of people from all around Naperville that this is important to.”
Alongside NEST, which is an official Naperville advisory body, other consortium members include the League of Women Voters of Naperville, First Congregational UCC Naperville, Accelerate Climate Solutions and Green Scene North Central College.
The partnership has been in the works for the past five months, Arriola said. It was born out of the organizations finding common ground in their concern for where Naperville was getting — and may continue to get — its electricity from.
Naperville, unlike most other municipalities in Illinois, provides electricity to taxpayers as a local service, rather than residents relying on an investor-owned utility such as Ameren or ComEd to keep their lights on. But doing so takes a lot of resources and industry expertise that the city doesn’t have in-house. So instead, it purchases energy from IMEA, an organization that offers an already assembled power supply to members at a wholesale price.
City staff have stated that in the time they’ve worked with IMEA, the agency has provided stable energy pricing to Naperville and performed utility work the city wouldn’t have been able to tackle on its own. The drawback is that the bulk of IMEA’s energy portfolio comes from pollution-producing coal.
The city’s contract with IMEA is due to expire in 2035. The agency, however, wants Naperville to extend its commitment out to 2055 and has requested that the city make the decision by April 30.
Currently, there is no schedule for bringing an IMEA contract extension to council for consideration, according to Brian Groth, director of Naperville’s electric utility. The city wants to first gather feedback through discussions with its Public Utility Advisory Board and a council workshop tentatively set for early April, Groth said. It is also waiting to receive the results from a consultant’s report.
In December, the council hired Philadelphia-based Customized Energy Solutions to provide the city with options for how it can power its electric grid in years to come. The company has been tasked with laying out alternatives to IMEA and how they measure up to what the agency currently offers the city.
The consultant will also evaluate the cost, benefit and risk of each option it provides. A report is expected back by the end of February, Groth said.
Council members are not due to formally discuss anything electric supply-related Tuesday night but with Customized Energy due to return with a report next month, Say No To Coal wanted to go before council before city discussions ramped, Arriola said.
Another factor that motivated the consortium to act is Naperville’s municipal election on April 1, which has eight candidates vying for four open council seats.
Tuesday’s meeting also comes a day after President-elect Donald Trump is sworn into office.
“The timing of this Say No To Coal action is the day after the inauguration of a president, who has called climate change a hoax and championed policies that favor continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels,” said Cathy Clarkin, co-founder and executive director of Accelerate Climate Solutions.
“By taking this action on the heels of the inauguration,” she said, “we acknowledge that we still have the power to address the climate crisis, reduce carbon emissions and create a clean energy future. The people who will be showing up on Jan. 21 are ready to work with the city of Naperville to decide what kind of future we want to build together.”
Teh consortium has several goals for next week’s and future actions, organizers say.
To start, members hopes to broach a conversation about Naperville’s electric supply that engages a broad swath of stakeholders.
“(This) is a complicated conversation and very nuanced,” said Susan Craighead, president of the League of Women Voters of Naperville. “So what we would like to see is that the city not rush to renew this contract and that they include the community of Naperville in the discussion. … There are many community members that don’t know this is even going on.”
North Central College senior Elisabeth Gardner, who is president of the school’s Green Scene sustainability club, especially wants young voices to be heard.
“This is our future,” Gardner, 21, said. “I’m thinking about when I graduate and when I’ll be living my adult life, this is going to affect me directly. And it’s also going to affect every single student at North Central. We’re doing this for our future. For the next generations.”
As far as the prospect of the city extending with IMEA, the group hopes it can encourage elected officials to refrain from making any decisions this spring, Arriola said.
“The way I look at it is we in Naperville have been left with world-class schools, this beautiful riverwalk, this vibrant downtown that people come to from all around the region,” Arriola said. “It’s a safe community, it’s a healthy community. And if you think about it, that’s the legacy of what the city leadership team and previous city councils have given us.
“I think one of the things that would be great is whatever we give the next generation … is as strong of a hand as we were given.”
