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Colorado Independent | Lawmakers seek to stall Xcel plan to shutter inefficient Cameo Station plant

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Lawmakers have introduced legislation to try to stop Xcel Energy from closing its outdated Cameo Station power plant, a coal-solar plant that Xcel says is too costly and impractical to maintain. Debate over the law sees politicians flipping ideology on its side. Grand Junction-area Republicans looking to preserve jobs in coal country are attempting to use government to force Xcel to make management decisions in direct opposition to market demands. Xcel says it’s just bad business to keep the plant open.   Read about it in the Colorado Independent.


Colorado Independent | Heated coal vs. gas battle comes to a head with key PUC decision

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Both Xcel Energy and environmental groups cautiously praised Thursday’s unanimous decision by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to convert the Cherokee 4 coal-fired power plant unit to natural gas. But both sides are clearly still concerned about the details in the plan.

Xcel officials originally wanted to keep Cherokee 4 running on coal until 2022, five years past the 2017 deadline mandated by the Clean Air, Clean Jobs Act for cutting nitrogen oxide emissions by at least 70 percent of 2008 levels in order to comply with federal clean-air standards.

Then the state’s largest electrical utility recommended installing expensive new emissions controls. Other state agencies and Gov. Bill Ritter’s office preferred shutting the plant down altogether in 2017 and replacing it with a brand-new natural gas-fired facility.

Read the entire article at the Colorado Independent: Heated coal vs. gas battle comes to a head with key PUC decision

Glustrom Wins Renewable Energy Award

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Leslie Glustrom (photo by Doug Grinbergs)

On June 3rd in Fort Collins, CO, Leslie Glustrom of Clean Energy Action was awarded Colorado Renewable Energy Society’s (CRES) most prestigious award, The Larson-Notari, for her exemplary contributions in the field of renewable energy. Glustrom joins the ranks of leaders such as Governor Ritter and Amory Lovins in the receipt of this award.

“I am thrilled to receive the Larson-Notari award, and I know the honor is a reflection of the team effort that has made our work for renewable energy in Colorado so successful.  I accept this award on behalf of many passionate allies and friends,” said Glustrom.

Becky English, chair of the energy committee for the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Sierra Club, and chair of the legislative committee of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society, along with 23 other CRES members co-signed the nomination.

Glustrom’s tireless work on clean energy began in 2004 when she left her paying job in a CU biochemistry research lab and devoted herself full-time-plus – and without pay – to fighting climate change. Specifically, she targeted coal-fired power plants, because they are the largest single source of CO2 and account for some 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

In Colorado, the state generates significantly more than half of its electricity from coal with less than 10% of the state’s electricity coming from clean renewable energy. Glustrom recognized that decarbonizing the state’s power supply is critical to fighting climate change and repowering for the 21st century. Key to her approach – then and now – is a dedication to uncovering and disseminating the facts on all the costs of our fossil fuel dependence and the abundant potential and cost-effectiveness of deploying clean energy solutions.

Within months of leaving her paid employment in 2004, Glustrom joined the ranks of citizens working to achieve passage of “Amendment 37,” the country’s first citizen-initiated renewable energy standard in the country.  Shortly after this landmark victory in Colorado, it became apparent that the state’s largest utility was planning to build a coal-fired power plant (Comanche 3 in Pueblo, CO) and Glustrom, with a small, but committed, team of activists took the charge against the plant’s construction.

Leslie applied for formal intervenor status at the CO Public Utilities Commission, representing herself. She is one of only a few citizens to intervene in formal PUC proceedings. Over the years, she has provided testimony in numerous proceedings involving resource planning, rate increases, solar energy incentives, transmission planning, “Windsource” and the “Smart Grid City” project, as well as many others.

In addition to the extensive work at the PUC, Glustrom was one of the founding members of the Boulder-based non-profit group Clean Energy Action which has combined forces with many other groups to challenge the current fossil-fuel paradigm.

These days, Leslie and Clean Energy Action continue to fight for a clean energy future at the local, state and national level. As part of this work, Leslie began an intensive analysis of US coal supplies beginning in 2005 and in 2009 published the report, “Coal: Cheap and Abundant…Or Is It? Why Americans Should Stop Assuming that the U.S. Has a 200-Year Supply of Coal.”  She has spoken around the country on the issues of coal costs and coal supply constraints and in 2010 she was a co-author on the “True Cost of Coal” study led by Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School.

