How
Georgetown’s GOP mayor became a hero to climate change evangelists
Dale Ross, the mayor of Georgetown, is the subject of an
interview conducted by ARD German television. Under Ross, Georgetown became the
first city in Texas and one of the first in the nation to claim to be entirely
powered by wind and solar energy, a move that has garnered interest from around
the world. Claudia Buckenmaier, senior ARD correspondent and her crew
interviews Ross. RALPH BARRERA / AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Posted: 3:58 p.m. Saturday, October 21, 2017
Highlights
Dale Ross presided over Georgetown as it became the first Texas
city powered entirely by renewable energy.
Ross, a Republican, has become a hero to environmentalists thanks
in part to Al Gore.
Ross will be introducing Gore at the GridNEXT 2017 Conference in
Georgetown on Monday.
GEORGETOWN —
In the 14 months since Al Gore came to Georgetown to see for
himself the story of this red Texas city’s conversion to solar and wind power,
Mayor Dale Ross has become something of an international sensation.
On Tuesday, journalists from “Weltspiegel,” a popular German
foreign affairs TV program, were interviewing Ross, the latest reporters to
have trekked to this charming city of 65,000, the first and still only Texas
city to operate entirely on renewable energy.
On Monday, Ross, a conservative Republican, will be introducing
Gore, the former Democratic vice president and climate change guru, who will be
the keynote speaker at the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Alliance’s third
annual GridNEXT conference being held in Georgetown, 30 miles north of Austin,
for the second consecutive year.
Ross is just back from an appearance with Gore at the National
Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas (a “Weltspiegel” crew was there to record it),
and a screening in San Francisco of a new documentary — “Happening: A Clean
Energy Revolution” — directed by Robert Redford’s son, Jamie Redford, that will
air on HBO in December.
In “Happening,” Ross reprises his uplifting role as himself that
he already played in Gore’s “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” which was
released in July, and the anti-coal documentary, “From the Ashes,” which
premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and the National Geographic Channel
earlier this year.
“Being in three movies this year, especially Vice President Gore’s
`Inconvenient Sequel,’ that has just taken it to a new level internationally,”
Ross said. “It slowly built up, and now it’s just this big media machine, doing
interviews in South America, Beijing, Japan, England.”
Ross estimates he has reached more than half a billion viewers on
five continents.
“How many viewers do y’all have?” Ross asks Claudia Buckenmaier,
the Washington correspondent for ARD German TV and radio, playing the part of
the jaded celebrity. “Only a million?”
“You know how many Japan’s going to have? Thirty-seven million,”
Ross says of the reach of NHK, Japan’s largest broadcaster, which will be
paying Georgetown a visit on Monday.
“Two million,” Buckenmaier says of “Weltspiegel’s” viewership.
“Two million’s a lot.”
“You set this up for 2 million?” Ross asks. “Really?”
By now, Ross knows his part well.
He is just what the environmental movement needs, straight from against-type
central casting — a Texas Republican CPA with a blue suit and a comic
likability.
“You look very, very good,” Buckenmaier assures him as the camera
is ready to roll.
“Oh, yeah,” Ross replies. “Short and fat is in.”
“Mayor,” Buckenmaier, “why did you take the position to rely on
renewable energy?”
“This is a fact-based decision we made in Georgetown, and first
and foremost it was an economic decision, and what we were able to accomplish
was to meet two objectives,” Ross says.
“The first objective was to mitigate price volatility in the short
term, and the second thing was to minimize or mitigate regulatory or
governmental risk, and so we were negotiating with wind and solar companies,
and natural gas,” he says. “We were able to secure 20- and 25-year contracts
with wind and solar, and the natural gas providers would only give us a
guaranteed contract rate for seven years.”
“Now this is the deal, we are paying the same amount per kilowatt
hour in year one than we are in year 25 with no cost escalation, so that meets
the objective of cost certainty,” Ross says. “And then in terms of regulatory
risk — the knuckleheads in D.C. — what’s there to regulate with wind and solar?
