Austin Energy Utility Oversight Committee (AEUOC) Meeting Transcript – 1/20/2026 Title: ATXN-1 (24hr) Channel: 1 - ATXN-1 Recorded On: 1/20/2026 6:00:00AM Original Air Date: 1/20/2026 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== Please note that the following transcript is for reference purposes and does not constitute the official record of actions taken during the meeting. For the official record of actions of the meeting, please refer to the Approved Minutes. Let's go ahead and jump right into it. I'll call the meeting of the Austin energy utility oversight committee to order. It is January 20th, 2026 and the time is 901. First up, we have public communication. Danielle. [9:01:35 AM] >> Yes? Can I have Paul Robbins, followed by Camille cook and Craig nazer? >> Thank you. >> Good morning. Council, I'm Paul Robbins, I'm an environmental activist and consumer advocate. Regressive rights is a term that means the more you use, the less you pay per unit. That's to be distinguished from Progressive electric rates, where the more you use, the more you pay per unit. Since 2012, Austin energy has attempted to make Austin's rates much more regressive and. [9:02:41 AM] Since 2022, our electric rates have gone up 29% overall. But you'll see in this map that they increase disproportionately for each council district, district three. For example, one of the poorest districts in Austin is 34% district four, another relatively lower income district is 31%, while district ten, the highest income is only 20%, and these take into account the customer assistance program. If cpap customers were not included, the disproportion this the disproportion between districts would be even more and districts ten and districts [9:03:43 AM] 8th may think that they got out lucky, but not necessarily because even though the average is, the average increase is lower. The majority of residential customers in every council district have above average rate increases. You'll see this map that shows that even in district ten, 63% of customers have above average rate increases, while district nine, 81% have above average rate increases. If this confuses you, consider the simple formula that about one third of the customers use two thirds of the energy. And so this final slide asks you to change the rates. You have the power to do this right now. You can retroactively change rates [9:04:46 AM] and just simply apply the rate increase proportionally to the monthly charge and all the tears. I believe it was 5% this year, so just multiply the base fee by 5%, tier one by 5%, and so forth. Thank you. >> You will call the next witness. >> Up next we'll have Camille cook. >> Good morning. Council chair and vice chair Siegel. My name is Camille cook and I'm a member of district three. Like everyone else here today, I'd like to talk about the myriad options we have to address our energy needs without the use of new Peaker units. Mainly, I wanted to discuss the little but important things that ai can do to squeeze out megawatts when we need them most, so there is untapped potential in creating time of use rates that can allow residents to be price [9:05:48 AM] responsive. Right now, there are small incentives to allow people to participate in grid saving behavior, namely the small incentive for owning an ev or smart thermostat. But beyond this, there is little reason for a residential customer at the moment to reduce their load because they don't see any meaningful signal on a cold winter morning or a hot summer evening. Other than a text message from ai. And potentially this, you know, smart thermostat. Notice notice Austin energy already has some incredibly effective energy efficiency programs, investing in the technology and ability to allow customers to adjust their electricity usage to contribute to protecting the grid that bigger customers already have been paid to do. Bigger customers already have this ability. A huge source of local demand at peak can begin to lower. Instead of buying expensive speakers in order to reach the high peaks of electricity use, we can lower those peaks and reduce the price of electricity for everybody. As you all see from E's presentation, there's still a long way to go for our demand [9:06:48 AM] response capacity, and this is a really good way that we can improve it. Another way that we can improve this demand response and energy efficiency is through the residential and commercial standard offer programs. These are essential to meeting our energy needs. They should apply incentives to these programs, just as they do to other rooftop solar, because we need all sources of local generation capacity that we can, especially those that aren't putting, you know, privatizing the the profits and socializing the costs by putting pollutants in the air, demand response and energy efficiency are especially important in this moment because of the forced disappearance of solar rebates from the federal government, increasing local generation capacity through rooftop solar is this incredibly important tool. We have to address our energy needs, but it's going to be harder to rely on as we go moving forward. I'm excited to see how much capacity we can gain from putting solar on city buildings, and this will improve and this will improve our local capacity, but we're going to need to work on more creative ways to ensure that we can reach this. With that, [9:07:48 AM] thanks for your time. We need to make sure that we can use every tool at our that we have the ability to. There are so many programs that are being been put forward just in ercot alone that could benefit from that we could benefit from without needing to rely on on speakers and and these things, there's so many opportunities we have to to reduce these peak load that we we are facing. So thank you all so much. I appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Up next we have Craig nazer. >> Hello, oversight committee, Craig nazer, conservation chair of the Austin regional group and the lone star chapter of the Sierra club. Almost 60 years ago, as a teenager, on a bright June day in northeastern Ohio, I read an article about CO2, how atmospheric CO2 was rising, and how that might drastically affect climate. I remember the moment clearly 60 years later, and here we are. I will be dead before the worst of it. But there are a lot of [9:08:49 AM] young people who have a horror filled future to look forward to. Science tells us that what we need, what we need to do. But we obsess about the details. The exact future is always unknown, but the path to save the Earth is crystal clear. Our path does not include gas Peaker plants. We want more renewable energy with batteries. Battery storage. Here is a poem from an old song that still holds an important message for those of us who continue to be almost afraid to turn our backs on the fossil fuels that are slowly killing us all. I came upon a child of god. He was walking along the road and I asked him, where are you going? And this he told me, I'm going down to yasgur's farm, gonna join in a rock and roll band. Going to camp out on the land. Going to try to get my soul free. We are stardust, we are golden. And we've got to get [9:09:50 AM] back to the garden. Well then can I walk beside you. Because I've come to lose the smog. And I'm feeling myself a cog in something turning. And maybe it's just the time of year. Or maybe it's the time of man. And I don't know who I am. But life is for learning. We are stardust, we are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. By the time we got to woodstock, we were half a million strong and everywhere was a song and celebration. And I dreamed I saw the bomber jets riding shotgun in the sky and turning into butterflies above our nation. We're stardust billion year old carbon. We're golden. But we're caught in the devil's bargain. And we got to get back to the garden. Thank you. >> Thank you, Mr. Nazer. [9:10:50 AM] >> If I can have Rebecca bernhardt followed by Al brydan. >> Good morning, and thank you for this opportunity to speak. My name is Rebecca bernhardt. I am a district seven representative on the Austin public safety commission and the public safety appointee to the downtown commission. I also work for Texas physicians for social responsibility. Texas. Psr is a statewide nonprofit guided by medical and public health expertise that works to protect human life from the worst threats to health and survival. Through outreach, education, and advocacy. Our members are physicians, nurses, public health professionals, and researchers. I am not a healthcare professional, but I am a person with asthma and with a teenage daughter who also has asthma. And I had a heart attack in 2022. My asthma likely developed because of [9:11:51 AM] early exposure to poor air quality from frequent wildfires. Because I grew up in rural California, wildfire smoke, along with the smoke produced by methane gas plants, is one of the most dangerous air pollutants because it contains both a large amount of small particulate matter, pm 2.5, and other toxic gases. Now that I live in Austin, although I check the air quality app daily