Austin Energy Leadership

President Jensen opened Friday's conference festivities with an overview of the conference's goals and gave all attendees a taste of things to come throughout the remainder of the weekend. He then introduced keynote speaker Karl Rabago, Vice President at Austin Energy.

Karl Rabago's talk centered around the concept of leadership in developing sustainable energy sources that involves crafting an agenda inspired by vision, helping people buy into that vision, and then supporting these people as they diligently work to move that vision forward. Municipal electric utilities are the hub of energy services innovation today and Austin Energy's mission statement is to provide a source of clean, renewable, affordable, and reliable energy to it's customers while also providing excellent customer service. Climate change is a reality and the only way that we as a society can start addressing this valid concern is to start changing the way that we do things and the way that we live our lives. Today's world is complicated and is further complicated by the fact that our everyday lifestyle is centered around devices that require a steady source of energy to operate properly (gas powered cars, handheld devices, etc). Think about the number of devices you own that require charging. Our own habits need to change and our priorities need to be put into perspective if we intend to be successful in the long run. Do we want to start investing in clean and renewable energy or do we want to start investing in additional infrastructure to support our growing lifestyle?

The city of Austin has a long term goal to utilize 35% renewable energy and achieve a 20% drop in CO2 emissions by 2020 by introducing a clean portfolio of options. Today's strategies include electric transportation, low income energy and weatherization, energy storage, smart grid & Pecan Street Project, Zero Energy Capable Homes by 2015, Austin Climate Protection Plan, Municipal Energy Efficiency Leadership, and Green Economy. With these options Austin has already achieved a +900MW energy efficiency savings, started utilizing 11% renewable energy (all volunteer supported), and lowered the average consumption with rates 15% lower than average. With this it has still shown itself to be both highly efficient and extremely reliable. To highlight Austin Energy's leadership in the renewable energy arena, Karl put up a chart stating that Texas could have saved $4.58 Billion in one year if all customers had been Austin Energy customers.

President Obama has stated multiple times that one of his goals is to dramatically increase the number of electrical cars on the road by 2020. With this being said, one of the problems faced is whether the current electrical infrastructure is capable of supporting multiple electrical vehicles charging at one time, referred to as "dumb charging", during peak hours. How do we address this issue? The options at our disposal is to change the pricing model, have charging stations at the work places, utilize solar energy, or simply invest the time and energy to improve the technology to become more efficient. There are a number of solutions and all have pros and cons so finding the right one will take time and a substantial monetary investment in both the public and private sector.

Karl concluded his presentation by stating that leadership requires vision and leadership is rewarded. Being able to reap greater benefits will require solving for multiple variables but it's important to keep in mind that this is a learning environment and mistakes will be made but the real tragedy for future generations would be if we did not learn from these mistakes.

Contact Karl R Rabago (karl.rabago@austinenergy.com)