It’s clean energy. So this as the perfect solution for the citizens we were
elected to serve.”
So what, Buckenmaier asks, did he think of President Donald Trump
taking the United States out of the Paris climate agreement?
“You know, I did go to Trump’s inauguration,” Ross said.
But, he said, “President Trump and I do not agree on environmental
issues.”
“It was a huge mistake to withdraw from the Paris climate accords,
although it really doesn’t take effect until after Trump is out of office,”
Ross says, assuming Trump will not be re-elected. “And we also don’t agree on
coal energy. There is no such thing as clean coal, and there is no future for
coal miners. It’s a very cost-prohibitive energy source, and wind and solar is
cost-effective, and in the long term, wind and solar are going to win the
economic battle. If you win the economic battle, you are going to win the
environmental battle.”
“Is this not putting you at risk with your Republican Party?”
Buckenmaier asks.
“No,” Ross replies, “because what I do, I make decisions based on
facts, and this was the best decision for the people who we were elected to
serve in Georgetown because, unlike the president, in Georgetown, we want to
make our decisions based on the facts.”
Trump, he says, “bases his, especially on the environment … on partisan
national politics.”
“I think the lesson in Georgetown is to make decisions on the
facts and not partisan politics, and you end up with great decisions,” he says.
But cozying up to Al Gore?
“My tea party friends are not so sure about me anymore and this is
what I tell them,” Ross says. “Al Gore has done more in one day to make the
world a better place than you have probably done in your whole life.”
“What reasonable person can’t weigh the evidence and come to the
conclusion that climate change is real and it’s happening. When you say, `No,
it’s not.’ Really? Well what are you basing that on? You think Irma and Harvey
were just coincidences? Really?” Ross continues.
“Remember in Gore’s first movie, they ridiculed him so bad about
(predicting) New York being flooded. What happened (with Hurricane Sandy)? New
York got flooded, right? You have fish swimming in the streets of Miami,” Ross
says. “You think all of that is coincidences? I don’t believe in coincidences.
I really don’t.”
Plank 39 of the 2016 Texas Republican Party Platform is devoted to
“Protections from Extreme Environmentalists.” It reads, in part, “`Climate
Change’ is a political agenda promoted to control every aspect of our lives. We
support the defunding of `climate justice’ initiatives and the abolition of the
Environmental Protection Agency and repeal of the Endangered Species Act.”
But Bill Fairbrother, the Williamson County GOP chairman, said,
“Contrary to the popular myth in some places, Republicans are all for clean,
breathable air. We just don’t want the federal government overregulating and
forcing needless bureaucracy on business and local governments, and if
Georgetown has found a solution that meets the needs of its citizens in a
fiscally responsible manner that just happens to be green, or whatever term you
want to apply to it, I’d like to think that Republican elected officials are
smart enough to find the answer wherever it is.”
“Mayor Ross is a CPA,” Fairbrother added. “I doubt he’d do
anything that doesn’t make financial sense, and the fact that is pleasing to as
diverse an audience as the former vice president is interesting, but fine with
me.”
Ross was elected to a second term as mayor in May with 72 percent
of the vote. In November, Trump carried all but three Georgetown precincts.
‘You really haven’t done anything’
In “Inconvenient Sequel,” Ross is seen telling a delighted Gore in
his August 2016 visit to City Hall, “You are in Georgetown, which is the
reddest city in the reddest county in Texas, and I’m a conservative
Republican.” That part about Georgetown and Williamson County being the
“reddest” is, inconveniently, not true.
“I was trying to make a point,” Ross said. “I’m telling him we’re
bright red.”
Ross, a big-picture guy, doesn’t sweat the details.
“I like Chris being around because some interviewers like all the
technical questions and my eyes just glaze over,” Ross tells the German crew.
Chris is Chris Foster, the city’s manager of resource planning and
integration, who has been working with Georgetown’s municipal utility since
2008.