during the warm months to know whether I should wear a mask, I don't really need to. Because when Austin is outside of the safe range of air quality, and for that, for me that's the moderate range, not the dangerous range. I just cough, that's my signal. Medical professionals will admit they don't fully understand pm 2.5 yet, and what its health impacts will inevitably or eventually amount to. They know it leads to premature death for people like me with heart or lung conditions, causes heart [9:12:52 AM] attacks, aggravates asthma, decreases lung function, and increases coughing and difficulty breathing, which I think we all already knew. Health care professionals suspect that once they fully understand the impacts of pm 2.5, it will be in the same category of seriousness as lead, which, just for a reminder, everybody who's like over the age of 40 is -5 to 7 iq points because we were exposed to a lot of lead as children from leaded gas and leaded paint. I am here today urging you to drop the methane gas powered Peaker plants from the resource generation and climate protection plan. Peaker plants aren't just expensive, but they would add to Austin's already significant load of fine particulate matter, as well as other toxic air pollutants. While Austin energy does not consider, according to the presentation, they are going to give local air quality and non-attainment to be an increasing risk in the 2035 [9:13:52 AM] plan. I certainly do. Austin air quality was moderate, which is the category that makes me cough or worse, about half of the days in 2024. I love living here. I don't want my life to be shortened because I live here. >> Thank you. Thank you, miss Barnhart. >> Mr. Braden. >> Thank you. Good morning, mayor Watson. Chairman and vice chairman, Siegel and council members. I'm Al Braden, a district seven voter and commissioner and member of the past two generation task forces. But today, I'm speaking for myself. Austin energy is not yet ready to recommend the purchase of Peaker units, but they expect to by may or early summer. A Peaker proposal could arrive very soon. We who worked on the generation plan are committed to ceasing fossil fuel generation by 2035. We have just ten years to get it right. If we buy new gas units now, we are really saying that we are not committed to eliminating the use of fossil [9:14:53 AM] fuels by 2035, since these units are designed to run for 30 or 40 years, how could we install Peaker units in 2030 to shut them down in 2035? How could that make sense? And we are talking about serious dollars. In November, Lisa martin estimated $60 million for Peaker. Dicker has for sand hill has six for scale. That's 240 million to $360 million. We could do a lot with that money, like a lot more transmission lines. The 2020 generation plan committed to purchase no more fossil fuel generators by the 2024 plan. Transmission issues and extreme weather pushed volatility sky high. That plan's assumptions were modeled on the very volatile years of 2022 and 2023, and Austin energy transmission study showed the need for major upgrades to bring more power into the Austin area. In the 2024 generation plan. We committed to lead with customer energy solutions, including [9:15:54 AM] local solar batteries, demand response, distributed resources and more. We committed to increased transmission capacity. We committed to local utilities, solar and batteries. And finally, if we couldn't get there any other way, we provided for the consideration of additional Peaker. When that plan was approved by council, the discussion on the dais was all about studying the alternatives very seriously, about reining in speakers, about guardrails, about running them as little as possible. That was just 13 months ago. Texas now has 18gw of batteries, over 10% of the power. On some evenings, they are growing exponentially and smoothing out that volatility. Our solar is 36gw, wind 41gw. The ercot market is now building more solar and batteries than anything else. And now Texas really needs wires. Ercot just approved a [9:16:55 AM] massive 760 kilovolt super grid overlay that can bring huge amounts of power east to west. It will break bottlenecks and reduce volatility across the state. These bring huge opportunities for our power lines to tap into, and they are planned for completion by 2030. So time is short. Let's commit to lead with these solutions. Thank you all very much. >> Thank you, Mr. President. >> Anyone else? >> No. That'll be everyone. >> Thank you very much. Let's go ahead and move on to approval of the minutes from the November 18th, 2025 meeting. Can I get a motion from council member Fuentes and a second from council member harper-madison? All those in favor, please indicate by raising your unanimously approve the minutes. Item two is the general manager's report by our general manager, Mr. Stewart. Riley. Mr. Riley, the the floor is yours. [9:17:57 AM] >> Thank you. Chair. Good morning. I'm Stewart Riley Austin, energy general manager. Do I have a clicker here? I have five topics I'm going to get through. I'll try to keep us moving and go through each of these pretty quickly. First of all, I wanted to talk about our winter weather preparations. We've had somewhat of a mild winter so far this year, but we do have to plan for extremes when we're getting ready for the winter. We are seeing a chance of winter precipitation this weekend, and so every year coming into December, we perform our winter weather preparations. That starts with making sure our personnel is ready, looking at our emergency staffing plans, using all the lessons learned from our prior after action reviews, we also look at all of our critical components across our system. That's that includes our transmission system, at our substations, at our power plants. And in terms of all of those critical components, we're insulating many of those [9:18:57 AM] components. You can see at the top of this slide, the top middle, some custom insulation, blankets that go around, components. Below that you can see heat tracing which provides heating, keeping critical equipment above a certain temperature and preventing them from freezing up. And then over on the right hand side of this picture, you can see a wind barrier. This one is high at the top of the sand hill combined cycle power plant, and that's going to keep the elements out and protect that equipment during extreme winter weather. I recently signed or prior to December. Rather, I signed our winter weather readiness attestation that is filed with the PUC and ercot to attest that we are ready for winter weather. We also participate in ercot inspections at our equipment, and they're coming around to make sure that all of our infrastructure is ready for the winter, and we're demonstrating that we're compliant with all of the PUC rules and regulations to to have that infrastructure winterized and [9:19:59 AM] ready. In terms of our electric transmission projects, it's always a priority of ours to maintain and upgrade our transmission infrastructure. One of our priorities from the resource generation plan is also to increase our transmission import capacity. And this work is all done during the months between the summer and the winter. Outside of the extreme months, you can request outages from ercot in order to get that maintenance work accomplished. To upgrade the transmission grid. Unfortunately, this outage season since September 15th, we had 29 transmission projects canceled due to our inability to meet ercot reliability contingency, specifically due to a lack of local generation. So while increasing our transmission import capacity is meant to decrease our dependance on local generation, what we're finding out is that our inadequate supply of local generation is is making it [9:21:00 AM] harder for us to complete transmission projects to solve for some of that problem. So we're seeing a delay in terms of work that we need to perform maintenance, increased reliability compliance, meet customer growth, and also to increase our import capacity. I just mentioned this because it's one of the many unseen challenges that we are solving for, and our teams are now adjusting plans to to find a viable path forward. I also wanted to mention our wildfire mitigation activities we recently put into place enhanced powerline safety settings on our distribution grid. These are in effect on high wildfire risk days. So for example, on Friday and Saturday of this past week, there was extreme wildfire danger weather. And on those days we are activating our enhanced powerline safety settings. This does not mean we are cutting off power to customers, but it does mean we are changing settings on the distribution grid to increase safety. So on [9:22:01 AM] those high wildfire risk days, our teams, our technology teams have put logic into place on our system, which targets wildfire risk areas and prevents the system from re-energizing if there is an issue detected on the distribution grid. And so instead of the system automatically re-energizing that circuit, our crews are going to inspect that circuit and make sure that it is safe to close back into