As a Resource Management Commission Commissioner, I have a seat watching how policy is made in our 'Greenest of American Cities', Austin. Last night, Austin Energy's Deputy General Manager, Roger Duncan, presented an overview of the Mayor's Climate Protection Plan (CPP). (This will be rebroadcast via RealPlayer on Thursday, March 22 at 7 AM. I hope to have a permanent location for this video soon.) The weird part of this proposal is that this is the first time any of the Commissioners saw the plan. It is very weird to be an advisor to City Council on resource conservation and management issues and only see a policy after it is publicly unveiled. But hey, that's politics in America, where even the environmental activists hide from the public glare...
Enough kvetching. Let's look at the plan.
"The Austin Climate Protection Plan will eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from virtually all municipal activities by the year 2020. This includes powering all City facilities with 100% renewable energy, converting the entire city fleet of vehicles to alternative fuels and electric power, and implementing greenhouse gas reduction plans in every City department."
Yes, this is a very aggressive plan. It commits the city to infrastructure investments throughout its infrastructure. Yet, with the exception of more aggressively converting to plug-in hybrid/alternative fuel vehicles, this was going to happen anyway. The message had finally got through to the Council and the the City Manager that not purchasing our Green Power for city buildings was now costing the city more. (Our batch 4 of Green Choice power sold out largely because industry figured out that carbon neutral power was also price stable power and, likely, cheaper in the medium term. Our batch 1 and 2 customers are paying less per kWh than our regular customers.)
What isn't clear from this plan, of course, is how we are going to pay for this transition? We'll talk about that in another post, but suffice to say that, though conservation pays for itself, it requires up front investments to capture those savings. Always remember that conservation equals profit. Nonetheless, it is hard to find the money, especially when the choice is between police and fire services vs. conservation investments. (Austin Energy's profits pay for the police and fire services, and investing money in conservation will take money away from other city services. The political process to allocate these funds isn't going to be pretty.)
"The plan calls for Austin Energy to aggressively ramp up its clean energy programs, achieving 700 megawatts of new conservation and efficiency savings and having 30 percent of its energy needs come from renewable resources by 2020. It also calls for making all new single-family homes zero net-energy capable by 2015 and increasing efficiency in all new commercial buildings by 75 percent in the same period."
Of these very aggressive goals, two of them were already underway before the CPP was announced. The RMC has been helping craft the zero net-energy new housing project for the last 6 months and will have oversight responsibilities for the foreseeable future. Most national research labs do not believe this can be done by 2015, so Austin Energy and RMC have their work cut out for them.
The 700 megawatts of new conservation savings is also not a change from our current plan. (Austin has saved well over 500 MW from conservation programs already.) We are doubling our plans to provide renewable energy by 2020 from 15% to 30%. This is a stout increase and will come at some significant cost. In addition to purchasing the renewable generation capabilitiy, we will have to make new engineering investments in backup generation capacity to handle the renewable energy 'dispatchability problem'and transmission and distribution (T&D) lines. (The 'dispatchability problem' is what do we do when the wind stops but your demand doesn't. According to conservative engineers, you must always back up the renewable energy source with an equivalent amount of gas or coal fired capacity to handle this problem. I'll discuss this in another post.)
There is one other item of large financial import to the utility, the "early retirement of existing utility GHG emissions." This means retiring existing power plants. Doing this before the end of planned life for these plants is going to cost Austin citizens a lot of money. Will future councils have the will to do this? I am dubious, but I"ve been surprised before. Even adding carbon sequestration technology to our largest plant, Fayette, is going to be expensive. In addition to changing the way we burn coal, we will have to build a pipeline to depleted natural gas wells to inject the CO2 for storage under ground. Both of these upgrades will cost tens of millions of dollars and will take multiple years to implement. Also, Austin will have a 'right of first refusal' on any expansion of the South Texas Nuclear Project. Both Austin citizens and the environmental community will need to decide if we are going to pass up this zero-carbon-emissions source. It is a devil's dilemma - short term carbon purgatory versus long term nuclear hell. (Frankly, we have already committed the 'nuclear sin' of producing this long lived waste. Doubling down on the production of that waste will not necessarily make our cost to dispose of it marginally higher. The capital investments here will also be large and we already have to make them.)
In summary, while I applaud the Mayor's Climate Protection Plan, I am also alarmed at the cost and wonder whether Austin and the rest of our country will make the requisite investments. I intend to stay involved to make it happen, but it is going to be a hard process. We will need all of the help we can muster from all segments of our society. The environmental community has set the goal, but has not really considered how to pay for it, and this is irrepsonsible. To have a sustainable society, we must have a sustainable energy utility.
