Mayor says work not over yet on 2020 generation plan

After more than two years of deliberations, public meetings and on online surveys, Austin Energy’s 2020 generation plan is, according to Mayor Lee Leffingwell, “definitely not set.”

 

Leffingwell convened a special session of City Council on Monday evening at the Palmer Events Center, where a public forum drew several hundred people for a panel discussion of the much-discussed generation plan proposal. The panel, which included retiring AE General Manager Roger Duncan and representatives from industrial, environmental, and low-income interest groups, did not engage in the kind of impassioned debate that has occasionally marked such forums.

 

Instead, most panel members seemed to agree that the proposed plan, which has yet to go before City Council for a vote, strikes a delicate balance between reducing AE’s reliance on coal, increasing its use of environmentally friendly sources of energy, and keeping costs down.

 

As written, the proposed plan would gradually wean Austin off coal by reducing the amount of power it gets from the Fayette Power Plant while increasing AE’s percentage of renewable energy sources to about 36 percent of its overall electricity generation.

 

According to Leffingwell, the plan generally meets the major goals of the city, although he isn’t ready to sign off on it just yet.

 

“Conceptually, we accept the premise that we need to reduce our carbon footprint and we accept the general parameters outlining how much we should do that, and we also generally approve of the approach that Austin Energy is recommending,” he said. “However, we have to make sure that during the process that we have enough flexibility in our plan to be able to adapt to changing conditions.”

 

Those conditions include changing technologies, pending carbon cap-and-trade legislation, a rate case in 2012, and costs that could shift rapidly in a changing energy market.

 

“We need to take the plan and make sure there is sufficient flexibility built into it to, number one, protect our customers from potentially high rates, and number two, make sure that Austin Energy maintains itself as a viable entity,” he said.

 

City Council will likely address the issue sometime in early March and might even approve a generation plan around then. But, Leffingwell added, “That’s not for certain yet.”