BIG PIVOTS: Is Colorado the Beacon on the Hill? Part One

This story by Allen Best appeared on BigPivots.com on November 29, 2024. We are sharing it in four parts.

With the Roaring Fork River below us chattering happily, Will Toor and I briefly exchanged memories in August. He was in Aspen to speak about Colorado’s milestones in its energy transition and discuss some of the next steps. I was there to listen.

Toor in many ways has a remarkable story. Mounting the podium a few minutes later, he did so with a limp. A couple of years ago, using ice axes, he and his wife had climbed up one of the permanent snowfields in Rocky Mountain National Park. When they reached the top, the cornice broke, sending them tumbling down the slope and into the hospital for extended stays.

It could easily have been worse. As is, he told me, the limp is likely permanent. It has not stopped him. That morning in Aspen he told me that he planned to meet with his children two days later to climb Mt. of the Holy Cross. It is, according to the latest survey, at 14,009 feet in elevation.

Toor and I also talked about Craig, in northwest Colorado. We had both been there more than 40 years before, when the trio of coal-fired power units were being built. Soon, they will be closed and then dismantled. It’s part of Colorado’s energy transition… what I call a Big Pivot.

For the first several months of 1979 I had been working in the Yampa Valley at a newspaper called the Hayden Valley Press. Like every other newspaper that I have worked for full time, it no longer exists. I think I remember receiving the princely salary of $170 a week.

Toor, if I have the chronology down, was in northwest Colorado a year later. He was a sheepherder west of Craig, near Dinosaur National Monument, for a few months. (I spent that winter shoveling snow at Amax’s Henderson molybdenum mill). I have never asked him what in his life’s journey caused him to shepherd the woolies on a lonely mountain.

Toor went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics but rather quickly got involved in public affairs. He was on the Boulder City Council and then became mayor before becoming a Boulder County commissioner.

For a few years after that he oversaw transportation for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project before being named director of the Colorado Energy Office by incoming Gov. Jared Polis in January 2019.

In that position, he is one of the key figures in Colorado’s energy transition. We have had bright, knowledgeable and even brilliant state legislators. We have probably thousands of people in state agencies, NGO advocacy groups and the private sector focused on how to engineer this pivot.

Toor operates in the highest circle. It may be only a small stretch of hyperbole to say, as somebody told me, that he doesn’t get a cup of coffee without consulting the governor. Polis seems to have an attentive eye on the details. For his part, Toor is a walking encyclopedia of facts and thoughts. I’d love to get inside their conversations.

Reflective of the broadened mission of the agency that Toor oversees is the staffing. The Colorado Energy Office had a staff of 35 under the prior governor, John Hickenlooper. Now, it has 86. It seems that I constantly see mentions on LinkedIn of new positions.

Toor is the public face, the individual called upon for speaking engagements. The forums in Aspen had been assembled by the Carbondale-based Clean Energy Economy for the Region. CLEER, a non-profit, has goals of ramping up renewables, decarbonizing transportation, and maximizing resource efficiency in the Roaring Fork Valley and downstream along the Colorado River to Rifle.

In going to Aspen, I already had been wondering how to understand Colorado’s place in the energy transition in a national or even international context. This pivot in Colorado is huge.

Former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter spoke first, and in concert with Toor, made the case that Colorado should be seen as exceptional in this energy transition.

Colorado’s easiest story starts in 2004, when Ritter was still the Denver district attorney with an inkling that he wanted to become governor, which he did for four years beginning in 2007.

State legislators had repeatedly rejected efforts to enact a renewable portfolio standard. Frustrated boosters gathered enough signatures to get a ballot measure asking voters to require large utilities to achieve 10% of their generation from renewables by 2014. With large margins in favor in metropolitan Denver (and similarly wide margins in opposition in rural Colorado), Amendment 37 passed by a margin of 53.6% to 46.4%.

“No other state in the country had put a renewable portfolio standard on the ballot until Colorado. We were first,” said Ritter.

That “first” is a theme that has emerged in the two decades that have followed.

“The people who were part of that effort, if you said to them, ‘Oh, by the way, Xcel is going to reduce their emissions 85% by 2030,’ they would not have believed it. If you had said to them, ‘Tri-State (Generation and Transmission Association) is going to reduce its emissions 80% to 85% by 2030,’ they would have found that totally incredible and not really believable. I guess incredulous is the word – and yet, we are on that trajectory.”

Actually, Tri-State now says it expects to achieve 88% reduction.

Xcel Energy easily met that mandate and then elevated requirements.

Ritter confided that he did a bit of good-natured jousting with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was governor of California when he was governor of Colorado. Because the governors were seated in alphabetical order, they rubbed elbows. Schwarzenegger would say they had a big old RPS (renewable portfolio standard) for 2035. And Ritter would respond that it was outdated because Colorado had an earlier one in 2030.

After Ritter left office came the work of abating methane emissions from the oil-and-gas sector. Ritter said that his successor, John Hickenlooper, “probably doesn’t get enough credit for all of the coalitions that he built in trying to reduce methane pollution, a really serious greenhouse gas. He had a tough time because the Senate changed in 2014 and it became more difficult to pass clean energy legislation.”

That work of methane abatement continues even now, but it’s noteworthy that Colorado was the first state to crack down on emissions from pipelines and other infrastructure. That was in 2014. Colorado’s rules became a model for those adopted by the EPA.

Then came 2018, a remarkable year around the country. Democrats regained control of the U.S. Senate. Continuing their control of the House and with a governor, Polis, elected on a platform of renewable energy, the state was set for rapid change. Too, agreement about the risk of greenhouse gas emissions had solidified.

The legislative session was brilliant, Ritter said.

Chief among the bills passed that year in response to the risk of climate change was HB19-1261. Its most prominent provision specified economy wide greenhouse gas reduction goals for 2025, 2030, and 2050. A prime sponsor was KC Becker, who spoke later in the day. Those goals led to a roadmap for accomplishing the work.

This was prelude to Ritter’s most intriguing statements. He observed that Colorado is relatively small, with a population of just 6 million people. It ranks 21st among the 50 states. He also noted Colorado’s interior location between the Atlantic and the California.

“We’re a beacon on a hill,” said Ritter.

Other states have done things, too. But among the 22 states in the U.S. Climate Alliance, the tracking conducted by Ritter’s Center for the New Energy Economy finds Colorado at or toward the front.

Federal tailwinds have helped Colorado move forward, Ritter acknowledged. He pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed in 2022 and is now being implemented in ways that “can make a meaningful difference.”

Beyond the climate impact of that law are the efforts to address marginalized communities much differently. He called it “maybe the most important piece of civil rights legislation since the Voting Rights Act” of 1965.

Ritter cited energy communities that fall under the heading of coal-dependent and environmental justice.

“The two may overlap, they may be different, but thinking about both of them and thinking about them in a policy lens has been something that I find actually remarkable.”

These policy frameworks give Ritter hope, he said. “We have a chance to be a different architect if we take optimal advantage of what’s in the Inflation Reduction Act, (and) the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and if we decide that we’re going to be part of that future where we design it ourselves.”

Ritter ended his formal remarks by saying that it’s “really important to say that we’re not going fast enough… We’re not moving quickly enough, not globally, not as a nation.” And although Colorado is on a better track than almost any other state, as a nation “we need to scale up, we need to become speedier in our activism around climate change and energy solutions…”

Read Part Two, tomorrow…