Sunlight, greenery and electric co-ops

Anne B. Butterfield

This decade is the warmest on record, and all that warmth can pull all the more moisture from the seas to dump it on our nation’s capital, as if trying to deliver a message.

The climate has spoken but skeptics have misunderstood. But also the burgeoning clean energy industry in China should also strike us as an emergency.

At a recent Rotary meeting in Boulder, Alice Madden, Climate Change Advisor of the Governor’s Office, said last week, “While the United States dithers debating the existence of climate change, the Chinese are investing nine billion dollars per month and have surpassed the States in patents -- imagine a world where the Chinese own all of our debt and all emerging technologies.” Pretty horrifying.

Fortunately, a bill to assure that Colorado’s largest utility will produce 30 percent of its power from renewables by 2020 was firmly supported by Xcel Energy’s Paula Connelly this week in a senate committee. Also the retirement of two small coal plants in Xcel’s portfolio are slated for closure; however the closure of the big kahuna –- Cherokee at 717 megawatts -- keeps being mentioned furtively, the way the fattest, beautifullest carp in the pond comes to surface from time to time. Let’s hope the high level rumors come true.

Back in DC, senators received calls by the thousands this week to urge them to power ahead for a comprehensive climate and clean energy bill. The seas are choppy, but all engines are “go”.

However, among Colorado’s electric co-op’s (REA’s), a culture of business-as-usual has become so calcified as to attract legislative attention. The governance in the REA’s concerns us for putting a drag on the national effort to get competitive on the use and manufacturing of technologies for producing clean domestic power. Colorado’s REA’s only need to meet a standard of 10 percent renewables by 2020, and many REA ratepayers would like to pick up the pace.

Representative Claire’s Levy has written a bill for transparency in governance (HB 1098) which spells out election procedures to open up a culture of incumbency among the REA boards. It would require REA’s to publicize the dates of elections and deadlines for entering the race, place candidates’ names randomly on ballots, disclose employee contributions to campaigns, and prohibit the use of co-op money to back any particular candidate. The bill is successfully moving through the legislature.

Mona Neely, publisher of the co-op publication Colorado Country Life has claimed that the bill is an attempt to muzzle co-ops so they can be taken over by a group with “a different agenda,” and asks, “why would you keep those who actually know what’s going on inside the co-op from speaking out?”

Methinks she swaps the interests of the co-op with that of the incumbent leadership. Transparency should be an utmost concern even if that means (gasp) losing out to duly elected directors who can provide new direction.

Our neighbors to the north, Poudre Valley REA, has been running regular small newspaper ads all year about their green credentials, having won an award from the Governor’s Energy Office. However, this expense of ratepayer money is hard to cipher since such material could be stuffed into monthly utility bills. Tellingly, the ads have increased to now half page in size in the run-up to the election for board of directors on the 27th of this month. A healthy skeptic might say that the co-op is telling voters (and newspaper editors) to support the incumbents.

That celebrated green REA has gotten up to one percent renewable power generation, with solar panels on 40 rooftop across their service area, according to Mark Daily of PVREA.

Most concerning, Colorado’s REAs have an imbedded commitment to coal, with long term contracts with Tri-State Generation and Transmission which has been financing the Sunflower coal fired plants in Kansas, a multiphase project that has defaulted several times to the federal Rural Utilities Service. It’s a long range money sink to reckless management and a depleting and dangerous fuel.

And how did the defaults of the Sunflower plants come to light? Through the perusal of 10,000 pages of legal documents by some hard nosed environmentalists.

When PVREA customers learn about Tri State’s effort to build three new coal plants, they are almost unanimously surprised and opposed, says Jan Petersen, candidate for the board at PVREA. His view is that REA’s need to stop acting “like middle management that implements Tri-State’s edicts” and go back to their roots of being face-to-face democratic and grassroots organizations. The sunlight that comes with diversity is a pretty great thing, too.