Puget Sound Energy needs to get back to managing public electricity without speculative design. Playing entrepreneur for foreign investors, multinationals and profit motives is violence to our fragile Eastside mentality and our development.

Moreover, this area is rated the No. 2 best place to live in the United States. This place demands better engineering designs. Powering this area for multilevel living must be more qualitative in all aspects. PSE is too industrial and commercial in many facets.

But, I want to talk mostly about how PSE is spinning ideology. Not the dark one about profit but one about psychology — the manner and process applied to Eastside residents. Putting Eastside residents in a ridged process where there is no choice is crude and heavy-handed. Eastside residents saw through PSE. Updating the grid involves greater complexity than PSE is allowing. PSE is asserting a project they themselves should be ashamed of. It’s backwards in thinking and presentation (modernism). PSE’s in-depth and wordy proposal notwithstanding.

We want the Eastside to develop energy without cutting 8,000 mature trees that help clean our air from all this traffic. PSE is bulldozing a speculative and projected claim. PSE says we need new lines because of growth from the ’60s, but then offers technology from the ’60s to meet this future lack of supply based on extreme scenarios.

But worse, PSE can’t conceive alternatives. Even putting it underground or underwater is not entertained while most modern cities have done it. The option is always considered “too expensive.” But is it? What about options? We have been put into a process of domination. Big towers and many words, schematics and projected developments advance a bad argument. PSE’s project synopsis is shock and awe.

Yet, in PSE’s proposal, the document itself questions the need for the project and speculates the energy requirement for 2018 by saying it may not be needed even at that time. The pressure of their project addresses a “projected deficiency in transmission capacity” and the importance of the program rests on the ambiguous claim “which could affect the future reliability.” “Projected” and “could”question the need for this project.

PSE should do the one option they do indeed mention but never actively state in their plan. PSE states: “PSE would continue to manage its maintenance programs to reduce the likelihood of equipment failure, and would continue to stockpile additional equipment so that repairs could be made quickly. PSE would also continue its energy conservation program systemwide and for the Eastside. As appropriate, conductor replacement on existing lines would occur.”

Julian von Will, Ph.D.

Bellevue