Cooling down the cooling plant sale
Where does this drive to sell come from?
So Austin Energy, our city-owned electric utility, wants to sell a bunch of cooling plants.
Well, officially the utility only wants to "study" the issue, but the proposed study it put on last week's City Council agenda strongly suggests that it has already made up its mind. The contract with JPMorganChase it proposed was technically free –– the bank would simply get a hefty commission if the utility eventually sold the facilities. In other words, the study authors had every possible incentive to recommend a sale.
