Endorsed By:
SRP Council Division 9 Association & District
Shelly Gordon moved to Mesa, Arizona over 6 years ago and has been actively working to change the energy future of Arizona ever since. Four years ago, Shelly formed Arizonans for Community Choice (AZ4CC), advocating for a clean energy model called Community Choice Energy (CCE) that is authorized in 10 states across the U.S. CCE makes it possible for cities and counties to procure clean energy on behalf of residents and small businesses, while maintaining a functional partnership with the utility that continues to; transmit and distribute the power, manage the grid, and bill customers. The main reason cities and counties form CCEs is to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increase renewable energy within their jurisdictions. According to the National Renewable Energy Lab, CCEs sell more green power purchased by customers than utilities. In fact, almost 5 million customers procured about 12.7 million MWh of voluntary green power through CCEs in 2021. That means that cities and counties with CCEs buy more green power than required by the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS).
Shelly believes that local communities have the biggest opportunity to meet clean energy goals and CCEs are one of the most effective strategies for achieving those goals, given that electricity is the 2nd largest contributor to GHG emissions. In pursuit of CCE enabling policy in Arizona, Shelly and her team have taken a bipartisan approach to meet with state legislators; Arizona Corporation Commissioners; city and county elected officials; sustainability staffers; energy suppliers and many climate action grassroots organizations — all in an effort to bring about CCE enabling policies to our state and to build an coalition of support for the CCE model.
Prior to moving to Arizona, Shelly served on the executive committee of the largest California chapter of the Sierra Club, which successfully advocated for CCE in the Greater Bay Area. Shelly started AZ4CC to lobby for bringing much more renewable energy to our State.
Shelly has a 40-year volunteer career, from fundraising for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to serving as a volunteer mediator. She ran her own medical marketing and public relations firm for over 20 years, was named one of Silicon Valley’s Women of Influence, served on the Human Relations Commission for the city of Palo Alto, as well as the Commission on the Status of Women for Monterey County.
Shelly’s interest in running for the SRP Council is to begin to understand the complexity of being a public power company, including energy generation, transmission and distribution. Shelly aims to facilitate the best decisions that lend equal weight to SRP’s reliability, affordability and sustainability commitment to customers. Sustainability cannot be aspirational but must be equally prioritized as the other 2 points of the triangle if we are to survive the increasingly dangerous effects of climate change, particularly during the 5 to 6 months of our desert summers. Continuing to burn more fossil fuels is not sustainable.
