This article announced that the City of Austin’s annual municipal electricity purchases would all be from GreenChoice renewable energy. This was about 328 million kilowatt hours a year in 2017. Though the electricity coming through the lines was a mix of all power sources, this mechanism allowed Austin to dedicate its electric budget to wind power, allowing more demand to be sold on the system.
Costs premiums of about $8.5 million detailed in this story have since come down markedly, in part due to my intervention.
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Today Austin will become the nation’s first major green-energy-only municipal operation, a milestone it will reach by relying on renewable energy the city has been unable to sell to its 400,000 other electric customers.
…every penny the city would normally spend on nonrenewable sources will instead go to a West Texas wind farm. This will reduce the carbon footprint of one of Central Texas’ biggest carbon-producing enterprises.
“Austin calls itself a green city. A lot of that is hype,” said environmental activist Paul Robbins, who has been pushing the city to switch to renewable energy for more than a decade. Now that it has, he said, “This is the first time in a long time Austin is truly a leader.”