Electricity Rate-payers in Austin, TX Take Progressive Stance on Renewable Energy

Here’s an article that lays out three choices available to electricity rate-payers: deregulation (“customer choice”), municipal aggregation (“city choice”), and municipal utilities (“city ownership”), and goes on to discuss the merits of each.  In the last case, a municipality’s purchasing and operating the assets of what was previously an independent utility, provides the opportunity for the citizenry of an enlightened city like Austin, TX, to make a huge push for renewable energy.

I’m reminded of one of the first blog posts ever to appear here, when I interviewed Jake Stewart,  who directs the ground-breaking Austin Climate Protection Program at Austin Energy, where he is active in integrated distributed generation innovation, smart grid deployment and carbon reduction strategy development.

To those of us who have spent time in Austin, it comes as no surprise that the city supports some fairly progressive views, and thus represents a small but important deviation from the overall politics of Texas.  In fact, I recall that Stewart’s area of deepest passion was the PR that entrenched interests are bringing to bear to create doubt about the reality of global warming. He quipped, “Do you know, they say sunshine is the best disinfectant and fossilized carbon interests are putting out a very steady flow of shady but effective propaganda. The junk must be constantly illuminated.”

He went on to explain, “We are dealing with a lot of this in the climate change arena where the ‘climate skeptic’ campaign has managed to garner a remarkable (and sad) amount of public penetration — predominately on AM radio and the likes, of course. In any case, I’m hopeful that science and truth will ultimately come out on top thanks to efforts like yours focused on getting accurate and palatable information out through the smoke. CBC did a fantastic piece on the inner-workings of this effort. It’s a brilliant piece that pulls back the curtain on the makings of the ‘counter climate’ campaign, which, of course, was funded by our friends in the oil and coal industries, a sample of which includes:

‘ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,” said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Strategy & Policy. “A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years.’

To Austin as a city and to Stewart as an individual: Keep up the good work.