'Concerned': Mayor calls for shut down of Austin's involvement in Fayette Power Plant

AUSTIN (KXAN) — When looking at the future of Austin's energy generation, Mayor Kirk Watson says he's looking at three prongs: sustainability and climate, affordability and reliability.

Those prongs are elements Austin Energy is looking at right now as part of its 2030 Resource, Generation and Climate Protection Plan, which is slated to come back to Austin City Council next month.

But late Friday, Watson announced in a newsletter that he was "concerned" about the direction Austin Energy was heading with that plan. Namely, that he didn't feel it incorporated a hard enough approach to departing from Austin's largest greenhouse gas producer -- the Fayette Power Plant.

"I think we need to set a clear vision of a goal on when we're going to get out of this," Watson said. "And we should continue to balance those three things that I talked about, we run our issues and our questions through the prism of how do we get out of Fayette Power Plant no later than January of 2029."

Austin Energy said in a written response to KXAN Friday that it was exploring options "in light of the mayor's remarks."

The Fayette Power Plant, roughly an hour from downtown Austin, is a coal-fired power plant. It was one of the plants included in a University of Texas research project that looked at the health impacts of that kind of energy generation nationwide.

Ultimately, researchers found roughly half a million deaths tied to coal power in the United States since 1999, though those numbers have gone down dramatically -- 95% -- since 2020 because of the installation of "scrubbers" or the shutdown of plants nationwide as the nation moves to cleaner energy. Researchers looked specifically at the Medicare population.

Corwin Zigler, an associate professor of statistics and data sciences at UT, put the findings simply: "Pollution that originates specifically from a coal power plant, there's some evidence that it's particularly bad for people."

On top of the health risks, Watson claims the Fayette Power Plant is Austin's single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

"It represents three-quarters of Austin Energy's emissions and about a quarter of Austin's overall emissions," Watson wrote in his newsletter. "The plant is also a huge consumer of our limited water supply."

Watson ultimately wants Austin Energy to take another crack at its forward-looking energy generation plan, and shut down its portion of the plant by January 2029. It would mean negotiating with the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) -- which co-owns the plant.

“The Fayette Power Project is important to the reliability of the ERCOT market. As a partner in FPP, the city of Austin must meet its contractual obligations related to the plant. We value our years-long partnership and look forward to working with the city of Austin in the future and hearing any proposal the city may bring forward," a spokesperson for the LCRA said.

That spokesperson added that the LCRA plans to continue operating the plant "as long as it continues to provide reliable, cost-effective power."

Doug Lewin, an energy expert and author of the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, said unlike a decade ago, when Austin City Council members first started talking about their desire to eliminate Austin's portion of the plant, cleaner options are now starting to become cheaper than coal -- a central argument against shutting down the plant years ago.

"It really is a remarkable moment we're living in right now where solar actually is cheaper than other forms of power. As recently as four, five years ago that was not the case," said Lewin.

When it comes to replacing the power generated by the plant, Lewin pointed to a combination of wind, solar and storage.

"But there's also things like long-duration energy storage -- there's iron-air batteries, which are using the power of rust, actually, to store energy. There's geothermal, which is becoming much, much more cost competitive and not to be neglected," he said. "There's the demand side, there's doing things like energy efficiency to lower demand, and actually having demand flexibility."