and re-energize. That does mean that the outages will take longer while we inspect them on those high wildfire risk days. But our goal here is to prevent anything that could create a spark. Eps or enhanced powerline safety settings is going into our wildfire mitigation plan. It's a new requirement that that was passed last legislative session in the wake of the 2024 panhandle wildfires. There's a law that requires electric utilities in high wildfire risk areas to file a wildfire [9:23:02 AM] mitigation plan for approval with the PUC. It requires us to get an independent third party expert to review our plan, and for us to file our plan with the PUC for for a contested case. And so we are updating our plan and getting ready for that activity this year. 2025 was a record year on a lot of fronts. I think we've talked to this committee about the record year we had for local solar, our third year in a row of of local solar records. We also had a record year for demand response. We achieved a 57 megawatt peak load drop this year. I have to correct a typo on this slide. It says that's enough to power about 11,000 homes. That should say 14,000 homes. So a significant amount of peak demand reduction. This increases reliability on the grid. This is sustainable and this is affordable for customers. We saw a 30% increase in enrollment of commercial customers. Part of that is the enrollment of all [9:24:03 AM] city facilities. That adds 6.4mw of capacity to demand response. We also see an improvement in terms of customer commercial customer response when we called demand response and a lot of effort being done by the team, a lot of outreach, a lot of education, a lot of marketing to get more people enrolled in demand response. We have some aggressive goals, an interim goal to 2027, and we're on our way to meeting those goals. And then lastly, you may have seen in the news the first solar standard offer project was installed. Thank you, chair vela for speaking at the ribbon cutting to commemorate that project coming online. As a reminder, the solar standard offer allows building owners to either host solar solar arrays on their rooftops or enter into a rooftop lease with a solar developer to sell all that solar energy production to Austin energy. Sort of like a power purchase agreement. Austin energy buys all that energy. We are seeing still in the queue, about 15mw of [9:25:05 AM] projects in the queue for solar standard offer. We're hoping that that all comes to fruition. We will continue to to work to get all that to come to fruition. And we're also this is a first of its kind program, and we're hopeful that not only do these projects come to fruition, but other utilities kind of follow the lead and and provide additional local renewable energy supply for us, for our grid chair. That's what I have for you. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. General manager. Any questions from the Dyess council member harper-madison. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Question slash statement. So I'm not as familiar as I could be with the solar standard offer. You said it's the first of its kind. I actually had a whole nother question, but in order to keep it light, I just shot straight to this because you piqued my attention. What do you mean? First of its kind? Are we the innovator here or are we following somebody else's example from a pilot? Or. This is. Tell me more about solar [9:26:05 AM] standard offer. >> Yes. Thank you for the question. This is something that is unique to Austin energy. Our solar program staff came up with this concept basically, you know, come one, come all. If you are going to put in solar, we will buy the energy and this is going to help us bridge the gap, because you might have some facility owners that might not otherwise have an incentive to put in solar, because maybe they lease out that building and the tenant is the one that pays the bills. And so this allows that building owner to have an income stream from the production of that solar energy. So it helps to get some more solar online, where otherwise there might not be that incentive to do so. >> And this is kind of an off the wall question. Does that apply exclusively to traditional brick and mortar? Or theoretically, could food trucks produce solar like? I'm just I'm curious, you know, what are the parameters? How how are we I mean, can chicken coop produce over. You know what I'm saying? Like what? What are what are the parameters? Just out of curiosity. >> What we're finding is that [9:27:05 AM] in order to produce at the scale, to be able to sell the energy economically back to Austin energy, it is going to typically be your bigger facilities like these. The the ones that are coming online now are, are warehouse type facilities with enough rooftop space to get some economies of scale and then sell that energy to Austin energy at the price that that maintains affordability for our customers. >> And I'll end with this one. I appreciate that you spoke specifically to something that I was wondering when you were speaking, you know, with some of the rebates coming up to, like, their expiration. I was thinking if there was a relatively difficult sell to get stakeholders invested in solar conceptually, how much harder is this sell when there's no financial incentive? So you spoke to that just now from a commercial customer perspective, I'm just curious to know this is a little bit off of this topic, but I'm curious to know how does that translate to residential customers? What's our incentive [9:28:06 AM] now that you know, the rebate tool is not an option? >> Well, in terms of, you know, the Austin energy rebate still exists, the the federal tax credits for residential did just expire. And so that creates some difficulty in terms of residential uptake. Richard genesee here in a little bit is going to talk about solar leasing. And so that's a potential opportunity to to bridge the gap a little bit. So he'll be talking about that in a little. >> Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you chair. >> Vice chair Siegel. >> Thank you chair vela. And I just want to first say that I did chuckle at council member harper-madison idea of solar on food trucks, but that's because I really liked the idea. It was surprising and I would actually love to see it if we could make it pencil out. Thank you, Jim Riley, for your presentation. I just want to ask if you could briefly respond to one of the comments we got from Mr. Robbins, our our commissioner, about a concern that some of [9:29:07 AM] the rate increases have applied inequitably across the geography of the city and would love any context you can provide. Thank you. >> Yes, I was. Well, I don't know all the research that he's done. I know that he has looked at consumption data. I believe what he's trying to point out is the fixed charge, the customer charge versus the kwh charges on the customer bill. So I'd have to look at specifically what he's talking about. But I just want you all to know that our rate increases are rate increases that aren't district specific. So maybe he's looking at usage data or something like that. In addition, our customer charge continues to be far cheaper than many of our peers. You know what we're seeing from neighboring utilities. You know, we're at $16.50 a month. We're seeing from neighboring utilities over $20, maybe $25 a month. And we really want our [9:30:07 AM] customers to conserve energy. They are conserving energy. Our customers in the Austin area because of our energy efficiency efforts over the years, we talk about our average customer only uses 860 kw per month. It's now down to 833, and that's far out of line with the rest of the state. And that's a good thing. And so we want to be able to maintain our financial health while encouraging that amount of energy efficiency and that usage reduction by our customers. And so we still have to maintain fixed cost recovery. One other thing I'll point out is that the cap customers don't pay the customer charge. So in terms of when we're looking at equity across our service territory, if we do need to raise the customer charge that fixed monthly charge, it is going to be a benefit to cap customers because that is going to reduce their their percentage bill increase. If some of that's going into the customer charge. >> Thank you. [9:31:10 AM] >> Councilmember duchin. >> Thank you, chair, and thank you for the presentation. Director Riley, I just have a couple of questions quickly related to some of the slides that you shared on slide four, which was about, I think, the lack of local transmission. There we go. I'm just curious, most of my questions are just about sort of the total scope of things. So the 29 projects, can you help me understand what is that a percentage of our total work, our total, what is the total amount of projects that we typically might see in a year? >> Yeah, I. I don't recall that number, but we can certainly get that to you. I do need to point out that not all of these 29 projects were to increase our import capacity, which I mentioned is one of our goals. Some of these might just be