Wow! What a week for San Antonio. An infusion of $50 million for Sustainable Energy Research and $100 million for Biomed applied technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. And the funds are greatly enhanced by the extensive expertise of Dr. Les Shephard and the technological and entrepreneurial brilliance of Mir Imran.
And then there is the huge energy efficiency, water conservation and
alternative energy potential projects of Joint Base San Antonio.
As Pogo once said, “We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.” Hope PoGo was wrong.
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2. Let public see hiring process for our utility – Express News Editorial
Robert Rivard Express News June 13, 2010
Mayor Julián Castro wasted no time in getting his second year off to a fast start with an economic development deal unlike what we have grown accustomed to in San Antonio.
Mir Imran is not a name many of us had heard before last week. The Silicon Valley-based chairman and CEO of InCube Labs is, by all accounts, a storied medical device inventor and entrepreneur, an engineer with shrewd business instincts and a proven track record of turning ideas into the kind of companies that bigger companies want to buy.
Yet his prior association with San Antonio was limited to a single speech in December at the invitation of Henry Cisneros, and some in San Antonio's business leadership found themselves carefully checking his reputation and track record before agreeing to participate in the multimillion-dollar private/public investment partnership that will allow Imran to hit the ground running here.
Finally, we have economic development news that isn't easy to understand.
For years now, the arrival of new jobs often meant out-of-town corporations electing San Antonio as home for a new call center or back-office operation, hourly wage work for a couple of hundred high school graduates with limited ambitions and prospects.
The arrival of such jobs, along with the requisite tax abatements and other incentives, is always front-page news and rightly so. This is a city with too many young men and women who will never walk across a stage to collect a university degree. They need to work, so we want the call centers here and not down the interstate in Corpus Christi.
But it's been hard not to look north to Austin over the years, a city where call centers are not front-page news. Backed by the presence of state government, a great public university and its inviting, laid-back culture, Austin married brainpower, vision and venture capital to incubate and sustain a world-class high-tech economy.
San Antonio's innovative bargain with Mir Imran (that name bears repeating until we get it) suddenly allows the city to think differently, more like our neighbors to the north.
My colleague David Hendricks, now the longest-serving journalist at the Express-News at 34 years, offers ample context of what this deal means in both economic development terms and the enormous importance of San Antonio starting to see itself as an investment partner rather than a suitor with a dowry for companies considering a move.
This deal didn't happen because Imran fell in love with the River Walk while here to deliver his speech. The real groundwork for this deal was laid in the 1980s when then-Mayor Cisneros, USAA Chairman Gen. Robert F. “McD” McDermott and others envisioned a biosciences economy and nurtured that vision through decades good and bad.
A more contemporary succession of leadership, including former Mayor Phil Hardberger, and now, Castro and City Manager Sheryl Sculley, is leveraging that vision. They are thinking differently and they are demanding the same of us.
That's why we won InCube. That's why CPS will invest $50 million in UTSA's College of Engineering and its search for new energy solutions for the city.
The really good deals might not be easy to understand or offer an instant return on investment. They do represent a new era in San Antonio, one that arrives just in time.
Robert Rivard is editor of the Express-News. E-mail him at rrivard@express-news.net, or follow him on Twitter at @editorrivard.
Let public see hiring process for our utility
Express-News Editorial Board June 10, 2010
CPS Energy should do right by its ratepayers and release the names of the three outside finalists for the CEO/general manager position.
Officials at the city-owned public utility believe they can legally withhold the names and have asked an opinion from the state attorney general on the issue. Only the name of the acting General Manager Jelynne LeBlanc Burley, who is one of the four finalists on the short list, has been released.
The move was prompted by an open records request filed by the San Antonio Express-News late last month asking for release of the names.
Derrick Howard, vice chairman of the public utility company board, and Mayor Julián Castro told the Express-News that keeping the names of the job candidates secret is crucial to the integrity of the process. Their concern is for the current employment of the three outside applicants who may not have told their employers they are being courted by CPS Energy.