While Ross was on camera for “Weltspiegel,” Foster was offering a
reporter a sotto voce tutorial on how Georgetown’s municipal utility fits into
the Texas grid. There are three electrical grids in the Lower 48 — the Eastern
Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas grid, which is
managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
“So the coal plants historically in order to run cheaply, they had
to run 24-7, all the time,” Foster says. But, as the city was searching for new
energy sources years ago, its officials noticed that the shape of the wind
supply from the Panhandle and the solar supply from West Texas actually matched
the profile of energy use in Central Texas.
“So we said, if we started to put them together, we would have an
energy profile that’s better for the city, and it’s cheaper to operate than the
coal plants, and eventually it will cause the coal plants to go off line
because they won’t be able to compete,” Foster says.
Luminant just announced the closing of three coal plants in Texas,
and it is projected that wind capacity will soon exceed coal capacity on the
Texas grid.
“They can’t compete with renewables,” says Foster. “Yeah, we told
you that was going to happen.”
Not everyone thinks that is good.
“It’s not kind of misleading, it’s very misleading, and it is for
political gain,” Charles McConnell, executive director of the Energy and
Environment Initiative at Rice University, said of Georgetown’s claim that it’s
using 100 percent renewable energy. “It’s almost like you can’t wait to pat
yourself on the back for something that you’ve done, and you really haven’t
done anything.”
“Renewables and the drive toward renewables in our portfolio is a
worthy effort,” McConnell said, “but declarations like this give people false
belief that 100 percent renewables is a realistic target for other cities and
other organizations to pursue, because if they can do it, why can’t we?”
McConnell, an assistant secretary of energy from 2011-13, worries
that the zeal for renewable energy, buttressed by federal tax credits, is
hurrying the grid to an unhealthy reliance on less than 24-7 renewable energy
sources, leading to brownouts and higher costs in the long run.
Like Trump and Energy Secretary Rick Perry (who as governor played
an instrumental role in the development of wind power, transmission lines and
the grid), McConnell believes coal is essential to America’s energy future.
“Coal is the bedrock of affordable electricity, and it will remain
so, no matter how much wishful thinking by environmental activists,” McConnell
wrote in an August opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. “City Pledges for
`100% Renewable’ are 99% Misleading: The power grid is built on fossil fuels,
and there’s no way to designate certain electrons as guilt free.”
But Fred Beach, assistant director for energy and technology
policy at the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, believes McConnell
is wrong on all counts.
“Advances in technology and market drivers are combining to push
coal out of the market, inevitably and permanently,” he said.
Beach said the Texas grid can handle a large increase in renewable
energy, “because we built a vast fleet of peaking power plants 10 to 15 years
ago to accommodate our high demand in the summer.”
“If everyone tried to do what Georgetown did tomorrow, the grid
would have predictability problems,” Beach said, but that’s not going to
happen, and in the meantime, the cost of utility batteries that can store
electricity from any source are dropping.
Beach also noted that the federal production tax credit for wind
generation is being phased out in 2020 — unlike breaks for fossil fuels —
having launched a thriving industry that no longer needs it.
As for McConnell’s first assertion, that Georgetown isn’t really
powered 100 percent by renewable energy, Beach said that it is technically true
that, unless Georgetown were to get off the grid, the energy it receives is a
fungible mix from all sources, but that’s not the point.
“Nobody knows where their electrons actually come from, not that
it really matters,” said Beach, who lives in Georgetown. “It just meant on an
annual basis we were procuring enough wind energy that we could say we’re being
covered on a net basis.”
In 2015, Georgetown contracted with Spinning Spur 3, a wind
project 50 miles west of Amarillo, for wind power, and with the NRG solar farm
under construction near Fort Stockton. The solar farm will begin providing power
next summer and account for 40 percent of Georgetown’s energy.
On days its supply falls short, Georgetown can buy energy. On days
it has more than is needed, it can sell the excess.
If Georgetown had not bought wind power, Foster said, “Spinning
Spur 3 would not exist today, and in its place Georgetown would have gas
contracts. The entire state portfolio would have less renewables, and more
fossil fuels. Georgetown pays for, and thereby deserves, full credit for the
renewables it caused to be built in the market.”