maintenance things like that. And and that lack of sufficient generating capacity makes it harder for ercot to allow us to take those outages. I can get you the full number. [9:32:11 AM] >> Okay. We'll follow. >> Up on that full scope. >> Okay. Thank you. And then the next question is on on slide seven about solar standard. You mentioned, I think 15mw in the queue after launching this first program, which by the way, congratulations for same same line of question, which is what is sort of the total opportunity that you guys have looked at for solar standard in our market. >> In terms of the potential capacity of all the tops? >> Yeah, like whereas 15mw in sort of the total opportunity. >> Well, you know, the total opportunity is far, far bigger than 15mw. What our hope is by pricing it right, by pricing it at the avoided costs and holding our customers harmless from any cost increases. From this, we're pricing it to where we are buying all that solar energy at what we would be paying, looking at our all in costs, whether we're buying energy off the grid, taking into account our transmission [9:33:12 AM] costs avoided, any costs that we avoid whatsoever, pricing it at that so that any of this energy production, you can keep scaling up and scaling up and scaling up, and it's not going to impact affordability for our customers. So the question then becomes, is it economic for that business owner to put in the solar and sell it back to us at that price? Some have made it pencil out and, you know, there are more at various stages in the pipeline that are going to do so. But in terms of the overall opportunity, I mean, it's it's far greater than. >> Maybe a better question would be what is the goal that you have for, say, the next five years with this program? >> Yes, we have we have a local solar goal that we're hoping to meet through, you know, to to meet the resource generation plan. And I'm, I don't remember- that specific megawatt target for our, our local goal. But we have interim goals and we have stretch goals. So we're you [9:34:14 AM] know, we're all in on trying to make solar expand solar, get as much renewable onto our system as we possibly thing. I'll follow up then to try and get that that information from you. And the last thing quickly was just noting that on that slide you referenced in that one article or the one article references how power demand is going to double across the state. How are you seeing that demand increase locally here? I'm assuming it's not doubling here in our region or zone, but how are you sort of how are you addressing that statewide demand increase? >> Right. Yeah, you're exactly right. So ercot to 2030 is forecasting almost a doubling of of demand statewide of that summer peak demand. And so we're we're not immune from that. We have large customers, whether they're industrial customers or transit projects or hospitals, all kinds of customers coming to us, large customers that want to move to [9:35:15 AM] Austin want to expand in Austin. And then we're just also seeing natural load growth from population increase, ev growth, a lot of good things, electrification of of different sectors. And so a lot of that load growth is good. We're seeing that as well. We need to be ready for it. I think what we've forecasted in terms of a high likelihood category is over 500mw worth of load growth. If you think about our peak load is is over 3000mw, but our average load is more like around 1800 or 1900 megawatts. So 500mw in addition is is substantial. And we want to be ready for that growth. It's happening all over. Ercot. Customers are looking for whatever megawatts they can get. And we're not immune from that. >> That megawatt goal is for 2030. >> That that forecast that we have. It's kind of a moving target because we have customers that approach us. They might be two years out, they might be five years out. But I think 2030 is probably a good approximation. >> Okay. I appreciate those [9:36:16 AM] answers and I'll follow up on the data and thank you for the presentation. >> Thank you. >> Council member. Walter. >> Thank you. Just we were talking about the standard offer rate. You mentioned. What remind us that the rate itself. How do you calculate that? >> So the rate itself looks at what we would be paying in the market. So what our customers are paying on their power supply adjustment. So. The the all in costs that will will not increase the power supply adjustment. We also factor in our four cp savings which is the four coincident peaks in ercot. So when you look at the amount that local solar saves us on our four cp. So we're we're factoring in even the transmission cost savings. So any of those costs that are avoided to us in any category that we can pay, that is what is baked into that rate. >> And you update that annually. Correct? >> I believe it's updated. Is [9:37:21 AM] three years, three years. It's three based on the three year. It's updated every three years based on an average. >> Okay. Because our. Psa has been going down. And I'm curious if that will drive the standard offer rate down because you're you're trying to make it level. >> Yeah. Yeah. If our avoided costs go up, if we have some extreme years, you know, the the the rate goes up. If the avoided costs go down, the rate it basically tracks that to, to keep our customers whole essentially. >> And how if at all, have you thought about you know, right now y'all are doing the all resource rfp. You know, let's just say the market prices here locally, 100mw of solar to be whatever it prices it at. And if we wanted to go by that we would go, you know, use cash or debt and that would be supported by rates to then pay for that solar or whatever resource here locally. I'm curious how. If we think of the [9:38:25 AM] two completely separately, if we think about utility scale generation and how we fund that and the price per kilowatt or kilowatt hour versus the price per kilowatt or kilowatt hour. And I'm not sure how you price this if it's on the what the what hour. But for the standard offer program and if there's a discrepancy. So like if we're paying a lot more to just go build something versus could we, you know, would it be beneficial to increase the rate and make it more attractive on the standard offer side? >> Yeah. So anytime we're contracting for a renewable asset and we're doing a power purchase agreement, that's going to be a pass through on the power supply adjustment. So for example, if we were contracting for utility scale solar, let's say it's in west Texas and it was a $60 per megawatt solar contract. What we would look at the equivalent locally, we would actually be able to pay more than that because of the avoided transmission costs. So we would factor that in as well. So if [9:39:26 AM] if a contract is is not pushing the power supply adjustment up at that utility scale price, it's it's going to be able to be higher at the local level because it's also going to avoid additional costs, which would be the transmission costs that for cp allocation. >> Okay. And my last question is if you could just give us an update on where the timeline for the residential program. >> So the residential, we have some conversations that we have to do internally because what we're seeing, the residential program may face some challenges in terms of getting to those economies of scale. And so we're looking at what we could do to. To to kind of bridge the gap there, or if it's feasible for developers to kind of aggregate programs and things like that. So it would be it's a large lift to bring that program to the to, you know, make that program go live. [9:40:27 AM] And we want to make sure that when we do that, it's able to actually yield some some positive results and have some projects come online. So to be determined, we're still working on it. >> Okay. Well, we'll have more conversations I'm sure. Thank you very much, chair. >> Thank you. And going off of a council member alter's question, the the grant that we was was rescinded was would that would have gone toward the residential solar standard offer or. >> That solar for all would have been its own program and that would have provided solar and storage for primarily for low income customers across our service territory. And it would have provided that solar and storage at no cost. And then it could have. The ownership could have flipped to that customer at the end of that 15 year period. So that was about a $32 million grant. So it doesn't impact the solar standard offer. It was a program of its own. >> Got it. But then I guess when when just just to for for [9:41:28 AM] my understanding, the public's understanding that when you're talking about a large building, there are those economies of scale where you can put solar panels all across a huge the roof of a huge warehouse. And obviously that's just one place to go. That's just one connection to make. Whereas doing something similar where again, a third party presumably would be going to individual houses to put very small scale solar arrays, the concern there would be the transaction costs just going again from location to location and kind of, you