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clean energy history

 

"When the concept of a green power program first received official blessing in 1999, the expectations for the program were underwhelming."

 

how we got here...

Austin Energy is consistently ranked as the nation’s top clean energy seller among public utilities. 

In 2006, BusinessWeek named Austin Energy’s Deputy General Manager, Roger Duncan, as the world’s 13th most important person in reducing greenhouse gases.  Therefore, it’s easy to forget that Austin Energy did not even have a green power program before 2000 and that the utility was forced to create the separate program because of a concern among state regulators that the utility’s coal/gas/nuclear customers should not be forced to subsidize a clean energy program.

In fact, when the concept of a green power program first received official blessing in 1999, the expectations for the program were underwhelming.

In February of that year, the Austin City Council adopted a set of policy directives for Austin Energy designed to make the utility more environmentally progressive.  The chief focus of the resolution was a laundry list of 10 ideas for reducing energy usage from the utility’s collection of coal, gas and nuclear plants.  The final item that appeared on the list, after “tree planting,” and “elimination of all ‘electric heating,’” was the idea of having city departments purchase “green power.”

That Council resolution then set a “goal” of Austin Energy achieving 5% of its energy portfolio through renewable sources by the end of 2004.

However, due largely to requirements imposed by state regulators, Austin Energy could only pursue this 5% goal by essentially setting up a separate clean energy utility within Austin Energy—in other words, the cost of wind, solar and landfill methane could not be blended into the overall fuel charge even though Austin Energy (and all utilities) already took this approach with the existing portfolio of coal, natural gas and nuclear.

The program also had to be voluntary, customers who subscribed would be charged the “green pricing” fuel charge rather than the conventional fuel charge, and the utility would only buy a new batch of green power when the existing power batch was fully subscribed.

With all of these restrictions, success for the clean energy program seemed almost as likely as success in eliminating electric heating.  Then came Vince Lombardi’s definition of luck—“where opportunity meets preparation.”  In this case, preparation was Austin Energy’s innovative decision to price the GreenChoice power at a guaranteed fixed rate over 10 years.  That meant the price that GreenChoice customers would pay would remain unchanged for a decade, and for businesses, that predictability was a big deal.

Austin Energy’s GreenChoice program wasn’t originally promoted as a way to save money (which is probably a good thing, because if it had, no one would have believed it).  But in February 2006, something that most of Austin’s major employers figured out over the previous three years became clear to everyone. 

For what may be the first time since coal sparked the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700’s, a public utility offered its customers a choice between two electricity sources whose prices were the result of competitive bidding on the open market—one a combination of coal, natural gas and nuclear, the other a clean energy combination of primarily wind and solar—and the lower priced electricity came from…wind and solar.

Now, clean energy isn’t just environmentally superior to coal/gas/nuclear.  It’s financially superior, too.

 

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