It takes a Governor

Anne B Butterfield, May 24, 2009

When a public official offers a public opinion ostensibly as a private citizen, his view should be subjected to a special smell test. And when the Deputy Director of the Governor's Energy Office Seth Portner took aim at Boulder’s desire to retire the coal portion of the local power plant called Valmont ("Tilting at power plants" Daily Camera May 9) his writing gave a whiff that was disturbingly off-base.

Portner asserted that coal emissions could be deeply reduced by customers’ vigorous household efficiency efforts, the way that SUV factories got shuttered when people stopped buying SUV’s.

Hello? If lower demand affected utilities, the two gas-fired turbines at Fort St. Vrain and the coal fired plant called Comanche 3 would never have been built because they are excess and expensive capacity. (And the only thing shuttering SUV plants is the lack of car loans and bailouts.)

Let’s be clear: every American household needs to trim its energy use to the admirable extent of Portner’s personal example, and doing so, our economy would flourish from fuel savings and job creation. Efficiency is the least cost energy and the fastest emission reduction plan, no contest.

But even if most of Boulder’s buildings reached Portner’s level of efficiency, his curiously unnamed utility might not quickly respond by shutting down coal plants, since that utility is bringing another large coal plant on line now, because utilities get paid for their asset base.

So our predicament is not about choosing either efficiency or political force to shut down coal plants, this is a time for both-and.

Far from being “quixotic” as described by Portner, shutting down coal plants (or hybridizing them) is a part of utility planning in today’s world. In 2012, Xcel will shut down 229 megawatts of older coal capacity as indicated in its resource plan, and even China has begun requiring power companies to retire an older, more polluting power plant for each new one they build. But in Colorado’s New Energy Economy we are not doing even as well as China, because our shut-down rate of old coal is knocked out by the ramp-up rate of new coal in Xcel’s 500 MW portion of Comanche 3.

Therefore if Boulder can convert Valmont with clean generation plus organized efficiency we should do it, because Xcel is expanding its coal and gas capacity in excess of the 16% reserve margin, and exposing us to fuel and carbon costs.

Rather than alluding to these issues, Portner’s essay painted Xcel into a corporate fairy tale with Exxon, where both vendors could not exist without consumers. Really? Tell that to the city planners who want a trolley line in their city but Standard Oil, predecessor to Exxon, joined with other companies to buy out 88 percent of our nation’s trolley lines, tore up all the tracks and resold the franchises as bus lines, resulting in anti trust violations and whopping fines of $5,000.

With smelly, noisy buses making suburbs and cars more attractive, we are now stuck in auto-addled suburbia, often overweight. So while it’s true that Americans are wasteful, none of us wanted our efficient systems to be switched out with wasteful ones by companies that grew to obviate our local powers.

It takes a corporation to do that.

Xcel does much more than meet our voracious needs, it shapes them by controlling information and crowding around our legislators. Ask Nancy La Placa, who was lobbying Colorado legislators to support a bill to put fuel mix disclosure on utility bills so that consumers could be more conscious and less voracious. She was brow beaten for it so rudely by a senior Xcel lobbyist that she documented the abuse with CEO Dick Kelley. Xcel doesn’t want customers being conscious of their fuel mix because to do so might trim the use of those fuels in which the company has the most equity for rate-basing.

With monopolies, markets are not free. And if legislators and regulators were able to protect the market and the public interest, Nancy’s bill would have passed by now. We need more political force.

It takes a Governor.

Insulating and sealing our buildings is necessary, but not sufficient. We need larger goals, like getting complete and functional transparency from our utility and reducing the coal burning capacity in Colorado.

For that, it takes a Governor.

And it is going to take all of Boulder's efforts, too.