know, it's just more expensive on a on a per unit scale. >> That's right. >> Okay. Got it. The transmission project cancellations. Again I just want to unpack that a little bit. So ercot is essentially telling us that we need those transmission lines up and working because we don't have [9:42:29 AM] enough local generation capacity in our service area. >> That's correct. Especially during outage season. If there are other utilities that are taking transmission outages to do work, it's a very compressed time of year. It feels like it gets shorter and shorter every year when you have hot weather going later and you got to get ready for the winter months. So when you're in outage season, there's transmission work going on all across the ercot grid. And so it's it's challenging when you don't have enough local generation to be able to meet all of the contingencies that you need to meet. And you're exactly right that if if you are taking those transmission lines out, you need to make sure you can produce that power locally. >> And so was this a more of a unique set of circumstances where maybe neighboring transmission lines were also kind of undergoing or is this, in other words, will we be facing this challenge kind of, you know, year after year after year? Because, again, as some of the the speakers mentioned, we do have to increase [9:43:30 AM] transmission capacity. But again, we have to maybe again pause the transmission activities to increase. How do we get out of that that that kind of loop. >> Yeah, we're we're figuring out how we can solve for that. And I think a lot of it is just putting our projects in far earlier than we've ever had to before. Because if you have these other transmission projects, if we're trying to get our transmission work and our transmission maintenance outage in earlier looking years out, perhaps we can do the work that we need. So the team is kind of recalibrating how we're going to be able to solve for this, this this challenge. >> Great. And I also just wanted to congratulate on the increased demand response. I mean, those are those are great numbers. I know that that from actually from the flier that is included in the in in the bill, the residential. You do get the credit. I want to say it's like $100 credit the first year and $25.25. [9:44:30 AM] >> As you keep going. >> Yeah. As you keep going. And I'm very glad to see the, the, the uptake of the of the residential offer, the what is what's the structure of the commercial demand response offer. Is there a standard structure or how do we operate on the on the commercial side? Is there a similar incentive? >> I, I don't know the details. We can we can get that to you. I'd have to lean on the team to tell me exactly how that program works. And it's different. And that different types of commercial sectors or different levels. So we can get you that information. >> Thank you. And then finally, how's it looking for this weekend? I know everybody's talking about a blast of of of cold air and, and possibly ice and whatnot. How are you feeling. >> So we will keep an eye on the the ercot forecasts and the weather forecasts. We are still seeing a decent chance of winter precipitation. The forecast so far aren't for [9:45:31 AM] anything like 2021 or 23. But again, we get our equipment ready, our teams are ready, we staff up, we have additional crews on, you know, on standby and on call. And we'll be ready to respond if, if we need if there are any impacts, whether, you know, weather related or ercot grid related will be ready and we'll keep the council and the public informed along the way. >> Great. Well, I was happy to see, I think in the 20s, but not in, you know, super, which is super cold for me, honestly. >> But it's typically when the cold combines with precipitation and we are seeing a chance of that. And that can be what creates the the greater impacts. But again, so far a lot can move between now and and Friday night. And so we'll we'll just keep an eye on it. But so far the predictions aren't for the worst case scenario. >> Well thank you very much general manager Riley. And if there's no further questions we'll go ahead and call up item three, the staff briefing on the resource generation and [9:46:31 AM] climate protection plan two 2035 by deputy general manager and chief operating officer Lisa martin. Miss Morton, thank you for being here. >> Thank you for having me. Good morning. Chair, vice chair, Siegel and committee members. I am Lisa martin, Austin energy's chief operating officer. And today I have the semiannual update on the resource generation and climate protection plan to 2035. Excuse me. We are committed to transparency with with regular updates on aspects of the 2035 plan. And specifically, the plan says that annually will provide an update on the progress we've made, the changes we're seeing and the actions needed to continue forward. And as part of that update, we'll also have the semiannual updates on the progress to key goals. And that's where we're going to start today. Starting with the overarching goal in the plan, which is achieving 100% carbon free generation as a percentage of load by 2035. You can see [9:47:33 AM] the historical data here. And we are currently sitting at 65%. The team and I are very happy to see this number stabilizing compared to the drop that we've seen in recent years, which of course, as we've discussed, is due to multiple factors like curtailments and congestion. This goal is always at the top of our mind, and we measure everything we do in terms of how it's going to impact this goal. That last slide was carbon free as a percentage of load. But the question is always how? Also how do we measure in terms of overall stack emissions. So 2025 preliminary data shows we've made tremendous progress over the years. And we continue to be at record lows, as shown by the green graphs on the left. More of that on the next slide. We also have some new guardrails adopted in the 2035 plan. One is carbon intensity, which is shown on the right hand side, and it's measured in pounds of carbon per megawatt hour of energy generated. Knowing that this can fluctuate [9:48:34 AM] for various reasons, we set the guardrail as the three year average from 2021 to 2023, which was the three years prior to the plan being adopted. Seeing that our results are below the guardrail across all of our generation, which is the graph in the top right, means the energy that we generate continues to come from a majority of carbon free resources. And then when narrowing into just local generation, which is the bottom right, there's a slight uptick in the intensity this past year. So I asked our teams to dig into the data, and it appears this is related to a few factors. In part, it was a mild weather year resulting in lower loads. And in turn, our local resources generated less in 2025 than they did in 2024. But we had outages with the sand hill combined cycle, which required us to rely more on the peakers than we would than we did in 2024. And so this metric is a ratio, and the math works out such that the overall metric goes up. Given the circumstances of 2025. This is partly why we're interested in having more efficient speakers [9:49:35 AM] in our portfolio, since we're operating at a deficit of local generation options, and more efficient options would help us reduce our carbon intensity. This slide shows the 20 year history of stack emissions from a peak near six to today's value of under 2.5. That's a very significant 60% reduction drop. And then wrapping up this section, I have a summary of each of the customer energy solutions goals. The wheel charts show our progress towards our near-term 2027 or 2030 goals, and you can see how much the team is doing despite growing challenges in each of these areas, the 2035 plan prioritizes customer energy solutions, and these results show how we're staying true to our commitments and our community's needs. And there are more detailed slides for each of these in the backup for reference. And I'll just pause here and say to councilmember duchin's question, the local solar goal for 2027 is 205mw, and in 2035 it's 405mw. And [9:50:36 AM] that detail is in the backup as well. All right. So I'm going to shift gears a bit. Still talk about progress we've made. But I want to share some of our key implementation wins. I have these broken out on four different slides. And based on the four major key actions in the 2035 plan. And although there's a lot of information on each slide, I'm going to hit the highlights and leave the rest for you to review at your leisure. So first of all, we prioritize customer energy solutions. And fiscal year 25 was a record high for new local solar, with 18mw of installed capacity. Our energy efficiency efforts accounted for an additional 24mw of savings. And as you know, the city adopted the 2024 international energy conservation code, and we streamlined the customer solar interconnection experience, especially considering the expiring residential tax credits at the end of last year. A lot of work done on the focus of customer energy solutions. [9:51:37 AM] The second key action