Paul Lau had a storybook career at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, starting 45 years ago as a university intern and rising to chief executive officer and general manager some four decades later.
Its capstone was Lau’s announcement that he will retire some time later this year, as he has guided SMUD for the last half decade toward a future of carbon-free electricity, to be achieved at least 15 years sooner than the rest of California and most of the world.
There is no getting around how the final chapter in Lau’s time at SMUD will be his darkest. He has presided over the worst electricity decision he and his Board of Directors has made this century, to buy power from a giant new solar farm in a pristine oak woodlands landscape when there were far more nature-friendly options…