Nevada County advances climate resiliency roadmap and readies Pioneer Community Energy transition

Nevada County officials on day three of a multi-day board workshop emphasized planning and grant-readiness as central to local climate work. Tricia Tillotson, director of the county's Community Development Agency, said the county has completed a greenhouse-gas inventory and vulnerability assessment and is assembling a nonregulatory Resource Resilience Roadmap meant to guide voluntary measures and strengthen grant applications.

"The road map is being drafted to be a nonregulatory document," Planning Director Brian Foss said, adding that draft measures have been developed by the consultant Rincon and are under review with stakeholder groups. Foss said the plan will include GHG profiles, a vulnerability assessment, alignment to the local hazard mitigation plan and community wildfire protection efforts, and that staff plan a second community survey and additional public workshops before releasing a draft plan in May with the intent to return to the board for consideration in July.

The board also heard a status update on Pioneer Community Energy, the community-choice aggregation the county joined in February 2025. Mandy Stewart, senior management analyst, said the California Public Utilities Commission approved Nevada County's addition to the Pioneer joint powers authority last year and that Pioneer is procuring power for the new member jurisdictions. "The expectation is for service delivery to start in October 2027," Stewart said, and staff will work with the Pioneer team on community education and on customers' options to remain with PG&E if they prefer.

Supervisor discussion focused on using the roadmap to capture grant revenue and on taking a voluntary approach to program participation. Several supervisors said they supported pursuing state funding opportunities and aligning resilience projects across jurisdictions to be competitive for Proposition 4 and other grants. The board noted one existing local grant referenced in the discussion as a $10,000,000 CRC grant that has funded roofs and facility upgrades, which supervisors said illustrated the potential scale of available funds.

Next steps: staff will complete the roadmap process over the next several months with targeted surveys and workshop engagement, produce project charters for implementation tasks, and return a draft plan to the board in mid-2026 for formal consideration. Pioneer Community Energy will continue procurement and the county will lead local outreach on the transition schedule and opt-out mechanics.