CPS Energy’s energy efficiency program has helped the utility save 216 megawatts of energy over the last two years — enough electricity to power 54,000 Texas homes on a hot summer’s day — staff told the utility’s board Monday.
It’s been two years since CPS Energy’s board of trustees approved extending the utility’s energy efficiency program for another five years, which at that time had already helped the municipally owned utility save about 1,000 megawatts in demand since it began in 2009. The program has been extended three times by the City of San Antonio since its inception.
Formerly, the STEP program aimed to reduce local energy demand by helping residents weatherize their homes, buy into the utility’s thermostat energy demand response program, and offer subsidies to residents purchasing solar panels for their rooftops.
The latest extension of the program goes even further by helping multifamily residencies weatherize their facilities, offering more options for residents to purchase community solar or for business owners to buy commercial solar, and looking at how battery storage could be utilized to help as well.
This version of the program seeks to reduce San Antonio’s energy demand over the next half-decade by an additional 410 megawatts, enough electricity to power 102,500 homes on a hot summer’s day, for roughly $350 million, which equates to about $3.50 on a customer’s average monthly bill over five years.
Since the utility’s board voted to approve an extension of the program in spring 2022, more than 130,000 CPS Energy customers have taken steps to become more energy efficient through the utility’s program, said Elaina Ball, the utility’s chief strategy officer.
“We have over 500,000 residential customers participating in some manner in our demand response programs,” Ball said. CPS Energy’s demand response programs allow residents or businesses to agree to their thermostats being changed to help reduce demand during peak events. “We’re proud to say we have more demand response customers than any other utility in the state of Texas,” she added.
For the most part, the utility’s trustees seemed pleased with the program’s progress Monday — chairwoman Janie Gonzalez, Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who serves as a trustee in his official capacity, and Vice Chairwoman Francine Romero all said they are glad to see the program is going according to plan.
The lone voice of dissent was Trustee John Steen, who argued that the program caused CPS Energy to lose out on dollars that it could have otherwise made if it had built an additional power plant when the program was first propositioned in the late-aughts.
The program’s usage was broken down by geography, with San Antonio City Council districts 3, 4 and 6 located on the city’s south and southwest sides, being high users of STEP while districts 1, 2 and 5 on the city’s east and central sides tended to have lower rates of participation: a disparity Nirenberg asked to learn more about.
“I applaud this program,” he said. “I think it would be helpful to see a little bit more granularity in the metrics.”
CPS Energy’s board also received a financial update Monday. CPS Energy runs on a unique fiscal calendar year that starts annually on Feb. 1 and ends on Jan. 31, putting the utility currently in its third quarter.
Steen noted that the utility has taken on substantially more debt — about 36% more, to the tune of about $8 billion in total — since President and CEO Rudy Garza took the helm of CPS Energy three years ago. In response, staff reminded Steen and the other trustees that the utility is in a period of “high investment” to be able to supply more energy as local growth explodes, which has included purchasing additional capacity and power plants that will ideally in time pay for themselves.
“You’re either making investments or you’re falling behind,” Garza said. “There’s no standing still.”
