The Naperville City Council authorized city staff Tuesday to negotiate a new contract with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency while also allowing the city to seek proposals from power providers on clean energy options.
The decision comes after many lengthy discussions and debates regarding the future of the city’s electricity source, including a nearly five hour workshop last month weighing the pros and cons of renewing with Naperville’s long-time energy provider IMEA.
Mayor Scott Wehrli introduced the motion at the Tuesday night council meeting calling for city staff to continue negotiating with the IMEA on the city’s key areas of concern, a proposal he announced on social media the day before the council meeting. Much of the mayor’s proposal centers on concerns about lowering the city’s carbon footprint.
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Once city staff go through negotiations with IMEA, which has been criticized for being too reliant on electricity produced by coal, and explore other clean energy options, the matter will return to a future council meeting for a vote.
“There’s been a lot of activity that’s taken place over the last three years and especially in the last seven days,” Mayor Scott Wehrli said. “There’s one thing that’s for sure: Everyone of you in this room would like to see action. There’s a lot of different provisions we’ve added here as this contract was originally proposed to where we are right now.”
Some of those provisions would allow Naperville to exit the contract in 2045, increase its Member Directed Resource (MDR) allocation if IMEA fails to meet its carbon milestones by a percentage equal to the shortfall, and increase the city’s by-right allowance of MDR capacity to 20% or 50% of energy consumption while also allowing the city to sign a power purchase agreement for other carbon free resources.
Under the proposal, the contract also would increase Naperville’s voting rights within the IMEA.
The motion passed 7-2, with council members Ian Holzhauer and Mary Gibson voting against it.
Most of the council expressed satisfaction with the mayor’s motion, with some praising the work that went on behind the scenes to make it happen.
“I think I heard it for the first time on Thursday (that) the situation changed and IMEA is seemingly … willing to come to the table and maybe negotiate in good faith with us if we are willing to do the same,” Councilman Patrick Kelly said, noting that previously he was told there was no room for negotiations.
Kelly also said he liked that the proposal would increase Naperville’s ability to change the source of their power “very significantly, by a significant number of years and by a significant percentage.”
“We could, in theory, in the next year, year and a half, move up to 70% carbon free where today we’re sitting at 10. And to me, that is something that is really, truly worth considering,” he said.
Although voting for the motion, Councilman Benny White expressed concerns over guidance for staff on negotiating with IMEA, particularly in regards to a timeline.
“Let’s define parameters from a timeline standpoint. When should staff come back, based off of what IMEA has said, and then maybe we can go from there,” White said.
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Under the mayor’s proposal, the amount of coal used by the city would drop to 592 megawatt hours a day, which Councilman Holzhauer noted was a substantial amount of savings for the city. Holzhauer suggested the city add a coal cap of 592 megawatt hours a day to the proposal, citing concerns regarding future energy usage with a potential new data center coming to Naperville.
The cap was not added to the proposal, which is what led Holzhauer to vote no.
Gibson said she opposed the motion because she was concern by how recently the proposal was presented public, arguing that it felt premature to vote on it.
Naperville is one of 32 municipalities that are part of IMEA, a nonprofit joint action agency that sells electric power to municipally-owned utilities. Last week, St. Charles voted against extending a contract with IMEA.