{"id":6564,"date":"2011-06-03T22:44:53","date_gmt":"2011-06-04T04:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/?p=6564"},"modified":"2011-08-11T21:16:24","modified_gmt":"2011-08-12T03:16:24","slug":"the-power-to-shape-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/?p=6564","title":{"rendered":"The Power to Shape the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At a city sponsored forum on June 2 entitled \u201cBoulder\u2019s Energy Future: Know Your Power\u201d David Driskell, the city\u2019s Director of Planning and Sustainability, declared, \u201cThe energy industry is changing. We can either be in the forefront of it and be a leader, or we can just go with the flow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another forum panelist, Paul Fenn<\/a>, the president of Local Power, Inc. and one of the principal originators of the technique of community choice aggregation, claimed, \u201cThe key challenge is can you change the business model\u201d of the electrical utility industry from the \u201cRockefeller era\u201d one in which customers are \u201cpassive, dependent\u201d into one in which customers are \u201ctransformed into owners of their energy systems.\u201d\u00a0 A pamphlet distributed by the city at the forum recounted accelerating technological developments in energy, such as the \u201csmart grid\u201d and advanced storage devices, including batteries, flywheels and fuel cells, and observed, \u201cthe electrical grid is increasingly starting to look like the Internet \u2014 an infrastructure for which innovative applications can be developed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jonathan Koehn, the city\u2019s regional sustainability coordinator, pointed out that although Xcel\u2019s electricity rates were \u201cstable\u201d from 1990 to 2003, they have increased since that period and are projected to rise substantially in the future due to the cost of new generation facilities. Koehn also noted that fuel costs will be an important variable in future rates. The city\u2019s pamphlet asserted that \u201cXcel expects its rates to increase by about 4 percent in constant dollars by 2020 (33 percent after inflation) and by about 8 percent by 2030 (78 percent after inflation).\u201d<\/p>\n

No panelist asserted that the rates of a Boulder electrical municipal utility would be lower than Xcel\u2019s.\u00a0 But one of them, Yael Gichon, the city\u2019s residential sustainability coordinator, stated that they would be \u201ccomparable\u201d and that a city-owned electrical utility would be \u201cfinancially feasible.\u201d The city\u2019s pamphlet commented that there \u201cis evidence that the cost of renewables will become as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuels.\u201d Fenn predicted that a sophisticated local electrical utility could reduce costs by moderating peak demands, exploiting local, renewable energy sources, and avoiding huge investments in generation facilities. \u00a0Driskell said that detailed financial projections for a municipal electrical utility would be released in the coming weeks. Several panelists indicated that the rates of such a utility would be set by a board of appointed citizens.<\/p>\n

The forum attracted a capacity crowd, including six City Council members, to a large meeting room at the East Boulder Community Center. It featured a panel of nine speakers, among whom were Tom Plant, former state representative and former director of the Governor\u2019 energy office, Kurt Haeger and Rob Osborne from Xcel, Steve Catanach, light and power manager for the City of Fort Collins, Fenn, and several city staff members.<\/p>\n

System reliability was a major subject. Koehn said that Xcel\u2019s overall system surpasses the national average in reliability and that the municipal utilities in Longmont and Fort Collins had better reliability than Xcel\u2019s Boulder region. Catanach added that Fort Collins\u2019 electrical utility performed in the \u201cupper quartile of utilities\u201d in the nation and that Fort Collins averaged 41 minutes to fix an outage, Longmont 34 minutes, and Loveland 64 minutes \u2014 all times which, he implied, are considered good.<\/p>\n

The potential for a sharp increase in the use of renewable energy was also extensively considered, although no specific renewable energy targets were proposed for a municipal utility. Koehn claimed that Xcel now uses coal for 60 percent of its electricity, natural gas for 28 percent, hydroelectric for one percent, and wind and solar for 11 percent, and he noted that in 2009 Xcel ranked sixth in the nation in wind-generated electricity. Haeger (from Xcel) commented that the price of wind power increased significantly after 2006, but has fallen somewhat in the last year. Nevertheless, he said that wind is the cheapest source of renewable energy, while observing that effective storage of wind-generated electricity remains a major technical barrier to its widespread use throughout the nation\u2019s electrical grid.<\/p>\n

Plant reported that Aspen\u2019s municipal electrical utility uses coal for only 27 percent of its electricity and that it plans to reduce that percentage to zero in the coming years. He also stated that on average the 57 electrical utilities in the state of Colorado rely on coal for 66.5 percent of their electricity. Catanach estimated that about 75 percent of Fort Collins\u2019 electricity is fueled by coal.<\/p>\n

At the end of the forum the panel addressed a number of questions from the audience, many of which implied skepticism about the prudence of creating a municipal electrical utility in Boulder. When asked why the city intends to place at least one issue about Boulder\u2019s energy system on the ballot this November, Driskell answered that speed is important because the city\u2019s occupation tax on Xcel (in lieu of the prior franchise fee) only lasts five years and that, if the voters decide in favor of a municipal utility, it would take several years to establish. He also said that certain federal energy tax credits of potential value to a municipal utility will expire soon. He further explained that Xcel is currently preparing a resource plan for the future and that, if it is approved by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission before Boulder opts out of Xcel\u2019s system \u2014 assuming, without knowing, that Boulder will opt out of that system \u2014 then Boulder would have to pay for the aspects of the plan that were attributable to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At a city sponsored forum on June 2 entitled \u201cBoulder\u2019s Energy Future: Know Your Power\u201d David Driskell, the city\u2019s Director of Planning and Sustainability, declared, \u201cThe energy industry is changing. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":6565,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[45,162,237,101],"class_list":["post-6564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-energy","tag-municipalization","tag-renewables","tag-xcel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6564"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7333,"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6564\/revisions\/7333"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}