On Thursday, December 11, 2025, PCC Founder Eileen McGinnis and Director of Community Arts Stephanie Chavez Noell went to City Hall to speak out against the proposal to put a deposit on expensive gas peakers (power plants).
Not only would expensive gas peakers lead to potentially higher bills for Austin Energy consumers, but they would lock in fossil fuel usage for decades to come: undermining Austin Energy’s carbon neutral by 2035 goals, worsening public health, and threatening our kids’ climate.
Chavez Noell’s public comment centered the environmental-justice legacy and children’s health inequities behind new gas investments. As she put it, “…policy decisions become turning points – moments that either heal long-standing inequities or deepen them. Approving new fossil-fuel infrastructure now would add yet another harmful chapter to the long timeline of inequities that have disproportionately impacted low-income, Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.”
But the work isn’t over. With fossil fuels so embedded in our culture, it’s all too easy, even in a city like Austin with robust climate equity goals, to look to new gas investments as the default solution.
Caregivers and allies: help amplify our presence at City Hall by adding your voice for a fossil-free future.
This action at City Hall was the latest iteration of a process that began in Fall 2024, when the PCC joined a clean-energy coalition of local and statewide nonprofits. We launched a community art build, designed by Stephanie Chavez Noell, to bridge climate arts & clean-energy advocacy. In the year and a half since, at pop-up events across the city, hundreds of Austinites of all ages have inscribed their wishes and hopes for a thriving, sustainable, equitable future on the arms of the SUN, a vibrant, 10-foot-tall wearable clean-energy puppet.
The SUN came out to a rally at City Hall in November 2024 after gas peakers were first proposed, and again for SUN-DAY ATX in September 2025, when community advocates held a renewable-energy festival at the Texas State Capitol.
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