Click the link to read the release on Governor Polis’ website:

September 24, 2026

Today, Governor Jared Polis announced that the Colorado Energy Office (CEO), in partnership with Xcel Energy Services, Inc., has been selected to receive a $250 million investment from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to strengthen a key transmission connection between Colorado and Texas, linking the Western and Eastern grids. The project will help Colorado meet growing electricity demand, improve reliability, and expand access to lower-cost power.

“This means lower costs and fewer outages for Coloradans. By strengthening Colorado’s electric grid and expanding our ability to share power with other regions, we can better protect families and businesses during extreme weather and periods of high demand while continuing to save people money. Electric grid improvements are exactly the kind of long-term investment our country should be making to strengthen our economy and save people money,” said Governor Polis.

The Colorado side of the connection will move from Lamar to the higher capacity May Valley substation, connecting it directly to the Colorado Power Pathway transmission network. Together, these improvements will help reduce strain on the grid, prevent outages, and give consumers access to more sources of lower-cost electricity by drawing from a larger pool of energy sources. By upgrading existing equipment and power lines instead of building entirely new transmission corridors, the project can also increase capacity while limiting construction costs and land use impacts.

“President Trump’s Department of Energy is making significant investments in energy infrastructure to power America’s future and lower costs for hardworking families and businesses. This $250 million investment will ensure that households in Colorado and across the Western United States have access to secure, abundant, and reliable power, even during severe weather and periods of increased demand. Affordable, reliable energy is the fundamental building block of a thriving economy and vibrant communities, and President Trump and Secretary Wright are committed to securing America’s energy future,” said Tim J. Walsh, Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management at the U.S. Department of Energy.

The nation’s power grid is divided into large regional systems that currently have a limited ability to share electricity between them, making it difficult to manage the demands of multiple energy grids. The Colorado-to-Texas Western-Eastern Intertie Modernization Initiative, or CO2TX, will upgrade an aging connection near Lamar that allows electricity to move between the Western and Eastern grids. Critically, today’s announced federal funding will support the project’s total $1.2 billion cost with the Department of Energy’s $250 million dollar contribution and Xcel Energy Services Inc.’s 80% match, cementing the project’s financing.

A closer map view of the Colorado to Texas connection project with additional project information reading as follows: Increase tie from 210 MW to 700 MW with capability for 2000 MW in the future; 37 – 136% increase in the Western Interconnection/Eastern Interconnection transfer capability. Expands access to lower-cost energy and supports rapidly growing large loads. Strengthen resilience during extreme weather by providing link between the Eastern and Western Interconnections. Cost benefit scenarios of 1.2 – 4.6.

“Updating and improving our power grid infrastructure is essential to ensure Coloradans have access to reliable, low-cost clean energy throughout the day and year round. Xcel Energy Services Inc’s proposed project will allow optimized use of clean energy resources across a much larger geographical footprint which will save Coloradans money on energy costs. We are grateful to the Department of Energy for investing in Colorado’s grid resilience to benefit our regions for years to come,” said Will Toor, Executive Director of the Colorado Energy Office.

The project will replace older equipment with a modern system that can move electricity more reliably between the two grids. It will also upgrade existing power lines with higher-capacity wires, allowing lines to carry more electricity without building entirely new transmission corridors. Specifically, the project will increase the amount of electricity that can move between the two regional grids from 210 megawatts to 700 megawatts, with the ability to expand to 2,000 megawatts as demand grows.

Upgrading the connection and expanding Colorado’s ability to bring more energy onto the grid will also create new economic opportunities and good-paying jobs. Qualifying construction work on the project will be required to meet federal apprenticeship utilization and prevailing wage standards. This will help to train the next generation of skilled workers and ensures Coloradans building the state’s energy future earn competitive wages.

The funding behind today’s announcement was made available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, which authorized DOE’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships initiative, and the Speed to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and other Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades (SPARK) funding opportunities. Colorado was selected through the SPARK program.

“Reliability is at the heart of this project and everything we do at Xcel Energy. Modernizing the Lamar Tie will strengthen the connection between the Western and Eastern electric grids, helping us better serve customers during extreme weather, meet growing energy needs and make the most of affordable energy resources across the region. With support from the Department of Energy, this smart, cost-effective investment will strengthen reliability and deliver long-term value for customers and communities today and into the future,” said Robert S. Kenney, President of Xcel Energy–Colorado.

CEO is the prime recipient, with Public Service Company of Colorado and Southwestern Public Service Company, both Xcel Energy Services Inc. subsidiaries, providing the funding match, system planning, design, and implementation. Southwest Power Pool will provide regional coordination and grid expertise.

Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Naveena Sadasivam):

December 12, 2025

While the U.S. sits in self-imposed isolation, the rest of the world, led by China, raced ahead to invest in renewables and commit to climate action

As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.

The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it. 

It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.

“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.”

These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. Over the past decade, however, the hopes that developed countries will prioritize financing both the global energy transition and adaptation measures to protect the world’s most vulnerable countries have been dashed — in part by rightward lurches in domestic politics, external crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and revolts by wealthy-country voters over cost-of-living concerns.

The resulting message to developing countries has been unmistakable: Help is not on the way.

In the vacuum left behind, a different engine of global climate action has emerged, one not political or diplomatic but industrial. A growing marketplace of green technologies — primarily solar, wind, and batteries — has made the adoption of renewable energy far faster and more cost-effective than almost anyone predicted. The world has dramatically exceeded expectations for solar power generation in particular, producing roughly 8 times more last yearthan in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed.

