Create our Energy Future is a Seattle City Light comprehensive effort that guides various actions, programs, policies, and partnerships as the utility, the city, and our customers move towards a carbon-free future. ECOSS draws on our expertise, experience, and community relationships to engage around the topics of Building Electrification, Transportation Electrification, and other utility strategies and services to increase awareness and familiarize community members with these efforts. This year ECOSS staff received a series of 10 trainings from Seattle City Light that dove deep into topics like utility services and planning, grid infrastructure, customer program development, climate adaptation and more, resulting in subject matter experts on staff. We engaged youth through various hands-on workshops with partner organizations, and tabling events and learned about their concerns for the future as it relates to climate change. Through the process of engaging with multi-family dwellings about Building Electrification, ECOSS identified the need and benefit of creating an educational cohort program for City Light customers and successfully developed a program for implementation. Lastly, ECOSS supported the development of an updated Transportation Electrification strategy by prioritizing focus groups and interviews with community groups and leaders to ensure the strategy still accurately reflects community priorities.
This program has cemented ECOSS and City Light’s commitment to co-creation and co-development of programs for community benefit. ECOSS has successfully synthesized the vast amount of technical knowledge involved with this body of work and has distilled it down into accessible and relevant language and activities tailored to community needs. We are proud of this new strategy as a directive for program development and look forward to continuing our co-creation journey with the Building Electrification cohort participants in 2025.
