Darby Riley
San Antonio’s citizens need to know that city-owned CPS Energy is quietly and with only limited public input committing our city to gas-fired power plants until at least 2050. Its leadership recently spent $785 million of our money to buy two gas power plants and are seeking to build more gas power plants. This is especially troubling because it is now understood that natural gas (which is up to 90 percent methane) is actually at least as damaging as coal because of the leaks in the processing and delivery of methane. Methane is 80 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas over a 20-year period.
The San Antonio City Council needs to take responsibility for these major policy decisions by CPS Energy, particularly since renewables and battery storage are now less expensive to develop than natural gas plants. CPS Energy presently has more capacity than it needs, so there is no urgency to develop new sources. Texas is presently the hottest market in the country (no pun intended) for utility-scale storage batteries. Enormous digitally controlled batteries now prevent power outages across Texas when demand surges.
Nationally, battery storage capacity is expected to double this year. Why are ratepayers incurring billions for natural gas plants when renewables and storage will meet future needs?
There has been comparatively little effort locally to promote the retrofitting of buildings to conserve energy.
Related: San Antonio’s Coal-to-Gas Conversion Could Bring Few—If Any—Climate Benefits
The city’s utility bond ordinances make clear that the City Council can control the CPS Board makeup, rather than continuing to allow the board to essentially appoint its own members. The ordinances also state that the CPS Board is required to follow policies set by the City Council. With climate change already causing major disruptions in residents’ health and safety (look at Houston after Hurricane Beryl) it is time for Mayor Ron Nirenberg and City Council members to exercise their powers over the utility we all own. It is not acceptable that the city allows the lives of low-income citizens to be jeopardized by unaffordable energy, especially when the City is the utility company.
One of the reasons for the City’s reluctance to act is that CPS Energy is generating huge unbudgeted sums of money during the summer months (last year: $247 million) by selling excess capacity from fossil fuel power plants to the state grid at high rates. The City takes 14 percent of CPS Energy’s gross revenue. Last summer the City Council did not know what to do with the excess being paid to it by CPS Energy. CPS Energy has become the tail that wags the dog, providing up to 30 percent of the City’s total revenue.
In the fall of 2020 volunteers from the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, Southwest Workers Union, and other organizations and unaffiliated individuals who care about our collective future gathered 14,000 signatures of 20,000 needed to place a city charter amendment petition on the ballot.
If approved by the voters, the amendment would have given the City Council more control over the utility and would have required policies to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
Those efforts were interrupted by a court order from Travis County that had been sought and obtained by CPS Energy without notice to citizens. (I represent two San Antonio residents in a suit against CPS Energy to obtain a court finding that the Travis County judgment is void; the case is presently on appeal in Austin.) Meanwhile, last year the majority running the Texas Legislature also sought to interrupt any grassroots effort to adopt so-called “climate charters” by claiming authority over what should be local decisions.
However, the City and elected state leaders cannot stop us from organizing to elect City Council representatives in 2025 who will require the City’s utility to act responsibly to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and to protect our low-income residents from a dangerously overheating climate. The City has the duty, recognized in San Antonio’s own 2019 Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, to do its part in effectively addressing the global climate crisis.
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Community Voices provides reflections and reportbacks from the frontlines of community work at the intersection of environment and justice.
