The following is a transcript of the Dec. 2, 2024, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA’s news director.
Our guests on this episode are Austin Energy’s Chief Operating Officer Lisa Martin and Mike Enger, Austin Energy’s Vice President for Energy Markets and Resource Planning.
Lisa and Mike are here to discuss the Texas public power utility’s resource planning efforts and recent news involving Austin Energy and geothermal energy. Lisa and Mike, thanks for joining us.
Mike, I wanted to start the conversation with you and focus on the recent geothermal energy news.
As you know, Austin Energy recently announced that it is partnering with Exceed Geo Energy to pilot a first-of-its-kind advanced geothermal project near its Nacogdoches biomass-generating facility. Can you provide additional details on this project? Also, what are the benefits of geothermal energy as a generation resource?
Mike Enger
It is a five-megawatt advanced geothermal power project that will be a little bit different than some traditional geothermal in which we will be utilizing supercritical CO2 instead of water and then pushing that CO2 through a turbine to generate electricity. I think one of the benefits of geothermal energy is it's a carbon free generation resource, but is not as dependent on the weather as wind and solar are, and so we won't have that same solar ramp down that ERCOT is seeing and we won't be depending on whether the wind will show up or not for that generation. So it will fit very nicely into our existing renewable portfolio to add and further diversify our renewable energy portfolio and our carbon free energy portfolio.
Paul Ciampoli
This question may be a little on the early side of things, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on whether if the project proves to be a success, would Austin Energy consider pursuing additional geothermal energy projects?
Mike Enger
Yes, that is part of the intent of this pilot project. The developer originally was looking to do a little bit of a larger project and I think we wanted to scale back a little bit. Look at this as a pilot. I think anytime you're doing something for the first time, there will be some unforeseen or some unknown challenges. So we'd like to understand and identify those challenges, see if we can safely and economically overcome those challenges and if we are able to, we would like to scale this up to a much, much larger size, maybe 200 to 400 MW.
Paul Ciampoli
Mike, I just thought of something off the top of my head. With respect to Texas specifically, any sense as far as the state’s geothermal resources overall?
Mike Enger
So with this advanced technology, we're using super critical CO2 and not being necessarily dependent on being able to find a good water source as well. I think it can be deployed throughout the state. I would say that the southern part of the state of Texas as well as the eastern part of the state of Texas -- the level that you have to drill down or the depth is a little bit more shallow and so that's why we're focusing over there in East Texas to start.
If you wanted to deploy it somewhere else in Texas like more near the Austin area, you would just have to go significantly deeper. But one of the other great things about this project and the company that we're piloting this with is they were kind of born out of the drilling for the oil and gas industry and so they have a lot of experience here in Texas drilling the similar wells that we'll be doing for the geothermal and this is a great way to transfer some of those oil and gas jobs over into that new clean energy economy as well.
Paul Ciampoli
Lisa, I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about the utility’s year-long effort to update its Resource, Generation and Climate Plan to 2035. Specifically, can you detail stakeholder involvement, as well as the modeling and analysis to predict and project the utility's reliability, affordability and sustainability needs for the next decade?
Lisa Martin
Sure, Paul. Thanks for having me. Austin Energy’s long been a leader on the path to carbon free and what Mike was just talking about is just one example of the forward thinking work that we do here at Austin Energy. We have progressively had more advanced carbon free goals...they started with renewable energy goals. Over 20 years ago, we started having our initial goals and they've gotten more and more advanced every time we update the resource generation and climate protection plan. So now we're doing the update to 2035 and...a lot of the energy landscape has changed since the previous plan was adopted back in March of 2020. And so we need to create a plan that's going to meet Austin's rising energy needs and enable an equitable clean energy transition while reflecting our community’s values of reliability, affordability and environmental sustainability.
And of course, as you look at all the different types of approaches to address all of those needs, there are trade-offs associated with all of them. So what we did was we embarked on a very extensive process with community stakeholders. We had over 40 different organizations representing thousands of Austinites and the surrounding communities come together to learn about what Austin Energy does when it comes to deciding how to move forward with energy needs, what kind of problems are we facing and talk to them about their stories about how they value reliability, affordability and environmental sustainability, and how do they they consider those in terms of priority?
We've heard from our community that reliability is a top priority. They also very much care about affordability and environmental sustainability. So we're really trying to figure out what's the right approach. What are the right sets of tools to put in our toolbox so that we can provide the best set of outcomes to meet our clean energy goals for 2035?
Paul Ciampoli
Lisa, you mentioned the changing energy landscape and so that's a nice segue to my other question for you, which is to have you comment on whether you think integrated resource planning has become more of a challenge in recent years and if so, why?
Lisa Martin
I think there's been a lot of global trends that have been driving changes in resource planning. And certainly we've seen a lot of rapid changes in technology and shifting costs, extreme load growth in various ways, make the forecast incredibly important and dynamic. Also, constant understanding about as you mentioned the integrated nature of this, the generation and the wire side....and frankly the demand side, they all come to play together and you have to think about how you can affect all sides of the equation. As a vertically integrated utility, Austin Energy is pretty uniquely situated here in the deregulated Texas market to be able to work on all sides of those equations.
So we take that into consideration as we work forward. Certainly there's continued evolving state and federal policies that we have to take into consideration. And as we just talked about great stakeholder awareness and a need to have an inclusive set of voices help inform the plan, and so taking all of that together, integrated resource planning becomes very important.
Paul Ciampoli
Lisa, Mike, thanks so much for taking the time of your day to to speak with us and I would love to have you guys back, perhaps even on separate episodes where we could revisit the geothermal project and obviously resource planning is going to be an ongoing project for the utility. So I just wanted to throw that out there as an option going forward.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, graphic and digital designer at APPA. I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
