Truckee Donner Public Utility District

Truckee Donner Public Utility District marked 2024 with many completed infrastructure projects and expanded community outreach. While delivering reliable, sustainable and affordable power and water is our top priority, we're also proud to bring an innovative and collaborative spirit to the projects we pursue.

In addition to making key investments in electric and water service reliability and safety, we planned for Truckee’s energy future with the adoption of its first integrated resource plan, participated in community events to give customers direct access to engage with our staff, and worked alongside other local agencies to collaborate on forward-thinking projects that will benefit Truckee for years to come.

Take a look at some of the successes the TDPUD team accomplished this year.

Water Operations

In 2024, our water department was busy with projects to replace pipelines, construct and rehabilitate water tanks, increase our water system’s fire flow and resiliency, and harden our infrastructure in the event of extended power outages.

Here are some examples of the work the TDPUD water team did to deliver and safeguard your drinking water every day.

• Completed pipeline replacement projects on Northwoods, Skislope Way and across Hwy 89N into Prosser Lakeview, totaling 6,000+ feet of pipeline replaced.
• Identified and repaired 39 pipeline leaks.
• Completed construction of two new water tanks, including a new tank near Pioneer Trail with an additional 2.5 million gallons of water storage, and a tank replacement on Skislope Way that doubled the capacity of the previous tank in that location.

• Brought the new Joe Aguera pump station and pipeline online, adding redundancy and capacity for water delivery to Tahoe Donner.
• Collected, analyzed and submitted 1,000+ water quality samples.

Electric Operations

TDPUD’s electric department was hard at work this year on projects to strengthen its system with infrastructure upgrades, engineer its network for the future and increase its carbon-free portfolio while maintaining affordable rates.

Here’s a look at some of the projects that help TDPUD deliver reliable power with minimal interruptions.

• Installed 103 power poles, including major rebuild projects on Northwoods Blvd., Spring Lane, Church Street, Rocky Lane and in Olympic Heights.
• Installed 62,894 linear feet (11.91 miles) of underground high voltage cable, including converting the overhead line on West and East River Streets to underground as part of the collaborative, multi-agency West River Street Streetscape Improvement Project.

• Launched new Time-of-Use electric rate, which incentivizes residential customers to shift their energy use to off-peak periods.
• Adopted TDPUD’s first Integrated Resource Plan, which forecasts Truckee’s energy needs for the next 15 years, allowing TDPUD to help customers manage their energy usage and better plan its power purchases to meet those needs, as well as satisfy regulatory requirements.

Vegetation Management

Vegetation management is an important part of TDPUD’s focus on service reliability and safety. Removing branches and trees that are a threat to power lines is crucial for wildfire mitigation, but an additional benefit is more reliable service and less outages.

 TDPUD does vegetation management work year-round. Branches and trees falling on power lines due to snow loading is a common winter outage cause, but TDPUD’s winter reliability has improved from this work.

• Trimmed 3080 branches.
• Removed 872 total trees (small, medium and large).
• Chipped 3024 yards of material.
• Cleared 142 power poles.

Behind-the Scenes Department Achievements

TDPUD has a strong team behind the scenes working directly with customers and making sure things run smoothly out in the field. Here are some of their accomplishments this year.

Finance & Administration

• Received the Government Finance Officers Association’s Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting for the 4th year in a row.
• Received the District Transparency Certificate of Excellence from the Special District Leadership Foundation.
• Issued two Power Cost Adjustment credits to electric customers.

Accounting

• Implemented a barcoding system in warehouse for better efficiency and ease in locating and tracking items.
• Successfully completed the 2023 financial audit.
• Processed 5,785 invoices.
• Issued 3,074 vendor payments.
• Closed 75 work orders.

Fleet and Facilities Maintenance

• Added two new EV vehicles to fleet (Silverado EV trucks)
• Maintained 87,000 sq. ft. of asphalt across 14 sites.
• Painted three water tanks.
• Refurbished exterior stucco and exterior paint on headquarters building.
• Accomplished interior remodel to repurpose office space to make better use of available space and accommodate more employees.

HR & Risk

• Awarded 24 Core Values employee recognition certificates.
• 15% decrease in property and safety incidents from 2023.
• 91% of surveyed employees believe they are part of something meaningful at TDPUD.
• Adopted Emergency Operations Plan and trained leadership staff on emergency operations.
• Increased focus on in-person safety training, including HAZWOPPER, confined space, traffic flagging and workplace violence prevention.

Customer Service

• Opened 1,239 new accounts.
• Closed 3,781 service orders.
• 91% of customers enrolled in online account management platform (Smarthub).
• 59% of customers enrolled in AutoPay.

Communications & Strategic Affairs

• Spent 342 hours advocating for our community’s interests in local, state and federal policy meetings and made formal comments on three state regulatory proposals.
• Participated in 18 joint agency working groups that deal with local, regional and state issues such as housing, watershed stewardship, wildfire safety, sustainability and local power generation.
• Logged 325,072 views of all social media content (Facebook, Instagram and X)
• Increased Facebook followers by 250% from 2023.

TTDPUD could never have had such a great year without the support of our dedicated staff, board, customers and community. As your community-owned, not-for-profit, locally-governed water and electric utility, we’re looking forward to continuing to serve our community in 2025.