I'm calling this meeting to order.

This is a Redmond City Council study session held on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026, commencing at 7 p.m.

Councilmember in attendance in person, our Council Member Forsyth, Councilmember Parsi, myself, Council Vice President Nueva Kamina presiding in lieu of Council Council President Stewart, who is attending AWC in Spokane today.

She's joining us online along with Councilmember Prakriya and Council Member Sony.

Councilmember Kritzer will also be absent from the meeting tonight.

Is there any objection to excusing Council Member Kritzer from the meeting?

Seeing none, she is excused, also just as a point of information, Mayor Bernie will also not be attending this evening.

There are three items on the agenda tonight, and that is the joint Redmond and Bellevue Electric Grid Capacity study findings and next steps, along with the RZC amendments, temporary non-commercial signs, and council talk time.

The first item on the agenda is the joint Redmond and Bellevue Electrical Grid Capacity Studies finding next steps.

Jenny Liebeck, Sustainability Program Manager, will introduce this item.

Welcome back, Jenny.

Thank you, and good evening, Council.

So again, I am Jenny Liebeck, sustainability manager.

And with me tonight is the project co-lead, Glenn Coyle, as well as Aaron Cherry and Kenton Phillips from AECOM, and they both served as the technical consultants on this project.

And also want to recognize representatives from Puget Sound Energy as well who are joining us this evening.

But just to set the stage for our conversation, so your packet included the full report, which represents more than a year of work in partnership with the City of Bellevue and Puget Sound Energy, where we explored the capacity of our local electric distribution system.

So we partnered with Bellevue given our similarities.

So we're experiencing comparable growth.

We share PSC infrastructure across our borders, and we have similar climate and electrification goals.

And working together also allowed us to share costs and bring economies of scale to the project.

So the report includes findings for both cities.

And tonight I'm just gonna or we will all focus exclusively on the Redmond component for obvious reasons, but just wanted to flag that.

So I also just want to note and encourage you to keep in mind that this study is a starting point for the city.

So we're really seeing significant changes in how electricity is used and delivered.

And this study is helping orient us in that landscape, just to better understand where future investments and coordination will be needed.

So for today, our goal is to share what we've learned and where we're headed next as we continue planning for Redmond's future growth and electrification.

So the report in your packet contains again that really technical analysis, and so today we're gonna try and bring that up a level and focus on the key findings and what they mean for from a planning perspective.

We'll also touch on you know why we embarked on this project, the key questions that we're trying to answer, and the overall scope.

And then I'm going to hand it over to Erin and Kenton to review the technical components of the study, including how they did the analysis and the key findings.

And then finally, we'll briefly discuss, you know, what these findings mean for the city and some of the next steps that we're going to be taking.

Um, but just to understand and give a little context as to why we undertook this work, it's just helpful to just take a step back.

Um I think first and foremost, with the adoption of Redmond 2050, we know that we're planning for significant growth over the coming decades.

We know there was going to be a growing population, new housing, um, more employment and businesses that are coming to Redmond.

Um, and at the same time, meeting our climate goals means that we're transitioning much of our community away from fossil fuels and towards electricity that's powered by an increasingly clean electric grid.

We have state policies, right, like the Clean Buildings Performance Standard, the Clean Energy Transformation Act, Advanced Clean Cars, and all of these policies are helping accelerate that transition and shaping how our community will look will use electricity in the future.

And so together, these trends mean that electricity will play an increasingly critical role in supporting our community's transition from a suburb to a city, as we outlined in Redmond 2050.

And at the same time, we know that we're already beginning to see signs of some of those increasing increasing demands.

Um PSE is receiving larger load requests, and in some areas, those have been more challenging to accommodate in timely manners that support uh economic development and growth.

But for all of the reasons I just outlined, we want to proactively understand where opportunities or constraints may exist so that we can better coordinate and plan long term.

So looking at the goals for this process, you know, at its core, this study is designed to help us answer three questions.

So, how much electricity will Redmond likely need as our community grows and electrifies?

Is today's local distribution system capable of supporting that future demand?

And if not, you know, where should the city and PSE begin planning together?

And so to answer those questions, we evaluated the future electric electricity demand at the substation level.

And Kessen will talk about that.

Um we'll explain that why we focused on the substation level a little bit later in our discussion.

Um but I did want just to flag that this is not an engineering design or replacement for PSE's own planning processes.

They conduct really detailed and robust utility planning processes using their proprietary operational data.

Um instead, this is an independent planning assessment.

We used publicly available information and local planning assumptions just to better understand how our future demand compares with the system's available capacity.

So it's intended to be kind of a relative kind of give us a relative understanding for that.

So there are limitations to publicly available data, but the study provides that valuable foundation for the city to compare again our projected community needs with available capacity and help inform that future coordination with PSE as we're working together towards that reliable, resilient, and clean electric system.

And then just as importantly, this process itself was about strengthening our working relationship with PSE and creating a stronger foundation for ongoing infrastructure planning.

So there were two primary components to this effort.

So again, that first was that technical assessment of the local distribution grid.

And again, because PSC already conducts its own planning, our goal wasn't to duplicate that work, but we instead wanted to have an independent assessment that evaluated our growth projections as we outlined in Redmond 2050 and our electrification goals as we've outlined in our ESAP using assumptions again in alignment with our planning efforts.

And so this just helps us understand where that future demand may exceed some available capacity.

And the second component was strengthening that coordination with PSE.

So during the project, we convened four collaborative workshops with staff from Redmond, Bellevue, and PSE, and as well as the consultant team.

And those discussions allowed us to share those planning assumptions, really better understand each other's planning processes, identify emerging challenges, and really begin to establish a more coordinated approach to long-term infrastructure planning.