That is understandable, but the public's right to know who is being considered for this very important position that will have a long-term impact on the lives of the residents in our community overrides the need for nondisclosure. CPS is a municipally owned utility and should conduct business in a transparent manner.
Employers who have the finest professionals in their fields on their payroll are well aware they cannot prevent their top talent from being courted by others.
Finalists for jobs as school superintendents, fire chiefs, police chiefs, city managers and college presidents have their names publicly released and often participate in open community meetings before a final selection is made.
An open selection process with public participation benefits the individual being hired and the taxpayers and ratepayers who pay their salary.
The CPS Energy selection should proceed in the open.
Cloaking the selection of the head of CPS Energy in secrecy and taking legal steps to keep the list of job candidates private will only foster unnecessary public distrust.
By Tracy Idell Hamilton - Express-News June 10, 2010
CPS Energy's largest customer has a mandate to reduce its energy use, and it wants to partner with the utility and private industry to help it do so.
Fort Sam Houston, Lackland AFB and Randolph AFB are CPS' 5th, 6th and 22nd largest customers. Collectively, they represent the utility's largest energy consumer and source of revenue.
Including Camp Bullis, the installations form Joint Base San Antonio, the largest of the joint bases created by the Department of Defense to streamline operations and save money undefined and one of the joint base's largest budget items is its energy bill.
And while all three bases have made moves toward energy efficiency, it's not nearly enough to meet the federal government's stringent mandates, which include a 30 percent reduction in energy intensity, or energy used per square foot, by 2015, and an increase in renewable energy use.
In fact, said Brig. Gen. Leonard A. Patrick, who heads Joint Base San Antonio, “you'll see trends are going in the wrong direction.”
He aims to change that, he told a capacity crowd at the Pearl Stable on Wednesday, during a daylong Sustainable Energy Workshop that laid out what the three bases have done so far, what plans are in the works, and how CPS and industry partners can help them reach their goals.
The event was sponsored by the Defense Transformation Institute, a nonprofit created five years ago to help foster partnerships between the military and the local community.
Lackland has already spent $17 million on energy conservation initiatives, including lighting retrofits on buildings that earned the base almost $950,000 in rebates from CPS and a 2-megawatt savings. It's also added solar film to windows on 58 buildings and upgraded heating and air conditioning systems .
At some point, said Ed Roberson, Lackland's energy manager, the base will have done all the “easy” projects and will need to work harder and smarter to find savings.
That's where specialized programs, like the Air Force's “enhanced use leases” and partnerships with private industry, will come in handy.
That program allows the Air Force Real Property Agency to seek partnerships with businesses interested in placing renewable energy projects on land owned by the Air Force that's not currently in use. Dennis Guadarrama, chief of the strategic asset utilization division in San Antonio, said that's meant placing solar, biomass, geothermal and other renewable technologies on bases across the country.
“You name it, we're involved,” he said.
When an audience member asked whether the Air Force had leased out roof space for solar installations, Guadarrama said it hadn't yet, but could be interested.
It's that kind of innovation and partnership Patrick said he'd like to see more of.
“Industry can help us use new technology,” he said. “We want to be a test case.”
David Hendricks SA Express News June 8, 2010
One of the best aspects of the new CPS Energy-University of Texas at San Antonio partnership in energy research is the fact that San Antonio is investing in itself.
The city doesn't have that reputation. At least not in Austin or Washington.
Last week, CPS and UTSA announced their partnership. On Tuesday, CPS Energy trustees approved the first two years' worth of research, $3.5 million. The partnership could widen to up to $50 million over 10 years for research in a variety of energy fields.
San Antonio, for a long time, drew more in federal spending than it paid in revenues. To Austin, San Antonio was a city with its hand out, especially for transportation spending. State legislators grumbled about it until voters finally approved a sales tax increase.
Yes, the city passes its bond issues. But when it comes to distinguishing itself with special projects paid by the citizens, San Antonio hasn't. Having lower wages and smaller tax bases than Dallas and Houston made such projects difficult without federal or state assistance.