Leslie forges strong relationships and knows the value of coordinated and collaborative strategies to make positive change happen.  The Larson-Notari award is a testament to the amazing efforts of Leslie and her many allies working for a clean energy future for Boulder and beyond.

Amateur Earthling | Boulder’s Energy Future Is Bright

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We’re going to be exposed to future fuel price volatility one way or another. If we stick with Xcel, it’ll be coal prices which seem low today, but are difficult to hedge against. If we strike out on our own, it’ll be gas prices, which are about the same cost as coal today, and are easier to hedge with renewables. Obviously $0.142/kWh is a lot more than our power costs today, but one has to imagine that if gas prices have doubled, coal prices are also likely to be changing. In that kind of uncertain energy future, having a grid with a very predictable long term cost of energy would become attractive to businesses, which will often pay a hedging premium to lock in a predictable price they can plan their operations around.

Read the entire article at AmateurEarthling.org:  Boulder’s Energy Future Is Bright.

American RadioWorks | Power and Smoke: A Nation Built on Coal

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At the time the settlers arrived at Plymouth Rock, people back in England had already been burning coal for generations. Londoners complained about coal smoke during Queen Elizabeth I’s era. A century before the American Revolution, in 1660, an Englishman named John Evelyn published one of the world’s first treatises on air pollution. He complained for pages about coal in London.

People would have preferred to burn wood to keep warm and cook food. Wood smoke smelled sweeter. But they had cut down the forests of England. Only rich people could have roaring wood fires.

So it’s no surprise that when Europeans arrived in America, the natural resource they were excited about wasn’t coal; it was wood. America had vast expanses of forest.

Settlers in America cleared land for farms, and burned the wood. Wood was easy, and America’s coal was hard to get at. It was on the other side of mountains, and there weren’t railroads or canals yet.

By the time of the American Revolution, there were still no factories in North America. And once Americans finally began to develop factories in the 19th century, they powered them with falling water. And built them where there were rivers with enough force.

Listen to the entire documentary or read the transcript at American RadioWorks:   Power and Smoke: A Nation Built on Coal.

GOOD | Across the Globe, Solar Power Just Keeps Getting Cheaper

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Solar power is getting cheaper. It’s something of a parlor game among energy companies and analysts to predict when, exactly, solar will achieve “grid parity” with coal and other cheap sources of electricity—in other words, when it will be just as economical to buy clean, renewable energy as it will be to buy coal power. There’s no clear answer: government subsidies will play a role, and solar will become a player in some regions and countries long before it makes sense everywhere. And just because solar is cheap doesn’t mean it will become the world’s primary source of power overnight. When solar is as cheap as coal, it’ll make more financial sense for investors to build solar plants. But they’ll still have to be built.

Read the entire article at GOOD: Across the Globe, Solar Power Just Keeps Getting Cheaper.

Paris Review | American Inferno

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Centralia has been on fire for almost fifty years.

The mines under the town—a vast network designed to tap the veins of purplish anthracite coal that spread weblike throughout the county—have been burning since 1962. The conflagration probably began in a stripping pit next to the cemetery, creeping along the deposits of fuel, burning up to three hundred feet underground. The town grew so warm that some residents no longer needed to turn on their basement hot-water heaters. Toxic plumes erupted, tree roots turned to ash, vegetables roasted on their stalks. The earth became unstable, and yawning holes opened into underground pits without warning: in 1981, twelve-year-old Todd Domboski fell into a sulfurous 150-foot-deep maw that appeared suddenly in his grandmother’s backyard, narrowly escaping incineration by grabbing onto a tree root. Efforts to stop the flames—clay seals to cut off oxygen, slurry pumped into the honeycombed caverns—proved useless. In the eighties, the federal government began relocating the town’s remaining population, razing their homes and shutting down a segment of the highway that had erupted. The fire may burn for another 250 years, encompassing 3,700 acres, before it runs out of fuel.

Read the entire article at the Paris Review – American Inferno.

The Energy Collective | Case Study: Boulder Colorado Takes Action On Climate Change

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The Boulder vote should send a message to utilities around the country as well as other communities that are tired of inaction on climate goals. In Colorado, while Xcel is on track to have 25% renewable energy in their portfolio by 2020 (a commitment which has positioned them as the nation’s leading utility for wind power) they also just completed a new 750 MW coal plant that will be producing energy well into 2060. Boulder voters saw no reason to saddle their grandchildrens’ generation with technology that was developed by their great grandparents.