is to develop local solutions. And these two start with customer side solutions. If all city facilities are able to participate in demand response event when it's called, that's an additional 6.4mw. We can shave off the peak load and the solar on city facilities. Rfq is out and and active right now. We signed a big 20 year battery storage contract for a 100 megawatt four hour system, with a second contract under negotiation. We completed the feasibility phase for Peaker evaluation, and we launched the all resource rfp, all to help provide for continued local needs. Our third key action is to continue our commitment to decarbonization. We renewed a 165 megawatt wind ppa and launched a new rfp to try to capture shovel ready projects before federal tax credits expire. And as we've already seen, total stack emissions continue to be at a record low. [9:52:40 AM] In the fourth and final key action is to further our culture of innovation. Since plan adoption, we strengthened our r&d partnerships and and attended a facility engagement with researchers and manufacturers, specifically in the advanced nuclear area. Solar standard offer launched its first commercial project for 370kw, and we revived the geothermal pilot. After several regulatory and financial uncertainties. There is a lot to be proud of on these last few slides and together we are making a real difference. These slides show much how much work has been going on, and we're delivering on so many commitments to make it happen. All of this is especially important in light of the ever evolving energy landscape. And over the past year, we've seen a lot of changes. This second section of the update describes those changes in several ways. And first, let's check in on our key risks. The 2035 plan highlights eight key risks, which you see shown here, and [9:53:41 AM] we took some time as a team to assess each one. The outcome is summarized here. And the main takeaway is that every key risk in the 2035 plan has either increased or remained steady. Said another way, there's really not any extra room to breathe here. We also asked ourselves what key risks have emerged or sharpened since the 2035 plan adoption, and we have three notable risks to add. First, federal level policies have drastically changed this year, with renewable tax credits expiring and federal grants being withdrawn, and this uncertainty complicates long term planning and infrastructure decisions, to say the least. Second, large customer loads are on the scene now more than ever, which creates some uncertainty and demand forecasting. They raise the risk of stranded investments and system volatility, and they are also raising the expectations for rapid service delivery, adding yet another priority to the already heavy workload. Third, an increase in legislative [9:54:42 AM] requirements on items like pole inspections and wildfire plans have impacts as well. And so we'll add these three risks to our register. As you know, we're actively taking action to mitigate these risks in particular and will continue to monitor them as we implement the 2035 plan. One last observation in terms of the changes we're seeing, we also did a check in on our technology readiness assessment that shows where things are with various technologies. The resource generation plan calls for an all of the tools in the toolbox approach to generation resources, with a priority on clean energy and continuing a culture of innovation. So Austin energy is continuously assessing technology updates that could help us reach our 2035 goals. So now I'm going to shift gears to, for the last time, to the actions needed section of the presentation. Given our progress and the changes we're seeing, these are the steps we're taking to meet [9:55:42 AM] our community's values of reliability, affordability, and environmental sustainability. Our implementation priorities for 2026 are shown here in the first two columns, with the last column showing the long term beyond goals. We have an updated demand response program for batteries that's coming out soon, and there's much work to do on all of the rfps we have active. We're also hoping to break ground on the geothermal generation pilot very soon. By mid-year, we'll be working on making strides to submit some key transmission projects to ercot for approvals and looking at enhancements for existing generation, including bidding into ercot blackstart rfp. We're also working on the predevelopment phase for a number of utility scale generation opportunities. When it comes to utility scale resources. This is better illustrated on this slide, which shows the four phase approach to implementing that type of generation as set out [9:56:42 AM] in the 2035 plan. I'm going to read this slide from right to left, which is the closest to commercial operation. And to put the process into perspective, our geothermal pilot and the first battery storage project are in the development phase. That's the administrative and legal phase. That's prior to construction. The second battery storage project is under negotiation and will seek council approval in the coming months. That's the predevelopment phase. And at the very beginning of predevelopment, we have the local local, excuse me, the local landfill solar project, the ercot wind rfp, as well as the all resource rfp and due diligence on more efficient speakers. In this phase, we refine what we know from our feasibility work, and we narrow options to develop a recommendation for council. This is also the phase where community engagement ramps up again. Shown yet another way, this time in terms of a timeline. This slide summarizes the major upcoming milestones [9:57:43 AM] regarding utility scale generation. Let's start with the all resource rfp, which is shown here in green. Proposals are due in late January, and we anticipate analysis will take 2 to 3 months. Once we develop a shortlist, our teams will pre-position contracts to bring viable recommendations to council for approval. We anticipate the earliest date for that will be a council date in may. In the meantime, we'll continue doing our pre-development work on all the other efforts noted on the previous slide. And so now I'm talking about the work in blue. We are planning community engagement for February, March and April, and we'll bring you recommendations on all of these projects as they become viable with batteries, solar landfill and wind ppas more likely to come throughout the spring. We don't anticipate any recommendation on speakers coming forward until we have the full results of the all rfp. And so as you can see, we have a very busy year ahead of us and lots of challenges and opportunities to navigate. Fortunately, the 2035 plan was [9:58:44 AM] written with flexibility in mind. And so, chair vela, that concludes my semiannual report for generation plan implementation, and I'll take any questions that you may have. >> Thank you very much, miss martin. Any questions? Councilmember harper-madison. >> Thank you, chair. I'll keep it brief. Just a couple questions. This was a really awesome presentation. Thank you guys. It answered some of the questions that I had extended beyond our our private meeting. The one question that just came to mind as you were closing your presentation was around the geothermal generation pilot. You know, I'm excited. I'm just curious. So what next? You know, let's say best case scenario, our pilot goes splendidly. What next? You know, just sort of what's what are the possibilities at the earliest possible next level stages. >> Yeah. So essentially the pilot gives us an opportunity to see if geothermal of this [9:59:46 AM] type is viable in Texas. And we'll start with the smaller quantities. It's 9.9mw project, and it had a number of challenges along the way. It ended up having to move to south Texas, and we we're hopeful that that it will show positive results. And if so, then the question is, is how does that build into economies of scale, larger opportunities for projects that, you know around various parts of Texas to ultimately bring carbon free, dispatchable generation to our load zone? >> So thank you. I appreciate that, and it's really exciting to see that, you know, we're really taking a robust opportunity to consider all the tools that are in that suite of options, and I'm excited to see us be innovative in the way that we are. I think it does require the political will to be bold and and be innovative, and I really appreciate that. Our electric utility is, you [10:00:47 AM] know, willing to to go outside of the status quo and provide the best level of care for our customers, but subsequently make certain that we're being pragmatic about the approach of the expenditure of very finite resources. And then the other question I had had to do with. So I'm just thinking through and you have to forgive me for doing this, but because I represent a district that historically has been disinvested, the future means reconciliation is we're retrofitting a quadrant of the city, frankly, in a major metropolitan city, but at a disadvantage of about 50 years. And so trying to play catch up always makes, I think, the