This story by Allen Best appeared on BigPivots.com on April 1,2025. We are sharing it in two parts.
The letter dispatched to Colorado’s legislative leaders on Friday intended a rebuke. It seemed to say “whatever in the world are you thinking?” It was implicitly directed at the administration of Gov. Jared Polis and allies.
The 64 signatories described a bill being readied for late-session introduction that would have Colorado’s electrical utilities hitting 90% decarbonization goals by 2035 as compared to 2005 levels and 100% by 2040.
The bill, if it became law, risked “driving energy costs higher at a time when our state is already nearing an affordability crisis,” said the letter.
Colorado currently requires utilities to achieve an 80% reduction by 2030, and nearly all are on track to meet or exceed that requirement. Vacant are requirements for the 2030s. The state requires 100% by 2050.
What’s going on here? Is there good cause for the angst?
What caught my immediate attention was the diversity of names and organizations. Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy, Colorado’s two investor-owned utilities, signed it, as did about eight labor unions who can usually be found at the table in energy policy discussions — and perhaps were enlisted to the cause by the big utilities.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, Colorado Springs, Utilities, and the Colorado Rural Electric Association.
Oh, and the mayor of Pueblo signed the letter as did a couple of pro-nuclear groups, Action Colorado, a Pueblo-based organization with members from southeastern Colorado, and Northwest Colorado Energy Initiative.
Then my eyebrows arched.
Holy Cross Energy.
And La Plata Electric Energy.
You can download the letter here.
Holy Cross Energy has the boldest energy goals in Colorado. It aims to achieve 100% emissions-free electricity by 2030 for its 48,000 members in the Vail, Aspen, and Battlement Mesa areas. It’s already getting close. The electrical cooperative last year achieved 75%. That included 90% in October. So far in 2025, Holy Cross has been at 80% renewable generation.
“Holy Cross Energy expects to reach between 95% and 100% clean energy supply by 2030,” Bryan Hannegan, the chief executive, told me by e-mail on Monday.
By then, Holy Cross had sent a new letter to Colorado’s legislative leadership. It no longer asked legislative leaders to bar the bill being discussed from being introduced this late in the session. Hannegan said that after consultation with directors of the cooperative over the weekend, Holy Cross had adopted a neutral stance.
La Plata Electric was puzzling for a little bit different reason. The Durango-based cooperative has been led since November by Chris Hansen. Before his move to southwest Colorado, Hansen was a state senator whose fingerprints were on much of Colorado’s most important energy transition legislation of the last six years.
Hansen was the prime author of a bill that required Colorado’s utilities to join a regional transmission organization, a market structure for sharing electricity, by 2030. As he has explained to me, Colorado cannot afford to be an island. To achieve the proposed very deep carbon reduction goals, Colorado’s utilities need to be integrated into a market structure for sharing electricity that is bigger than one time zone, bigger than one weather event.
To help that along, he also sponsored a bill to create the quasi-governmental organization called the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority. The explicit mission is to facilitate necessary transmission that an Xcel Energy, for example, might not want to build but which will be necessary to get to 100% emissions-free electricity.
Presumably with his guidance, La Plata’s name was on the letter. Why?
“As a group,” says the letter, “we have not historically agreed on all aspects of the energy transition and have often engaged in vigorous debate on what the best path forward is for our State’s energy future. However, we come together to ask that you not grant late bill status for legislation that would preemptively advance the clean energy targets for the power sector forward a full decade, from 2050 to 2040 – not because we don’t think it may be possible to get there, but because we have to build out the framework thoughtfully, and with intention, to ensure that the energy transition doesn’t needlessly result in soaring energy costs.”
The view from one utility
Seeking clarity, I contacted Mark Gabriel, the chief executive of United Power during the last four years. Before that, he ran the Western Area Power Administration out of Lakewood for eight years.
“It’s not a rebuke, it’s common sense,” he responded when I wrote him. We talked the next day. United Power’s name was on the letter, too.
Gabriel said it’s not just that the bill is being prepared for introduction with little more than a month left in the legislative session. He shared broader concerns about whether the goals identified in the draft bill can be achieved without sacrificing reliability and affordability.
“To hit those numbers will require a lot more transmission capacity than we have. Nobody is going to turn transmission around quickly enough. Transmission and quick should never be used in the same sentence.”
The average transmission project takes a decade, he said, and long-distance transmission lines take 15 to 16 years.
True, Xcel Energy expects it will complete the Colorado Power Pathway, its 550-mile loop around eastern Colorado, by 2027, six years after its application to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. But the resources are in one time zone and one weather system. Even if this $1.7 billion investment allows Xcel to better tap Colorado’s abundant renewable energy resources, Colorado will remain mostly an island.
Hansen, in his response to my inquiry, had also drawn attention to transmission. He said the bill as written “presents significant operational challenges for implementation. In particular, it does not address existing and future transmission constraints or Colorado’s requirement for all operators to join an RTO by 2030.”
An RTO is a regional transmission organization, or a market mechanism for sharing electricity. The Southwest Power Pool has the lead. Colorado utilities have been joining SPP’s day-ahead market, which is to begin in April 2026. Markets+, a more advanced iteration, will arrive in 2027. United Power has committed to SPP, but Gabriel doesn’t see this being the full answer, either.
What matters entirely, he went on to say, is that we’re preparing to close coal plants even as demand for electricity is on the verge of rapid growth.
“So you have demand growing one way and supply going the other, and if you overlay the change in generation mix, it becomes an impossible situation to solve. All three at the same time when only two are possible.”
Gabriel left me with this quote: “Electrons follow the law of physics. Electricity follows the law of politics.”
What exactly are the politics of this situation?
Read Part Two, tomorrow…
Allen Best publishes the e-journal Big Pivots, which chronicles the energy transition in Colorado and beyond.