{"id":8539,"date":"2011-10-16T16:23:50","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T22:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/?p=8539"},"modified":"2011-11-18T12:19:54","modified_gmt":"2011-11-18T19:19:54","slug":"staying-with-xcel-is-too-risky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/?p=8539","title":{"rendered":"Staying with Xcel Is Too Risky"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I support Ballot Issues 2B and 2C because staying with Xcel is too risky.\u00a0 Whoa, you say, that’s not what I’ve heard.\u00a0 That’s because what you’ve heard is what Xcel has spent half a million dollars, so far, to tell you.\u00a0\u00a0 The next time you get a slick mailer with a dire message from the Boulder Smart Energy Coalition, remember that these “concerned citizens” have gotten $250,000 (so far) from Xcel.\u00a0 Full disclosure: I’m not getting paid a penny to write this.<\/p>\n

The truth is that there are a number of bad things that could happen if Boulder stays with Xcel.\u00a0 Some are catastrophic, and less likely, but some bad things are virtually certain to happen.\u00a0 The first, and worst, is that Boulder citizens will continue to subsidize growth elsewhere in the state.\u00a0 Colorado is projected to double in size to between 9 and 10 million people by 2050.\u00a0 Xcel will build many new, large generating facilities to serve its share of 5,000,000 new electricity consumers, and these facilities will be built well in advance of need and will be paid for by existing Xcel customers, including the citizens of Boulder.\u00a0\u00a0 But, that growth might not happen, you say.\u00a0\u00a0 That’s even worse–Boulder will be stuck paying off plants that have no customers.\u00a0 It’s a lose-lose proposition and is certain to occur if we stick with Xcel.<\/p>\n

Another bad thing is that Boulder will certainly continue to pay profits to Xcel shareholders and bonuses to its management, only a very small portion of which will return to Xcel shareholders who happen to live in Boulder.\u00a0\u00a0 And, Xcel’s administrative costs will continue to leave Boulder (their headquarters are in Minneapolis).<\/p>\n

Things could get even worse. Xcel is a publicly traded company, and investors, who set share prices, demand quarter-to-quarter revenue growth.\u00a0 There is no guarantee that Xcel management won’t make decisions that increase our electric rates and compromise reliability in order to feed that growth addition.\u00a0 Pshaw, you say?\u00a0 In fact, just such a thing happened to Montana Power, which would have been a 100-year-old company if it had survived until next year.\u00a0 Bored by by life in a regulated utility, MPC’s CEO, with help from Goldman Sachs and some slick lobbying, got a last-minute bill passed by the Montana Legislature to de-regulate electricity.\u00a0 MPC sold all of its generation and transmission assets and all of its natural gas infrastructure and got out of the utility business altogether.\u00a0 It invested the money in a small fiber optic firm called Touch America, which soon was worth pennies on the dollar.\u00a0 In Butte, the last working copper mine was forced to close when electricity rates increased up to 20 times, and many of those folks in Montana who were faced with skyrocketing electric rates were also MPC shareholders, who now owned worthless Touch America stock.\u00a0 The only things standing between Boulder electric consumers and the greediest investors, managers and investment bankers are the Colorado State Legislature and the Public Utilities Commission.\u00a0 Not a very comforting thought.<\/p>\n

Voting no on Ballot Issues 2B and 2C will end any effort that could prevent these bad things from happening to Boulder.\u00a0\u00a0 I strongly urge a Yes vote on 2B and 2C to allow us to examine the costs and benefits of municipalization.\u00a0 Those benefits include bringing control of our electricity supply into our own community, ending our subsidy of growth elsewhere in the state, and keeping profits and administrative expenses in our local economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I support Ballot Issues 2B and 2C because staying with Xcel is too risky.\u00a0 Whoa, you say, that’s not what I’ve heard.\u00a0 That’s because what you’ve heard is what Xcel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":8541,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[497,162,351,101],"class_list":["post-8539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-election-2011","tag-municipalization","tag-puc","tag-xcel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8539"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9223,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8539\/revisions\/9223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}