representative for that district be thinking about how can we make certain that any application of the generation of revenue is equitably applied to the city and the various districts? And so then when we're talking, I'm super excited. You guys got my brain buzzing about the about the [10:01:51 AM] solar standard offer program. I'm like, we got a lot of roofs and a lot of empty land in district one. If the generation of revenue helps to advance any desire to see some comprehensive, you know, redevelopment development in general, you know, community revitalization effort, if d1 is able to independently produce enough revenue to sort of do what, let's say, a bond would do in lieu of. So that kind of thinking got me thinking, what's the application of the generation of revenue? Let's say our collective ten districts raises $300 million. Do we equitably or not equitably because they're not the same? Do we evenly separate the dollars, or is there some scale of application of the generation of those kinds of dollars to where more goes to areas that need it more? >> Are you specifically talking about for the solar standard. >> Very specifically? >> Okay. So the solar standard [10:02:52 AM] offer program is intended to generate the appropriate amount of revenue to offset the avoided costs. So it's essentially intended to be cyclical and just basically pay for itself. The benefit of the solar standard offer program is that it puts solar megawatts into the community solar program, which then is distributed, if you will. It's an offering to customers who wish to have access to clean energy, even if they can't put solar on their rooftops. And there is a low income component to that. And so the program really does speak volumes for helping the community reach clean energy goals in a number of different ways. Not only does it provide access for people to host solar on the rooftops, but also, again through the community solar program to have access to additional solar megawatts. So hopefully I've answered your [10:03:52 AM] question. >> You did. That's helpful because I have I have more clarification about how the generated revenue is applied, and it sounds like it's applied unilaterally to our like, collective assets as opposed to investment. So thank you. You did answer my question okay. >> Appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thanks, chair. >> Any further council member duchen. >> Thank you. Chair. Just one question. Thank you for this presentation. And that's to demand response. And I appreciate you sharing that data. I'm looking at it right now. I'm just curious is there anything appreciate the goals that you've laid out here. Is there anything that. Council offices that we can do in terms of communication or outreach? You mentioned part of it is education that we can do to help support those goals. I know that that's something that a lot of our focus is on constituent resident [10:04:52 AM] communication. But is there something that we can do in that, in that space to reach out to or educate businesses about this opportunity as well, that we have not yet fully explored? >> I think that to reach each one of these goals, or each one of these goals, is an aggressive goal that does require members of the community to understand how everyone can do their part to reach our clean energy future. And you know, the team under Richard genesee's leadership is working harder and harder to continue to grow these programs in a number of different ways. One thing they've done recently is they've hired an M and V consultant. So that's an evaluation, measurement and evaluation consultant who helps to see are we measuring these programs in an appropriate way, and are there other ways to grow. And as that, you know, as those ideas come to fruition, as we we, you know, try to push even harder to reach these [10:05:54 AM] goals than certainly the communication opportunities. You know, through you, you and and your fellow colleagues, whether it's through your newsletters or at your town hall meetings, is is always welcome because we need as many voices as we can to help us collectively prioritize customer energy solutions and help that be a very strong foundation for our local resources. >> Okay, I'm partly asking in context of, I think, earlier slide seven, where that's the one goal that seems to be harder to achieve than the others. That's not quite as advanced as some of the other goals. So any ideas that you guys have going forward that, that. We have yet to not fully tap into would be appreciated. >> Yeah. And I can speak to that one. I you know, I think people look at these wheels and they start to say, oh, I'm really worried about the demand response. I'll tell you, I'm not as worried about the demand response, one, because we have, you know, two more, two more [10:06:54 AM] years to go to reach that goal. But also, the team recognized that when these goals were set, they were based off of some analysis that was done by nv energy insights leading into the gen plan adoption. And it is an aggressive goal. And demand response depends on people acting at the moment. You need it the most, right? There's always an opt out option in demand response. So you can have a lot of people signed up for the program, but if they decide that that day they don't want their thermostat on, it's a hot day. They want they don't want it to be, you know, raised a little bit. They can just opt out. And so that will impact this goal. And so, you know, encouraging people to, you know, just do their part is is key. But the the battery storage program that Richard and his team are. Releasing later this year should help support this demand response goal in a number of ways. >> So so part of the challenge is not just education. It's getting people to actually stay [10:07:55 AM] the course. That's true okay. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Councilmember alter. >> What is the ercot blackstart rfp? >> So. Every two or I think now it's three years ercot releases an rfp to request proposals for blackstart capable resources to essentially be contracted for for that period of time. And the ercot blackstart plan and all the transmission service providers. Blackstart plans to ultimately rebuild the grid after a complete blackout of the ercot system is based off of the the those blackstart units as a foundation. So they start they can start from nothing, start up and start to produce power, then start each blackstart resource can start a next start unit, and then slowly build back the [10:08:55 AM] transmission backbone of the grid, which then allows, once a stable backbone is there, to to build out the distribution, to serve all of our load and essentially restore power to most of the state of Texas. And so the rfp is to identify which resources are essentially the foundation of that plan. >> Are batteries eligible? >> They are not not yet. >> Okay. >> The other thing I want to mention, and I really appreciate the work here and all the information is, you know, we really have done a good job of lowering our CO2 emissions. But the reality is, until we're out of fayette, that line is just it's not going to really go down. We're talking at the margins now because of the great work y'all have done. But that's that's the elephant in the room. And until we're able to really address that, you know, we are really talking about the margin. So I appreciate the work you're doing. And hopefully we can [10:09:56 AM] find some willing partners to to find a solution there. >> Thank you, Mr. Alter. Any further questions? Brief question on page five of the of the presentation. When you know, we're seeing that the carbon dioxide stack emissions and the nitrogen oxide stack emissions are dropping from the 2021 through 2025, is that essentially? And again, I think this dovetails off of council member alter's comment. Is that essentially the reach program right there? >> This is essentially it's all of our stack emissions. So yes, the the significant decrease is partly due to reach. The decrease is also due to closing down the decker steam units in 2021 and 2022, and essentially this is the remaining generation that is necessary to essentially keep our system whole and keep our bills affordable. You know, our [10:10:57 AM] general manager is committed to producing and adding more and more renewables to our portfolio locally and across the state of Texas. And each time we do that and we can get that, that generation to our load zone, these numbers will continue to go down. And the graph on the previous slide, the percentage of carbon free as a percentage of load will continue to go up. So again, at the forefront of our mind and one of the major, major goals of our workgroups. >> No, it's a it's an impressive accomplishment. I mean, we're seeing very substantial I mean, basically 50% cuts in carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. That's a that's a tremendous goal. And I just wanted to to highlight that. And with that, we bumped Mr. Mackenzie last time. And we're not going to bump him this time. Thank you very much, miss martin. >> Thank you very much. >> I know. >> And