Xcel Energy’s latest plan is a bloated commitment to maintaining big, outdated, centralized fossil fuel generation for far too long.
The plan, which the Public Utilities Commission is expected to consider this week, maximizes Xcel’s corporate profits and shareholder returns and will harm Coloradans’ lives, air quality, climate, and health. Hurt worst are the communities in which these coal plants were built — Pueblo, Hayden and Brush.
After bowing to pressure from the public, Xcel said it would accelerate the closure of these three plants to at least 2031, but that is still far too many years of burning coal.
Last year, the percent of electric energy Xcel generated using coal actually increased. According to Xcel’s 10-K disclosure forms, the company generated 25% of its electricity via coal in 2021 up from 21% in 2020.
Xcel keeps feeding our money to its lemon of a coal plant, Comanche Unit 3 in Pueblo, which it built despite public opposition based on Xcel’s own data showing that this was an unwise investment economically. In this day and age, it does not make sense to continue to invest in coal plants. Colorado Xcel customers are paying millions each year to keep the coal plant generating profits for Xcel whether it is working or not.
The Comanche 3 coal plant’s air permit allows the emission of almost 2 pounds of mercury a week, along with many other toxic metals — arsenic, lead and chromium. We have been unable to determine from the public record how much mercury is actually being emitted. Along with the CO2 and water use, the plant produces coal ash that must be stored.
This is all beyond unconscionable, and another eight years is much too long. Keeping coal plants open until the last half of the decade and Comanche 3 until 2031 supports Xcel shareholders, but it is an arbitrary deadline.
Burning fossil fuels at power plants creates emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, carbon dioxide, mercury, and other pollutants. Nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide emissions contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone and fine particulate matter, causing a wide array of health problems, and those beyond respiratory and cardio impacts have just been studied starting in the last decade.
In 2019 Colorado law promised that greenhouse gas pollution would be reduced by 26% by 2025, which Xcel and the state are getting away with ignoring. We believe, based on a third-party analysis, that stopping the regular use of coal by 2025 is the most affordable way to reach these reductions.
Xcel pours a lot of money into advertising and lobbying politicians, governments, and organizations.
But we see you, Xcel, and the lives, health, and community well-being you harm and disregard.
We see the primacy and shielding given to this Wall Street traded extraction machine. Xcel has been able to get higher returns from Colorado than other states. Last year, Xcel Energy gave $660 million to Wall Street shareholders, and it gave $585 million to them the year before.
The Public Utilities Commission will decide soon on Xcel’s plan. It’s difficult for the Commission to keep up with a large corporation of attorneys and donors protecting millions in profit. The PUC has allowed Xcel profits to go up and up despite flat sales. It’s a good business if you can get it!
Unfortunately, Coloradans can’t, Xcel is an out-of-state monopoly. Instead of flowing out of state, this income stream should be going to Colorado communities to invest locally and own long-lasting solar and storage, on rooftops, in microgrids, in solar gardens, and where farmers and ranchers want it.
Now Xcel wants to spend $9.9 billion from all our pockets over the next 4-5 years for electric distribution, transmission, generation, natural gas, etc. Their past and proposed spending fill up the grid and electrical supply with fossil fuel generation that costs us now and later.
The last century’s model of big central generating plants and distant transmission lines is more vulnerable to outages in increasingly extreme weather. Coloradans will be better served by planning for and investing in more distributed solar and storage, local ownership, incentives for demand management, and charging when renewables are available – during the day in sunny Colorado – all economical approaches. Solar and storage are assets that Coloradans want to own.
Xcel would like to own as much of the energy generation as possible to keep our communities paying hundreds of millions in profit annually to Xcel, growing at over 10% instead of local ownership, with panels paid off in 5-15 years.
We need the PUC to better regulate Xcel starting now. Likely we need an actual public service company in Colorado, a non-profit consumer-owned power authority, keeping investment and income streams here in Colorado, where they circulate in our local and state economy, instead of mining our pockets to send to Wall Street.
And we would get clean air and clean electricity faster.
We can do this. It’s time for candidates and elected officials to stop taking money from Xcel. It’s time to have open data, access by our communities and experts, and public interest planning.
Our kids, our neighbors, our community, and this beloved place we’ve grown up in and want to protect are depending on it.
Neal Walia is a longtime Colorado resident and a candidate for Congressional District 1. Jamie Valdez is a community organizer with Mothers Out Front, and Marie Venner is the chair of the Colorado Call to Action and the Small Business Alliance.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.