Read the entire article at The Energy Collective:  Case Study: Boulder Colorado Takes Action On Climate Change.


Is An Energy Transformation Afoot?

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Bavarian Solarpark (Wikimedia Commons)

Almost immediately after we empowered Boulder to form a utility, a spate of articles appeared in the national press talking about the relative costs of coal and renewables, and the trends in those costs. There was Krugman’s Here Comes Solar Energy Op-Ed in the NY Times, making the case that solar PV is already cheaper than coal-fired power once you remove all the subsidies we provide to both of them, and calling for the feds to fix regulation to make that clear. Boulder’s own RMI had a bit of commentary on Krugman’s opinion: it’d be nice if federal regulations were saner, but even without that fix, it makes sense to build this stuff now, and will only make more sense as time goes on and the balance of system costs (which currently make up 50% or more of the cost of a PV installation) are reduced through best practices, standardization and mass production.

From the industry side, GE’s Jeff Immelt also said that federal regulation was a little beside the point now… and that even without government support GE was going all-in, expecting something like 200GW of solar to be built in China and India by the end of the decade. That’d be a non-trivial amount of generation, on the order of 10 Three Gorges Dams, or as much power as the entire US nuclear generation fleet. Meanwhile NRG Energy, a nationwide and largely traditional fossil-fuel based independent power producer is planning to spend the overwhelming majority of its capital investment funds over the next few years on solar, mostly small utility projects (20-100MW) and distributed rooftop generation.

In the same vein, Xcel Energy’s recently filed 2011 Electric Resource Plan foresees essentially no new generation facilities being built until close to the end of the decade. Some of this is attributable to the soft economy, but many people are saying it’s just as much a consequence of energy efficiency, demand side management, and increasing distributed (behind-the-meter) generation coming on line. Unfortunately, Xcel’s Comanche 3 power plant added 750 megawatts of coal generation to the Colorado grid last year, and this lack of demand for more energy means the company is now walking away from the transmission lines that would have enabled large-scale solar-thermal with storage in the San Luis Valley. This means that the only way to shift Xcel’s power mix in the near future will be to accelerate the retirement of existing coal-fired generation, making room for more efficiency, wind, and solar.

The optimistic narrative that falls out of the articles above — that our energy systems are undergoing a transformation — seems plausible, and I hope that it’s true. Certainly it’s the one that the Boulder Light and Power effort is going to be built around. It’s comforting to see that we’re not alone on the world stage, and less daunting to imagine our job as facilitating an ongoing transformation, rather than starting one from scratch.

InsideClimate News | U.S. Carbon Emissions From Fossil Fuels Rose in 2013 as Coal Use Ticked Up

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West Virginia coal plant/Credit: John E. Amos

When all the data is in, it looks like carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will have gone up 2 percent in 2013 from the previous year, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) said on Monday.

The main reason, it said, is an uptick in the use of coal for electric power. But it’s also a sign of growing economic activity in general.

Read the whole article at Inside Climate News: U.S. Carbon Emissions From Fossil Fuels Rose in 2013 as Coal Use Ticked Up.

Going Down With the Xcel Ship

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As the Boulder City Council considers the merits of municipalization and Boulder’s carbon reduction goals, it is essential to recognize that there are opportunities and risks with EITHER path going forward—establishing a muni or establishing a deal with Xcel.

By Frederick Whymper - From page 293 of the 1887 book The Sea: its stirring story of adventure, peril & heroism., Volume 2. Found via project Gutenberg here [1]., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41134597

By Frederick Whymper – Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41134597

With all of Xcel’s major coal suppliers now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with Xcel’s failure to consider even the possibility that the US coal industry won’t rebound, and with the potential for utility grid defection and load defection as documented by The Rocky Mountain Institute, there is clearly a risk with the Xcel path of tying Boulder to a sinking ship.  Grid defection occurs when consumers have other options for power that don’t make them dependent on the grid.  Load defection occurs when consumers shift their energy load from utility-delivered electricity to their own self-generated and stored power.

