Austin Energy's Power Partner Thermostat program is the furnace-relevant incentive for Austin homeowners: a $50 purchase rebate on a qualifying smart thermostat, a one-time $75 bill credit for enrolling it in the demand-response program, and $30 a year for each year you stay enrolled. A homeowner can equip up to five thermostats per account.
It is worth being clear about what this is and isn't. Texas has no utility rebate for repairing a furnace, and Austin Energy is an electric utility, so it does not rebate gas-furnace replacement the way Atmos does in North Texas. What it does subsidize is the thermostat that controls your heating and cooling. A smart thermostat trims furnace runtime in winter and AC runtime in summer, which is why the utility pays you to install one and to let it ease back briefly during peak-demand events.
For someone who has just paid for a furnace repair, this is the low-effort companion move: the device pays for itself quickly between the purchase rebate and the enrollment credit, and it keeps paying $30 a year. The demand-response enrollment means Austin Energy can make small temperature adjustments during a handful of peak events, which you can override.
Enrollment is straightforward — buy a qualifying ENERGY STAR thermostat, connect it to Wi-Fi, and enroll through Austin Energy. The major Wi-Fi brands homeowners already buy — ecobee, Google Nest, and Honeywell Home among them — are typically eligible, so most people don't need special equipment. Both homeowners and renters qualify, an unusually broad eligibility rule among utility programs.
One reason this is worth doing in a gas-furnace home, not just an AC home, is that Texas grid stress is no longer a summer-only story. Since the 2021 winter storm, ERCOT has set record winter demand peaks driven by electric heating and furnace blowers running hard on the coldest mornings, and a smart thermostat that pre-heats efficiently and avoids the sharpest peaks helps your bill exactly when heating costs spike. Confirm the current rebate and credit amounts on the Austin Energy page before you buy, since utilities adjust these from year to year.