Between 1948 and 1965, Santa Clara laid the foundation for becoming power-independent, and that was due to the vision of two people: George Sullivan and Don Von Raesfeld, a collaboration with Santa Clara University, and progressive city councils.
In 1948, Sullivan, Dean of Engineering at Santa Clara University, proposed a plan for meeting the needs of the rapidly growing city – including the then-new industrial area in the northern part of Santa Clara. It was imperative, Sullivan believed, that the city plan to serve those rapidly growing industrial needs rather than passively allowing PG&E to step into the void.
Sullivan’s plan became the basis of the city’s modern distribution system, including the design that allows loads to be served from multiple sources in the system – a system that reduces the likelihood of outages.
When Sherman Jackson became Utility Superintendent in 1950, the department began “to buzz with development,” wrote retired Superintendent Norman Ingraham in 1988. “The building boom had begun and ‘it has been a madhouse ever since.’”
By 1955, demand had already outstripped Sullivan’s plan.
It was this “madhouse” of growth that Von Raesfeld stepped into when he became city manager in 1958 – arguably becoming the single most influential person on Santa Clara’s road to power self-sufficiency.
Von Raesfeld combined a pragmatic — rather than ideological; he was a Republican, not a Socialist — vision for publicly-owned power with a command of detail and a talent for getting things done.
In 1962, Santa Clara was purchasing all its electricity from PG&E under a series of contracts that went back to the original 1904 agreement with United Gas and Electric.
That meant PG&E — not the city –—determined the price of power. And in Von Raesfeld’s view, low electric rates could give the city a competitive advantage by providing electricity from the least costly power available – electricity from the Federal Central Valley Project.
“In April of 1935, the Federal Government began development of the Central Valley Project to store and distribute water for farming,” Von Raesfeld told The Weekly in 2005.
“The by-product of these constructed dams was the generation of hydroelectric power … For political reasons, Santa Clara was not included as a recipient at that time because Santa Clara was an ‘all requirements’ wholesale customer of PG&E,” Von Raesfeld continued.
“In studying why Santa Clara had no allocation of Central Valley Project Power, while most public power agencies did have an allocation that afforded them considerable savings, I found that many allocations were unused and that the unused power was sold to the private power companies,” Von Raesfeld said.
It would take several years of lobbying, but in 1965, Santa Clara would flip the switch on Central Valley hydro-power.
Coming up: Part 3, Hydropower and the Birth of the Northern California Power Association.
This series takes a look at different eras of Silicon Valley Power, starting with its 19th Century beginnings, post-war expansion, investment in power generation and growth in the 21st Century.
