[Dale] Ross is the mayor of Georgetown, population 65,000, and he has become a minor celebrity in environmental circles as a result of a pioneering decision in 2015 to get all the city's electricity from renewable sources. Georgetown's location in oil-and-gas-centric Texas and Ross's politics add to the strangeness of the tale. The mayor is a staunch Republican. "You should see the fan mail that I get, especially with the movies," Ross grinned. The 58-year-old said the decision to follow the lead of Burlington, Vermont - the first US city to run solely on renewable energy - was not the product of liberal do-gooder vapours wafting up Interstate 35 from nearby Austin. It was based on cold-eyed pragmatism, the fruit of the kind of careful numerical analysis he performs in his day job as a certified public accountant. "The revolution is here," he said. "And I'm a good little Republican, a rightwing fiscal conservative. When it comes to making decisions based on facts, that's what we do." The facts, Ross said, are that when Georgetown negotiated power supply deals the cost was about the same between natural gas and wind and solar, but the natural gas option would provide only a seven-year guaranteed contract whereas 20-25 year proposals were on the table from renewable providers. Georgetown officials decided to lock in a long-term rate to eliminate price volatility. [Energy] prices in the city, Ross said, have declined from 11.4 per kilowatt hour in 2008 to 8.5 this year.