Karl R. Rábago Delivers Invigorating Friday Morning Keynote Presentation

Friday’s keynote morning speaker was Karl R. Rábago, Vice President, Distributed Energy Services at Austin Energy, who gave an invigorating overview of his utility’s efforts to develop renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electrified transportation. Austin Energy is the nation’s 9th largest community-owned electric utility, serving more than 400,000 customers and a population of almost 1 million. The utility provides service within the City of Austin, Travis County, and a small portion of Williamson County.

Austin Energy runs a Plug-in Partnership Program. Under the program, residential Plug-in Electric Vehicle (PEV) owners within Austin Energy’s electric service territory receive a rebate of up to $1,500 for the purchase and installation of a Level 2 (220/240 volt) charging station. This is just one of many programs administered by Austin Energy demonstrating their commitment to energy efficiency and renewable energy.

According to Rábago, these programs are made possible by Austin Energy’s committed leadership goal. Karl defined leadership as crafting an agenda inspired by vision, convening people around a common agenda, and serving people in pursuit of the agenda. Austin Energy embraces these leadership goals, which are embodied in their vision. Namely, their vision is to built environmental and transportation sector responsibility powered by clean, efficient and increasingly renewable electrical energy and providing customers with a growing menu of services and options to enable them to maximize the value derived by energy services.

Rallying behind these objectives is devastatingly important, according to Rábago, to combat climate change, which he views as the single most significant threat facing the globe today. 

Rábago referenced Frank Ackerman’s Climate Economics in Four Easy Pieces in Development (2008), in which Frank discusses four primary aspects of climate economics: First, your grandchildren's lives are important; a low discount rate is needed to validate concern about far-future outcomes. Second, we need to buy insurance for the planet; prevention of catastrophic worst-case risks, not response to average, expected outcomes, should be the motivation for climate policy. Third, climate damages are too valuable to have prices; the impossibility of putting meaningful prices on human life, endangered species, and ecosystems defeats attempts at cost–benefit analysis of climate policy. Fourth, some costs are better than others; the ‘costs’ of active climate policies will create jobs, incomes, and new technologies, while avoiding the physical destruction of the much worse costs of an increasingly extreme climate. 

Rábago concluded by maintaining that leadership does require vision--leadership is required, and leadership is rewarded. We need to remember, according to Rábago, that these are systems issues; we need to solve for multiple variables to reap greater benefits. And we will make mistakes. This is a learn-by-doing experience!