The risks of grid and load defection are underscored by the recent report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories showing the continuation of dramatic declines in the prices for wind and solar electricity.

For solar, the 2014 average contract price was 5¢ per kWh. For 2015, 4¢ per kWh, a 20% reduction.

For wind, the 2014 average contract price was 2.4¢ per kWh. For 2015, 2.0¢ per kWh, a 16% reduction.

Although Xcel has made some advances in acquiring wind and solar, it still has major commitments to coal, and may not be agile enough to keep up with changing market conditions.  Xcel’s customers will be on the hook for costs from rising fossil prices and/or the collapse of the fuel supply.  A municipal utility, owning no generation assets itself, and able to lock-in long term low prices with power purchase agreements of renewable energy, would be insulated from those risks.

Xcel’s Municipalization Offer: Heads They Win, Tails We Lose

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Two weeks ago, Xcel made a set of 11th hour electricity provision offers to Boulder, a so-called “partnership,” and a buy-out option. Readers should understand that Xcel’s offers are not what the city asked for; they are only what Xcel is willing to proffer.  These offers are lousy deals for Boulder and future generations (see the Sierra Club letter to City Council http://www.sierraclub.org/rocky-mountain-chapter/indian-peaks/Politics-and-Issues).

Here’s why:

  • Xcel is committed to coal: Almost 70% of Xcel’s electricity generation is from fossil fuels and they don’t plan to phase out large coal-fired generation for over another half century (2070).  In the face of climate change and for the sake of future generations, it is inexcusable to continue delaying action against climate change and conversion of our electricity generation to renewable energy sources.
  • Premium for renewables: The “partnership” offers no commitments to achieve Boulder’s goals for decarbonizing our electricity supply. It does, however, guarantee that we will pay a premium for renewable energy even though the cost of renewables is less than Xcel’s cost of coal-generated electricity and continues to drop every year.
  • Deja vu all over again:  Xcel’s offer looks effectively like the franchise Boulder chose not to renew in 2010 because Xcel was not interested in working with Boulder to decarbonize its electricity supply. And Xcel’s offer handcuffs us to them for another 20 years. A generation is a long time to be precluded from availing ourselves of innovations in state and federal legislation and in the energy market.
  • It literally sucks:  Xcel sucks approximately $34 million dollars of profit from Boulder each year, money better spent on modernizing the grid, converting generation to renewable energy and money better kept here at home circulating through our local economy.
  • Inflated buyout: The buyout option obligates Boulder to pay 180% of value of the distribution system, inflated separation costs, and an illegal requirement to compensate for lost revenues. With its incredibly high cost, it is not a credible option.

Photo credit: http://s382.photobucket.com/user/Billyeadon/library/

So why is Xcel proposing this 11th hour franchise? It has the smell of fear. Xcel demands that City Council suspend the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) process by April 19th if Council decides to pursue Xcel’s offers. But the PUC has already affirmed Boulder’s constitutional right to form a city owned utility. The only remaining questions are how we separate from Xcel, the cost, and the timeline.  And the PUC will begin considering Boulder’s case to separate from Xcel on April 26th. If the PUC accepts Boulder’s separation plan, it starts a chain of events that Xcel mortally fears. Many other communities with similar goals to decarbonize in the face of climate change are watching Boulder’s case and if we are successful, that begins the unraveling of Xcel’s investor owned monopoly and renders their business model obsolete. Xcel will also lose that annual $34 million of profit from Boulder.

City Council should reject Xcel’s offers and continue with the PUC process. Whereas Xcel has everything to lose, Boulder has nothing has nothing to lose. Even if the PUC renders an unfavorable decision for Boulder, there is no reason, or rush, to enter into a “partnership” with Xcel. Boulder can continue in its current state with Xcel (out of franchise) indefinitely and reserve the flexibility to take advantage of innovations and evolutions in the electricity world.  The legislature may put in place the rules needed to create a true path for municipalization.  Colorado may shift to being in a Regional Transmission Organization or “RTO.” We may end up with a competitive utility situation like in Texas, with opportunities for customer choice.  Suspending the PUC process limits our options for an entire generation.

Citizens of Boulder, City Council needs to hear that you support Boulder continuing with our efforts to ensure a clean energy future for future generations. Come to the Council meeting on Monday, April 17th at 6 PM and express your support.  And write City Council at council@bouldercolorado.gov .

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