CLIMATE NEWS | SATIRE
Austin Energy Announces New Vice President of Obfuscation Following Increased Oversight
New role promises to improve inability of customers to understand issues
AUSTIN, Tex. — November 5, 2021 — Austin Energy, the City of Austin’s community-owned electric utility, today announced the appointment of Claire Cloudsworthy to its newly-created Vice President of Obfuscation role. The move follows clear reporting by local media on the utility’s response to the widespread outages that affected the area last year.
“We’re excited to usher in a new level of customer truth protection,” said Austin Energy’s chief electron officer Berndt Downer. “While we value safety and service above all, when things go wrong, there’s no value in worrying the general public with the details. And hindsight is not 20:20, it’s a liability.”
The newly created role follows the creation of ERCOT Center for Total Truthiness (ERCOT CTT) and the development of similar roles in utilities throughout the ERCOT region.
“Ensuring we maximize detail so it’s difficult to determine responsibility is a critical role for any public service organization,” Cloudsworthy said. “It’s only neighborly to protect our fellow Texans in the energy industry from undue scrutiny. I guess it boils down to letting our customers choose what they’d like to hear when we say ‘oversight’.”
The specialist role is focused on optimization of the use of passive voice, declarification of data through adjustment of axes and disoptimal selection of graphical modes, and maximization of report length. It also ensures that committee sizes are designed to have every voice heard, but without leaving any single member of the committee responsible for its output.
“We hope to replicate the successful ERCOT model of providing more and denser information, preferably in scanned documents without character recognition so reporters can’t easily search their content,” said Downer. “And during outage crises themselves, we do provide faxed updates to newsrooms, though dissemination of customer load reduction requests is generally limited when such customers have restricted access to radios and television broadcasts.”
The news follows the release of an extensive analysis of the extended non-optional immediate power supply reduction event that occurred in the ERCOT region last year.
Media notes: Questions can be delivered by telegram to Division of Inquiries from Organizations Defined as Media, 721 Barton Springs Road Austin, TX 78704–1194 between 11:30 am and 3:20 pm.
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