Even now, many of San Antonio's business investment announcements come with the help of state incentives.
But the CPS Energy-UTSA partnership is different.
CPS Energy is owned by the city of San Antonio, although it serves suburbs, too. In the past, when the utility needed solutions from research, the research contracts went elsewhere. Now, CPS Energy is investing in UTSA.
If advances are made that can be commercialized, San Antonio can use the technology itself and keep the profits from licensing it to other utilities. San Antonio wouldn't have to buy licenses from discoveries made elsewhere.
Usually, when a technological or scientific advance from a university is commercialized, half the profits go to the scientists or researchers, and the university receives the other half. CPS Energy and UTSA still have to work out the details for the commercialization revenue splits, if they come.
UTSA will use the CPS Energy partnership to seek federal energy research funding. That has a better chance of happening since the city invested first.
UTSA's research will cover many energy angles: renewable energy and its storage, conservation, use of customer smart meters, on-site generation, grid security and sequestration of carbon from fossil fuels, especially coal.
Some of the research is best-suited for professor/student settings. For example, when it comes to investigating consumer aptitude and eagerness for using upcoming residential smart meters to reduce monthly bills, students can compile and analyze the research as well as anyone. Having the right consumer education and incentives in place is necessary for smart meters to improve efficiency.
The director of UTSA's Sustainable Energy Research Institute, Les Shephard, will recruit new faculty internationally to lead the efforts. The city's investment should make recruiting easier. Utility-university partnerships are more common outside the United States than inside, Shephard said.
Most U.S. universities make research contracts with private companies.
“Our students are fabulous,” added Shephard, who moved to San Antonio only two months ago from New Mexico's Sandia National Laboratories. “I'm not worried about our future.”
Now that CPS Energy has invested in UTSA, we have a chance to find out exactly how good they are.
dhendricks@express-news.net
Express-News Editorial Board June 8, 2010
The collaboration between CPS Energy and the University of Texas at San Antonio to create a sustainable energy research program is a boldly creative blend that matches resources and needs.
Offering great potential for both entities as well as the city as a whole, the plan is a sophisticated use of the benefits from research funding that works on several levels.
If the CPS Energy board approves the $50 million plan today, the utility will finance the creation of the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute at UTSA's College of Engineering.
Quietly pursued for months by Mayor Julián Castro, the partnership combines CPS Energy's need to find methods for generating clean, sustainable energy with UTSA's push to become a national research university.
In an interview with the Express-News last week, Castro described the benefits this way: “The ratepayer gets a more efficient utility, we get the economic development in San Antonio, and the university spirals ever more quickly to Tier One status.”
The Express-News reported that while specific research projects will be determined in the next few months, areas of interest are expected to include the capture and reuse of carbon emissions, developing a smart grid that enables distributed generation and methods for storing wind and solar power. Breakthroughs in each of these areas are crucial for making sustainable energy dreams a reality in a growing region as environmental concerns push utilities to move away from traditional carbon-based electricity generation.
And the potential benefits for UTSA are equally significant. Officials told the newspaper that the university soon will begin hiring researchers for the institute and will seek top-flight talent in the mold of Les Shephard, who left Sandia Laboratories to lead the new institute. New graduate programs are likely to develop as well as corporate spin-offs based on technological breakthroughs spawned by the institute.
In addition to providing powerful momentum to UTSA's drive to reach Tier One status, the economic benefits to the city could be huge, and the institute has the potential to make San Antonio a center of sustainable energy activity.
Castro has earned major kudos for orchestrating this deal. CPS Energy needs the discoveries that this research should produce, and UTSA needs the investment to move to an enhanced status. Success in both areas are crucial to a healthy future for San Antonio.
The mayor already has proven he can handle tough jobs that are forced onto his agenda. With the birth of the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute, Castro emerges as leader with vision. And Castro is making good on his campaign promise to strive for high quality economic development.
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