Austin Energy opened wind power subscriptions Monday for the city's residents as a part of the GreenChoice Program.
Batch-five customers will pay a fixed GreenChoice charge of 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for the next 15 years for the wind power generated in West Texas. Batches are defined by the time period in which customers subscribe to the program, said Carol Harwell, product development coordinator at Austin Energy.
She said customers in batches one, two, three and four are paying GreenChoice charges of up to 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour. The fuel charge for regular energy customers is 3.65 cents per kilowatt hour. Average residential customers in batch five will pay about $18.50 more per month than customers using regular energy. That average will fluctuate depending on the regular fuel charge, Harwell said.
Subscription for the wind energy program began in 2000, and it took about a year before the wind farms came online. There are 8,700 residential and 450 commercial customers in the first four batches, Harwell said. Wind farms in West Texas power Austin Energy subscribers.
"We still are only at about a little less than 3 percent of our residential customers so we're not anywhere close to where we should be in terms of numbers of subscribers," Harwell said. "It does go up every batch, as it would be expected - whenever the regular fuel charge goes up and the premium between the two gets smaller, then we do have more people signing up."
Harwell said that in signing up for the GreenChoice program, Austin residents would be helping to lower air pollution in the community, reducing their own carbon footprint, supporting the renewable energy industry in Texas and locking in their fuel cost for 15 years.
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