next is item for staff [10:11:58 AM] briefing on solar leasing by Richard genesee, vice president for customer energy solutions. And Mr. Jesse the floor is yours. Thank you for the presentation. >> Good morning. Thank you. Chair and vice chair Siegel council members I'm Richard genesee, the vice president of customer energy solutions. And this morning I'm here to deliver a brief presentation on solar leasing. So I think I have the clicker here. Oh sorry. Go back one. Okay. First we'll start with what is solar leasing. So solar leasing is an agreement where residential customer can pay a monthly fee to use a solar system installed on their property. But a third party commercial company owns and maintains the equipment. And as you can see from the slide, there's basically three parties involved in solar leasing. The first being the [10:12:59 AM] residential customer that gets the benefit from 100% of the solar generation. Lease terms are typically 25 to 30 years or 20 to 25 years, with built in annual escalators. And then there's solar leasing companies. Leasing companies are able to benefit from the 30% solar tax credit and the modified accelerated cost recovery. And lastly, there are the solar installation contractors. These are the contractors that install the arrays, and they may directly lease to the customer or lease through a third party. So what are the potential what are the complications of exploring solar residential solar leasing. So solar leasing is challenging. It requires a lot of customer education and protection. Unfortunately, there are a lot of unsavory elements in the solar industry that Austin [10:14:00 AM] energy has worked for 20 years to ensure that customers are protected and customers are safe and able to pursue solar without getting taken advantage of. And this is very true in the leasing front as well. Solar leasing can introduce complications because the lease terms are typically very complicated. It's more complicated than regular solar purchases. They can cause a lien to be put on a house, which would require a new purchaser to assume the terms of the lease, or buy out the pv system before home ownership can change hands. And also, under Texas state law, Austin energy is the sole provider of retail electricity in its service territory. So unless the solar lease is written in a very specific way, it would violate state law. So that also becomes a challenge and problematic. But there are advantages. And really one of [10:15:00 AM] the reasons we're exploring solar leasing is because we are committed, as you've heard already, to doing absolutely everything that we can to expand the portfolio and to expand renewables in our service territory. So why are we exploring it now? You've heard already this morning the commercial tax credits and the solar, the residential solar tax credits have already expired. The commercial solar tax credits expire at the end of 2027, so leasing can invest, can leverage the commercial incentive tax credit and also the appreciated accelerated depreciation tax benefit. So leasing provides this alternative path to for residential customer to access solar. And lastly, as you see on the slide, we have a long history at Austin energy of supporting supporting the solar industry, which is particularly challenged with very thin margins in the Austin area [10:16:01 AM] versus other areas in which solar has been deployed, because we have lower energy costs. So lower energy costs leads to less margin for vendors. So next steps we are working with legal to review the concept and structure. You know, there are multiple leases that have been provided that we're examining and seeing that they can work, that they ensure legality and best practices. A is strategizing on the most effective program design to ensure that customers are educated and protected. When it comes to leasing, this is probably the biggest element, and caution of moving forward is that we're concerned that customers will be subject to lease agreements that are just, frankly, bad deals. And so we're working to actually set up education and standards that we can educate customers on. These are the components that [10:17:01 AM] might represent a good solar lease versus some of the bad solar leases, frankly, that we've seen out there. We are looking to pilot a program assuming one and two work out. Well, we're looking to pilot a program next month, and we are having our first community stakeholder meeting on solar leasing at the end of this month on 128 on January 28th. That concludes the presentation. I'll take any questions or comments. >> Thank you very much, mayor. >> Yeah, briefly, I want to just say thank you to Austin energy when I first when when the tax credits went away and we saw what damage that was going to do to residential solar leasing, we talked about this, and originally we felt like there was going to be a bigger problem than what we're seeing now. The industry has matured, although it's not fully mature, and we're going to play a role now in that maturation. And I just want to [10:18:02 AM] say thank you for that. And I but I really want us to to push as fast as we can. And, and, and one of the big parts of the problem members was that big problem was the concept that who's selling the energy, right? If you own the equipment that's producing the energy, because it's the solar equipment that's on somebody's house, do you run into that problem? We think we've jumped through that hoop or at least believe we can. So all I'm doing is encouraging both the decision to get us moving this fast, and then let's see if we can't move faster. I worry about how much we can do, you know, through 2027. So thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Council member harper-madison. >> Thank you, chair, I appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Because along those lines, I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking about changing of the guard or, you know, just sort of as as things change hands. And I'll tell you specifically what came to mind [10:19:02 AM] anecdotally, and you tell me whether or not this is applicable in any way, in terms of things we need to worry about avoiding. I love this idea. The solar leasing, it's, you know, conceptually, something I've thought about, but I'll admit, this is not my strength in terms of my subject matter expertise. So as a layperson, I had some iteration of this in my head already. So I'm happy to see what the professionals do when you guys, you know, take all the data and what's possible. So I was thinking about two separate instances. One, there's a dish still on my house that's probably been there since the 90s, you know what I'm saying? But nobody knows whose equipment it is and who's permitted to take it down because it can potentially cause roof damage because of the it's affixed to the, you know, so it's been like a year trying to figure out who can take that dish off of my house without me being financially responsible for any damage that may be caused by them removing the hardware, the infrastructure. Second similar scenario had to do with like a service exchange with a sub [10:20:04 AM] lease, and then the sublease turned into somebody else altogether. Took over. But just the changing of the guard. My thought is around sort of continuity. It seems to me like a family that sit there not moving for 32 years. The, you know, the challenges with them seem fewer, but, you know, just the volatility of people who move a lot. You know, just things moving around. I'm just curious to know if there's. Are we concerned about or maybe do we anticipate the piloted programs offering the opportunity for us to extract where the challenges lie with those sort of abnormalities within a system? >> In a word, yes. I mean, this is a complicated space and it's a new territory for us. And we want to move cautiously and carefully while we move aggressively to go as expediently as we can. But the last thing we want to do is support something that's going to actually cause more harm [10:21:05 AM] than good, so that that's so absolutely to answer your words, we were going to move forward as aggressively as we can, but also as cautiously as we can. >> Yeah, I can see that, you know, with the new thing is that most especially when it comes to, you know, sort of house infrastructure. I mean, you break stuff at a house, it's so expensive, you know what I mean? So thank you, I appreciate that. It's a lot to think about, but I'm really excited about the potential for the program. Glad we're starting this pilot program. Thank you chair. >> Thank you. Any further questions? Mr. Jensen, thank you very much. Appreciate the presentation and appreciate the kind of concerns and caution around the interesting and innovative new program, but obviously a tricky one too. Good luck. Thank you. And with that, we'll move on to future agenda items. And but I would say again, unless everyone has something in particular, just go ahead and touch base with with me on the dais and then [10:22:05 AM] with no further business before the committee, we will adjourn at 1022 and I'll turn it back to the mayor.