Posts Tagged ‘energy’
Aspen Daily News | City of Aspen’s electric energy usage dropping faster than expected
Aspen at night by mobil'homme (flickr commons) "The city of Aspen’s programs to encourage energy efficiency by charging large users higher rates may be working too well, leading to lower-than-projected electricity sales and a revenue [...]
PostCarbon.Org | Victory at Hand for the Climate Movement?
Timing is the key shift the world needs to make in its thinking – this is no longer about the future, it’s about now. We don’t have 20 years to decide to act; we have 20 years to complete the task. If we follow the science, then in 20 [...]
No Explosions at Fracking Forum
photo and graphic courtesy Mike Chiropolos At a PLAN-Boulder County forum on the evening of November 19, a panel discussion of hydraulic fracturing of oil shale to produce natural gas (and sometimes oil), commonly known as “fracking,” [...]
The City Proceeds Carefully on a Municipal Electrical Utility
Heather Bailey, Executive Director of Energy Strategy and Electric Utility Development (photo from COB website) At a talk on the evening of November 8 sponsored by PLAN-Boulder County, Clean Energy Action, and 350.org, Heather Bailey, Executive [...]
Energy Intensity and Boulder’s Climate Action Framework
Odense, Denmark (Google Street View) With this year's expiration of the Kyoto Protocol and our Climate Action Plan (CAP) tax, the City of Boulder is looking to the future, trying to come up with an appropriate longer term climate action [...]
Turkish Lessons
Boulder continues to struggle with how to create a more sustainable community, as do like-minded cities around the country. One place to look for lessons in sustainability is to communities that have existed and thrived, more or less unchanged, [...]
Colorado to Preempt Local Regulation of Oil and Gas Industries
With the introduction of the Halliburton Loophole in 2005, the federal government largely abdicated its role in regulating the water quality impacts of oil and gas extraction. Local governments have been forced to step up, and communities in [...]
Help put Boulder’s Climate Smart Loan Program back on track
In the summer of 2010, Boulder's innovative Climate Smart Loan Program screeched to a halt, because the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) decided that the property assessed clean energy (PACE) financing mechanism amounted to a lien on any [...]
Boulder’s Municipalization Prospects: An Outside Perspective
I was invited by the editors of the Blue Line to write this piece after they saw some of the comments I had written for a utility industry newsletter that’s been following Boulder’s initiative to form its own utility. I must admit that I’m [...]
Is An Energy Transformation Afoot?
Almost immediately after we empowered Boulder to form a utility, a spate of articles appeared in the national press talking about the relative costs of coal and renewables, and the trends in those costs. There was Krugman's Here Comes Solar Energy [...]
