Title
AN ORDINANCE authorizing the executive to execute a new, longer term service agreement with Puget Sound Energy for the purchase of renewable energy, replacing the existing service agreement approved under Ordinance 18472.
Body
STATEMENT OF FACTS:
1. King County is a major electricity customer of Puget Sound Energy, purchasing more than ten million dollars a year in electricity to operate county buildings and facilities within Puget Sound Energy's electricity service territory. Approximately forty-six percent of the electricity supply in the Puget Sound Energy electricity service territory through its standard electricity offerings is supplied by carbon-based sources, including twenty-three percent coal and twenty-three percent natural gas.
2. The 2020 Strategic Climate Action Plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from government operations by fifty percent by 2025 and eighty percent by 2030, through measures including increasing the percentage of energy from renewable sources used in county operations to seventy percent by 2020, eighty-five percent by 2025, and ninety-five percent by 2030.
3. Puget Sound Energy developed and received approval from the Washington state Utilities and Transportation Commission in September 2016 for Tariff Schedule No. 139 Voluntary Long Term Renewable Energy, known as Green Direct, offering one-hundred-percent renewable electricity to municipal and large commercial electricity users from the Skookumchuck wind facility in western Washington that began operation in November 2020 and the Lund Hill solar facility that went into operation in eastern Washington in December 2022.
4. Puget Sound Energy offered different options for Green Direct energy contracts, including ten- and twenty-year service agreements. The cost of energy was less for the longer-term agreements.
4. Ordinance 18472 authorized the executive to enter into a ten-year service agreement for the purchase of one hundred percent renewable electricit...

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