An Austin Energy crew clears fallen branches from power lines and repairs cables in South Austin in 2023.
“Because we are community-owned, the community has a voice in how we do our business,” Lisa Martin, chief operations officer with Austin Energy, said.In a lot of other Texas cities, there is no single electric utility — let alone a public one. “Austin Energy is unique in that it is vertically integrated,” Martin said. “We are basically end-to-end providers.”
“The climate is changing faster than we can adapt to it, and we need to slow that down,” she said on a recent spring morning at the group’s state office in downtown Austin. That includes dropping its stake in a coal plant it had planned to divest from a years ago. It's had trouble breaking its contract with the plant’s co-owner, the Lower Colorado River Authority.“I think where there comes some tension is just how fast we can move into certain technologies," White said,"and how quickly we can retire certain types of generation, whether we can leave the whole concept of burning things to produce electricity behind us.