Downtown strip in Georgetown, Texas
Georgetown, Texas is a small city outside of Austin with big ambition: five years ago, it committed to powering itself with 100% renewable energy. It was an exciting, inspiring, and even bizarre event -- who would have expected a fairly-conservative town in an oil-and-gas state like Texas to voluntarily go renewable? When the city reached its goal in 2015, the city of 50,000 was placed in the national spotlight, showing how, regardless of size, politics, or location, any community could be powered entirely by the wind and sun.
Of course, no story is actually that simple.
Georgetown didn’t go wrong by switching to renewable energy: it’s how they did it.
Many cities in the United States and beyond have transitioned to renewable energy successfully and cheaply, and many more aim to do so in the coming decades. Georgetown’s decision-making serves as a lesson for other communities by illustrating that the transition from expensive, polluting fossil fuels to cleaner, healthier, more affordable renewable power is no small move -- and in order to protect people’s bills while prioritizing job creation and communities’ health, it needs to be done right.
Most importantly, other successful examples abound, as close as 30 miles away in Austin. And as Texas edges towards a renewable energy boom, many more cities in the Lone Star State can look forward to a 100% renewable transition, albeit with considerable planning and community participation.
How did this all start?
Here’s a short-hand answer: Essentially, Georgetown neglected to seek community input before signing contracts that generated significantly more energy than the city needed on an annual basis. The goal was to sell that excess energy for a profit through Texas’ electricity market. Unfortunately, at least in the few years since the contract was signed, the utility lost money on those excess sales, leading in part to higher electricity bills and upset residents.
Here’s the longer, more accurate answer.
In 2015, Georgetown was celebrated for becoming the first Texas city (and the largest in the US) to commit to 100% renewable energy goals—hailed as both an exemplar of how to win big on the environment in conservative, small-town Texas and a beacon of hope for renewables in the state that serves as a central hub for most of our nation's oil and gas industry.
What didn’t make headlines is that Georgetown was in a unique situation. Georgetown has a municipally-owned utility, which meant the City Council could decide what energy to invest in rather than shareholders; only 14% of electricity in the US is provided by a municipally-owned utility. Even more important and distinctive, the city’s major energy contract also expired in 2012, leaving the city with a massive gap to fill to supply its residents with electricity.
The lack of community input in Georgetown’s decision-making process for energy policy created significant financial ramifications. As a result, the city's decision to buy too much power at 2015 prices, which are high compared to current prices —regardless of whether they invested in clean energy or dirty fossil fuels—created a financial debacle incongruent with ‘the model clean energy achievement’ narrative that was marketed internationally.
Meanwhile, multiple stories seem to exploit Georgetown's hardships to opportunistically question the credibility of renewables rather than explore how and why Georgetown decided to purchase excess power fixed at 2015’s comparatively high prices.
The city could have made its transition without betting on energy sales or passing its losses onto residents -- including soliciting community feedback in the first place. They could have also taken a more measured approach and moved to 100% renewable energy over time rather than all at once. Among cities that are scaling renewable energy, Georgetown’s situation is the exception, not the rule (although climate deniers and fossil fuel proponents might suggest otherwise).
The Importance of Community Input in City Decisions
Thirty miles down the road from Georgetown, Austin is showing how cities can accelerate the transition to renewable energy economically and in line with community needs. Austin's integrated resource planning has succeeded due to the intervention of Austin community leaders and Sierra Club staff over the last half decade. Meaningful public participation is of the utmost importance for ensuring that Austin avoids financial harm while becoming leaders in the deployment of clean energy among Texas cities. Georgetown can be seen as a parallel case of what could have happened in Austin had they not conducted adequate community engagement.
Towards the end of 2013, community and environmental leaders in Austin battled Austin Energy's ambition to build a new 1,000 MW+ fracked gas plant under the guise of financial responsibility. In response, community leaders and Sierra Club staff pushed City Council to create the 2014 Austin Energy Generation Resource Planning Task Force to help guide the creation of a comprehensive Resource Plan that balanced the need to address public health, affordability, and climate pollution with maximizing Austin Energy's profit—the utility is, after all, the city's cash cow.
An environmental coalition comprised of Public Citizen, Climate Buddies, SEED Coalition, Solar Austin, Austin Interfaith, the “Faith, Energy, and Action Team”, Environment Texas, the Austin Climate Action Network, Sierra Club, and the Texas Drought Project pushed City Council to pass a landmark resolution. Resolution 157 laid out numerous objectives, most importantly the zero carbon by 2030 and 65% renewable energy by 2025 goals—both with the caveat of being achieved "if affordable."
