Last week, Austin Energy announced a revised Draft Generation Plan responding to the slowed economy. The resulting plan: continued use of all existing power plants including COAL through at least 2020, delaying additions of MORE fossil fuel generation and ELIMINATING 75 MW of renewables from the original plan.
On April 30, Austin Energy provided an update to City Council on the Revised Plan and emphasized that the plan was not a staff recommendation but rather a strawman for discussion purposes.
Follow-up dialogue during the meeting should be encouraging to those in Austin who are interested in seeing a wide variety of planning options on the table.
Council Member Laura Morrison:
“I just want to get clear. I always like to be able to see options …..”
Austin Energy General Manager Roger Duncan:
“Our intention is to bring all the options to the City Council.
And there may be a dozen or more, and we’ll graph them out. But there will be recommendations from the boards and commissions, and the staff will be making recommendations, but all the options will be available and we hope to have options that sort of stakeout the two end points in terms of costs and renewables, and Council can choose anything in between, of course, or outside of that.”