Foster also doesn’t feel guilty about Georgetown raising
expectations for renewable power.
“You know what will happen if you set the expectation that you
will reach Mars by 2025, right?” Foster said. “Well, you might not get to Mars,
but you will significantly advance your capability of traveling throughout the
solar system.”
‘People do want renewables’
Georgetown didn’t set out to meet some kind of renewable energy
goal, it just happened, Beach said.
“This was never the intention,” he said. “This was never, `Hey, we
want to be 100 percent renewable by a certain date.’”
“It’s true that Georgetown is a very Republican, very conservative
town, and yet, inadvertently, we backed into this situation where now, truly,
100 percent of our electricity on an annual basis comes from renewables,
primarily for economic reasons,” Beach said.
“I was on the utility board from 2008 to 2012-13, when we actually
did all the work that made this possible,” Beach said.
Georgetown had been getting its power through the Lower Colorado
River Authority.
“With LCRA we had no control over the mix whatsoever, and didn’t
care to,” Beach said. “It was 75 to 80 percent coal with a natural gas fill.”
But Georgetown, one of the fastest-growing cities of its size in
the country, was loath to renew with LCRA.
“We felt the combination of committing long-term to LCRA, which
was doubling down on coal, and the first term of Obama, when he was seriously
talking about a carbon tax, did not bode well for electricity prices if we
committed to LCRA,” he said.
Meanwhile, Beach said, “the renewables just kept getting more and
more cost attractive. We were being offered contracts, at extremely competitive
prices, that were locked in for 20 years with zero volatility.” Georgetown
entered into its first wind contract to satisfy Southwestern University, one of
its biggest customers, which wanted to operate exclusively on wind power.
“Can other cities in Texas do what Georgetown has done? The answer
is `yes,’” Beach said. “Can everybody in Texas do what Georgetown has done? The
answer is, ‘hell no.’”
“You can’t really have 100 percent of anything without having
problems, but to say there’s a limit or some theoretical limit on how much
renewable energy you can have in the grid is not true,” Beach said.
“Originally people said if you hit 10 percent renewables, the grid
will crash. We hit 10 percent. It didn’t. ‘Well, if it’s 20 percent renewables
the grid will crash.’ We hit 20 percent. ‘If you hit 30 percent, the grid will
crash.’ We hit 30 percent,” Beach said. “We’ve had days here in Texas when wind
was 50 percent of the grid and it didn’t crash.”
Altogether, in 2016, about 44 percent of energy used on the grid
was natural gas, 29 percent was coal, 15 percent was wind, 2 percent was
nuclear, and a fraction of a percent was solar, according to Electric
Reliability Council of Texas.
“What Georgetown has done for whatever reason has had some impact
in that it has sent a market signal,” Beach said. “It has sent a signal to the
utility market, at least in Texas, that people do want renewables, for whatever
reasons, whether it’s the price reason or environmentalist reasons, and in
Texas it’s primary for the price reason – cost.”
Perhaps, but of such dollars and cents, environmental heroes are
made, and, as he prepared for Tuesday’s interview with the German news crew at
the former post office that is now City Hall, Ross made a request of
Buckenmaier, his interviewer, standing on the opposite side of a counter over
which clerks once sold stamps.
“Can you take one step back?” Ross asked Buckenmaier.
“Ja,” she said, German for “yes,” without budging.
“That way,” said Ross, waving her away from him.
“Ja,” said Buckenmaier, not sure what Ross was up to, and still
not budging.
“Now,” Ross insisted.
“Ja,” said Buckenmaier, stepping away from the counter. “Are you
going to jump over?”
Everyone laughed, but Ross finally had Buckenmaier right where he
wanted her.
“You’re standing in the exact space that Vice President Al Gore
stood in when he came to visit,” Ross said. “Are you feeling the Gore aura?”
Only 4700 voted in the last election and Ross carried it with a single and consistent voting bloc out of Sun City. Stop aggrandising his imaginary mandate.
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