In response to the resolution, Austin Energy released its own studies to push back against this goal as too costly and plan to reach 50% renewable energy -- but also had proposed 500 MW of new fracked gas. This time, Sierra Club leaders and community allies asked a City Council member to bring Austin Energy to the table so we could directly negotiate. Finally, a full compromise was reached by passing the (10-year scope) Austin Energy Resource, Generation and Climate Protection Plan to 2025 in December 2014, set to start in 2015. The “2025 Gen Plan,” as it came to be known, would bring Austin to 80% carbon-free energy (including about 23% nuclear) and subjected Austin Energy's proposed new gas plant to a rigorous independent study. Ultimately, the plan to build a new combined-cycle gas plant was dismissed.
If energy decisions are not made with customers’ best interests in mind and their direct input, policies will fail. This is why community members need a seat at the table.
After the 2025 Generation Plan revision, the next major community-informed policy update took place through the 2016 "Rate Case"—essentially a year-long, public review process in which an independent hearing examiner took testimony from advocates and commercial customers to revise Austin Energy's rate recommendations. The most important aspect of the Rate Case settlement regarding community participation in resource planning, fought for in particular by the Sierra Club and Public Citizen, was a resultant process to address commitments to shut down fossil fuel generation and guide goals for solar and energy efficiency programs. Under the auspices of the city's Electric Utility Commission (EUC), Austin Energy worked with the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, low-income advocates, and other stakeholders in 2017 on another update to create the Austin Energy Resource, Generation and Climate Protection Plan to 2027, or 2017 Gen Plan.
This 16-member EUC Resource Planning Working Group held more than a dozen meetings between November 2016 and May 2017 and approved a suite of recommendations that were ultimately presented to City Council in August 2017. The recommendations mostly maintained the current course of the 2025 plan, including a slight delay in the phase out of the Fayette coal plant and the two Decker gas units, and boosted investments in renewables, energy efficiency, and local thermal storage while recommending more studies of “dispatchable” renewable resources like battery storage, demand response, and the use of electrical vehicles.
Now, once again, the Resource Plan (Austin Energy stopped calling it the “Gen Plan”) is being updated with the Resource Planning Working Group having reformed under the EUC. Sierra Club, Public Citizen, other organizations, and community advocates for low-income people and the elderly are pushing Austin Energy to go entirely carbon-free by either 2030 or 2035 while maximizing energy efficiency program investments, local solar installations, and exploring further battery storage and expanding electric vehicle infrastructure.
Without a public process that has a similar emphasis on open, transparent review from community members, Georgetown lacked the public input or accountability necessary to develop and implement renewable energy policy that is simultaneously good for customers' bills, eliminates reliance on dirty fossil fuels, and keep their books in the black. Outsider perspectives, however, seemed to have missed the main point of this issue: the coverage of Georgetown's troubles speciously focused on the idea that the 100% renewable goal is to blame, when really how a community gets to 100% is as important as getting there at all.
Texas’ Growing Renewable Energy Potential
At the most basic level, the way Texas’ electricity market works is that a utility sells 100% of the power they generate when this electricity is most profitable and then buys the power they need when it is cheapest. Because this is actually how the Texas grid works, the idea that the intermittency of renewables directly caused the financial woes of Georgetown is wrong -- and it’s no surprise who’s purporting that false narrative.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a right-wing think tank backed by the fossil fuel industry, has every reason to be threatened by the boom of renewable energy -- and has taken every chance to deride communities moving towards cleaner, safer, more economic clean energy. The group is funded by the Koch Brothers, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips, among other big polluters with a vested interest in staunching the renewable energy transition. TPPF has been a misleading voice in Georgetown’s renewable energy story, publishing hit piece after hit piece to denounce renewable energy and blame the clean energy industry for Georgetown’s challenges.
Although the truth is more complicated than that in Georgetown, one thing is clear: the momentum toward clean energy is unstoppable -- and achieving 100% renewable power is possible when done democratically and transparently.
Georgetown’s desire to go 100% renewable and Austin’s measured progress towards clean energy are just the tip of the iceberg of Texas’ increasing renewable energy potential, both in total capacity and profitability. Last year, a combination of wind and solar energy surpassed coal in Texas as a primary energy source for the first time. In 2020, it is expected that wind by itself will far surpass coal, and wind and solar together will generate nearly a third of our energy. Given that Texas produces more electricity than any other state in the nation, that’s a pretty big deal. For solar specifically, Texas is projected to have the second fastest growth in the nation, and currently has the 4th most solar capacity of all states. As of October 2019, 64,000 MW of solar and 35,000 MW of wind have been approved to be built in the state’s primary energy market compared to just 7,000 MW of fracked gas. In addition, the proposed plans for storage are huge, with over 7,500 MW of electric storage being proposed over the next several years. When paired with renewables, storage makes clean energy available even when the sun and wind aren’t, removing the need for fossil-fuels as “backup” for renewable resources.
Ultimately, Georgetown may have been able to reach 100% renewable energy and maintain financial solvency with a comprehensive, community-informed resource planning process.