PolitiFact
ford, asked to assess progress on this campaign promise, said: “You can hang a big ol’ ‘Work-In-Progress’ sign on the mayor’s office. We’re not done yet.”
For our part, we didn’t spot signs of the mayor acting to change Austin Water’s operations. In its own right, though, Austin Water last September started gathering input for a fresh review of its business, including its rates, the utility’s financial manager, Joseph Gonzales, told us. He said the council would probably have results by August.
An Austin Water document states that the most recent “cost of service” review occurred in 2007.
“While the cost of service methodology principles remain unchanged,” the document says, “Austin Water believes the methodology used to determine equitable and defensible rates should be strengthened to ensure all customer classes pay for their cost of providing service.”
The Adler-led council has focused on Austin Energy. Notably, council members voted in August to cut Austin Energy’s revenue, reducing bills by $42.5 million annually and settling a yearslong rates fight between the utility and its major industrial and commercial customers.
Industrial and commercial customers were expected to enjoy the bulk of the savings, $36.5 million, and the average residential customer was predicted to save $62 a year, though those savings weren’t expected to be evenly shared. Customers with the heaviest and lightest usage would save far less than customers in Austin Energy’s middle pricing tiers.
The average Tier 1 customer (lightest usage) would save $4.12 a year, according to the utility, and the average Tier 5 (heaviest usage) customer would save $9.69 annually. The average Tier 3 customer would save $69.30 annually, when compared with the previous rates. The new rates took effect Jan. 1.
So credit Adler with helping put rate reductions in motion.
We looked next at progress on his vow to change the utilities’ business models.
Adler elaborated on this part of his promise in his 2014 campaign platform: “Innovations such as shifting toward local distributed power generation, accelerating water reuse practices, and placing even greater emphasis on con- servation will help us avoid recurrences of the massive expenditures we have seen in recent years for power generation, water supply, and conveyance.”
To our query, Adler adviser Frank Rodriguez emailed web links to three Austin Energy efforts: the push to expand its renewable energy sources, a new electricity storage effort and the utility’s energy efficiency programs.
In 2015, Adler and the council approved power-purchase deals expanding Austin Energy’s potential solar power production by more than 20 times — adding 450 megawatts to the utility’s then-30 in that year. That move fell in step with pro-renewables actions of previous councils. In 2014, the pre-Adler council signed off on contracts to purchase a combined 450 megawatts of solar and wind power.
There’s a long-running debate, though, over whether the push into renewables actually saves customers money. Opponents of the deals maintain that they saddle Austinites with unnecessary costs.
Rodriguez also pointed to Austin Energy’s two electrical storage experiments — in East Austin and at Mueller — that provide a small step toward effectively distributing locally generated power, as mentioned in Adler’s promise.
Both projects are partly funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The technology allows Austin Energy to store relatively small amounts of locally generated solar power to be distributed when the sun isn’t shining. Adler and the council voted to approve the purchase of the East Austin battery in October 2015 and the Mueller system in 2016.
We rate this Adler promise In the Works.