| Every now and then some good environmental news about our backyard comes along. It turns out that Austin, Texas is the number one city in America for clean technology industries according to SustainLane (“the premier online sustainability best practices knowledge base”), a recent Time Magazine article, and others.
There are a number of exciting advances in green technology happening in Austin.
Chief among them is the Pecan Street Project, the country’s largest urban ‘smart grid’ network. A smart grid allows utility companies to gain real time feedback from individual consumers across their entire network and should provide great increases in efficiency, reliability of service, and even enhanced security. Austin recently opened the largest solar farm in Texas, a 30 megawatt facility in Webberville. The Webberville Solar Project is but one step in reaching the city’s goal of getting at least 35% of its energy from renewables by 2020. Other steps in this direction include the sale of the Fayette Coal Plant, a notorious polluter. Clean tech companies like Joule Unlimited (a biofuels producer), HelioVolt (a thin film solar panel manufacturer), SolarBridge (which makes AC modules for solar panels), and many others make Austin a creative hot spot for the industry.
This great environment for the clean technology industry did not just appear out of thin air. A strong partnership between our local (city owned) utility (Austin Energy), the University of Texas’s Clean Energy Incubator (a program which provides venture capital funding and laboratory space to new businesses), Austin’s forward thinking city council, and state and federal funding sources provides the unique conditions for the clean tech sector to flourish. The Pecan Street Project, for instance, was partially funded through a large grant from the 2009 Federal Stimulus.
This year’s elections will have very real consequences for the burgeoning clean technology industry in Austin. While I’m sure Brigid Shea (a former councilwoman and Save Our Springs director) would be a stalwart environmental defender, Lee Leffingwell has some very real accomplishments he can point to. The partnership between public utility, university, private enterprise, and city council works in Austin in a way it doesn’t work anywhere else. I would be very cautious about making major changes here. |
