Roseville electric utility director doesn’t take power for granted
It’s quite a leap to go from living off the electrical grid to being the electric utility director of Roseville, Calif., but Daniel Beans has made the transition with grace.
Even Beans sees the irony in a move his parents made from their city of 2,000 residents in northern California to the countryside outside town, where there was no electricity and no phone. “We heated water with the sun during the summer and a wood stove in the winter. We used kerosene lamps for lights and as a teenager, I listened to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 using a car battery and car stereo in my room.”
After high school, Beans went to college but dropped out at the end of the first quarter. “My major required taking calculus, a subject I was academically socially and emotionally unprepared to take.”
His trip back to full-time college studies took five years and included working in a gas station; enrolling in a community college, where he explored majors like literature, anthropology and geology earning a private pilot’s license and learning how to throw pottery on a wheel.
When he eventually returned to Point Loma Nazarene University, Beans graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in his original major, engineering/physics.
His post-college career took him to the San Francisco Bay area, where he worked as a defense contractor. Next, he moved to Redding, Calif., to work as a consultant primarily on engineering projects for NASA Ames Research Center. During those 13 years, he earned professional electrical engineer licenses in both California and Oregon.
In Redding, he also began to work as an electrical engineer for the city electric utility, where he was promoted to engineering manager, finished a master’s degree in public administration and was then promoted to assistant director of resources. In 2015, he became assistant director of transmission and distribution and later won the job to lead the utility as the director.
In 2022, he moved 150 miles south, to Roseville, to take the position of public utilities director.
“I knew Roseville well, as we are part of many of the same joint action agencies and associations as Redding,” he said. He added that Roseville “had a great reputation in our industry circles.”
Roseville Electric was established in 1912 and is a department of the city of Roseville. It has 200 full-time employees. Beans said the utility is an enterprise fund that has “various regulatory requirements that vary from the city.” The city council serves as the utility commission.
“We have an appointed utilities commission too, but their role is advisory only. The city council approves our rate cases and all contracts.”
Because of Roseville Electric’s reputation as the best in California – operationally – Beans said his first priority when accepting the director position was “not to mess up a great organization.”
His second priority was to ensure that members of city management and the city council understood the power business enough to make sound decisions that promoted the values of the community: reliability, followed by affordability and then sustainability. Roseville Electric’s customers expect exceptional value for their rates, he knew.
He spent his first year in Roseville developing a new strategic plan that involved an aggressive reorganization forced by some high-level retirements. There were also unfolding transformer supply chain issues as well as the issue of rate increases.
Primarily because of very low natural gas prices, between 2014 and 2020 Roseville Electric had no rate increases. “After 2020, U.S. and California energy policy, along with Russia invading Ukraine, natural gas prices spiked. We had to raise rates 8 percent for two years, hoping gas prices would settle down.”
Instead, they stayed high. “In California, the constrained electricity market and other factors forced us to make the temporary increase permanent and then raise rates another additional 18 percent within a few months.”
Even given those hefty increases, Beans said Roseville Electric customers pay less than half what their neighbors are paying to state-regulated, investor-owned utilities.
The move from Redding to Roseville also gave Beans an opportunity to increase his involvement in the mission of public power not only statewide, but regionally and nationally. That’s when he became president of the California Municipal Utilities Association, the primary voice of community-owned electric, water and wastewater entities in California.
While still in Redding, he was appointed to the board of directors of the American Public Power Association, the voice of not-for-profit, community-owned utilities powering 2,000 town and cities across the country.
His work in Roseville and his involvement with APPA brought him into the Light Up Navajo initiative, a joint effort between APPA and the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority. The mission of LUN is to bring electricity to the 13,000 Navajo households that have no power.
The 27,000-square-mile expanse of the Navajo Nation covers four states and is the largest Native American territory in the U.S. It accounts for 70 percent of unelectrified households in the country. Beans explained that without power, those homes have no access to running water, reliable lighting, modern heating and cooling or appliances like refrigerators and microwaves. A family may use portable coolers filled with ice for food preservation and will often drive 90 minutes each way several times a week to fill 250-gallon plastic tanks for water for cooking, cleaning and drinking.
In 2023, LUN successfully connected 159 new Navajo Nation homes to electricity. In 2024 the number was 170. The total to date is more than 850 homes.
“The Light up Navajo project changes the lives of everyone involved, including those providing power and those receiving it for the first time,” he said. Beans cited the example of a 93-year-old Indian man who had received power to his home for the first time in his life.
While the average cost of connecting a home to the grid is $40,000, the donation of utility crews and equipment by public and other power industries brought connection costs for the LUN project down to about $8,000 per home, meaning more power could be provided to more homes, faster. Beans said this is only one example of the long history of Roseville Electric’s providing aid to communities that have never had or have lost power.
He is incoming vice chairman of the APPA executive team in June. He also serves on the APPA CEO Climate and Generation Policy Committee; the Wildfire Working Group; and is a member of the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council, which is the industry’s primary coordination point to the federal government. The ESCC tackles issues from mutual aid during hurricanes and wildfires to physical and cyber security.
No3: Beans, center, has a number of leadership roles with various joint action agencies as well as responsibility for advocacy and education both locally and nationally. No2: One of Roseville Electric’s recent outreach projects was hosting the 2025 APPA Lineworkers Rodeo. No horses or bulls here — just poles and electrical equipment where line workers could show off their professional skills. The event attracted nearly 10,000 participants and spectators. No1: Daniel Beans was named director of the Roseville, Calif., Electric Utility in 2022. (Photos provided by Rossville, Calif.)