China is largely responsible for the breakneck pace of clean energy growth. It now produces about 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels. In the first half of 2025, the country added more than twice as much new solar capacity as the rest of the world combined. As a result of these Chinese-led global energy market changes and other countries’ Paris Agreement pledges, the world is now on a path to see 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, compared to preindustrial temperatures, far lower than the roughly 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) projections expected just 10 years ago. 

These policies can be viewed as a symbol of global cooperation on climate change, but for Chinese leadership, the motivation is primarily economic. That, experts say, may be why they’re working. China’s policies are driving much of the rest of the world’s renewable energy growth. As the cost of solar panels and wind turbines drops year over year, it is enabling other countries, especially in the Global South, to choose cleaner sources of electricity over fossil fuels — and also to purchase some of the world’s cheapest mass-produced electric vehicles. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia are all expected to see massive increases in solar deployment in the next few years, thanks to their partnerships with Chinese firms. 

“China is going to, over time, create a new narrative and be a much more important driver for global climate action,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Shuo said that the politics-and-rhetoric-driven approach to solving climate change favored by wealthy countries has proved unreliable and largely failed. In its place, a Chinese-style approach that aligns countries’ economic agendas with decarbonizationwill prove to be more successful, he predicted. 

Meanwhile, many countries have begun reorganizing their diplomatic and economic relationships in ways that no longer assume American leadership. That shift accelerated this year in part due to Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to impose tariffs on U.S. allies, and more broadly, to slink away into self-imposed isolation. European countries facing punishing tariffs have looked to deepen trade relationships with China, Japan, and other Asian countries. The EU’s new carbon border tax, which applies levies to imports from outside the bloc, will take effect in January. The move was once expected to trigger conflict between the EU and U.S., but is now proceeding without outright support — or strong opposition — from the Trump administration.

African countries, too, are asserting leadership. The continent hosted its own climate summit earlier this year, pledging to raise $50 billion to promote at least 1,000 locally led solutions in energy, agriculture, water, transport, and resilience by 2030. “The continent has moved the conversation from crisis to opportunity, from aid to investment, and from external prescription to African-led,” said Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission. “We have embraced the powerful truth [that] Africa is not a passive recipient of climate solutions, but the actor and architect of these solutions.”

The U.S. void has also allowed China to throw more weight around in international climate negotiations. Although Chinese leadership remained cautious and reserved in the negotiation halls in Belém, the country pushed its agenda on one issue in particular: trade. Since China has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, tariffs on its products could hinder not only its own economic growth but also the world’s energy transition. As a result the final agreement at COP30, which like all other United Nations climate agreements is ultimately non-binding, included language stipulating that unilateral trade measures like tariffs “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”

Calling out tariffs on the first page of the final decision at COP30 would not have been possible if negotiators for the United States had been present, according to Shuo. “China was able to force this issue on the agenda,” he said. 

But Shuo added that other countries are still feeling the gravitational pull of U.S. policies, even as the Trump administration sat out climate talks this year. In Belém last month, the United States’ opposition to the International Maritime Organization’s carbon framework influenced conversations about structuring rules for decarbonizing the shipping industry. And knowing that the U.S. wouldn’t contribute to aid funds shaped climate finance agreements.

In the years to come, though, those pressures may very well fade. As the world pivots in response to a U.S. absence, it may find it has more to gain than expected.

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Climate Center website (Peter Goble):

October 8, 2025

A recent email query about renewable power got me thinking about where we produce renewable power and why. The reasons are complicated. However, the weather is critical in determining where we generate renewable energy such as solar and wind power. I’ll be candid enough to say that I like renewable power, but my goal for this blogpost is not to comment on the merits of generating electricity one way or another. My goal is simply to share a couple maps from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and discuss why we see the patterns we do. 

Solar Power: Solar power production potential is determined by geographic factors such as latitude altitude, and weather. Figure 1 below, from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows “Global Horizontal Solar Irradiance” across the Contiguous United States. For practical purposes, we can think of this as “solar power production potential,” or even more simply “how much sunlight do you get?”

Perhaps the most obvious pattern in Figure 1 is the difference between the northern and southern United States. The “Sun Belt” is aptly named. The southern United States receives more direct sunlight than the northern United States because it is closer to the equator. Northern states are blessed with nice, long summer days with plenty of sunshine hours, but sunlight pierces the atmosphere at a more direct angle at lower latitudes. Even within Colorado, we can see a difference in solar power potential from south-to-north. Areas like the Four Corners, San Luis Valley, and Comanche Grasslands (all in southern Colorado listed west-to-east respectively) stand out as sunny areas.

Altitude is an important factor as well. Even under clear skies, not all sunlight that passes through the top of earth’s atmosphere makes it to the surface. Some is scattered by particulates and some is absorbed by water vapor, dust, or ozone. Sunlight is thus less intense at lower elevations. Therefore, all else being equal, high elevation areas will have more solar power production potential than low elevation areas. You have probably felt this either hiking in our Colorado mountains or traveling down to sea level. The sun feels more intense on the skin, and it is easier to burn at higher altitudes.

Why is it that Colorado’s highest elevations do not show as high of solar production potential as the valleys? Weather. Our mountains are more likely to be shrouded by clouds due to orographic lift: As air is forced over our mountain ranges it must rise. As air rises it cools. As air cools, the water vapor in the air condenses, forming clouds, and oftentimes, rain or snow. One obvious example of the role of weather in solar power generation potential can be seen looking at Oregon. Western Oregon has a wealth of onshore airflow from the Pacific Ocean, bringing thick, low clouds and drizzle, which block sunlight. Eastern Oregon is high desert. The Cascade Mountain Range blocks clouds and moisture from moving inland. As a result, solar power production potential is much higher in eastern Oregon than western Oregon. While it is less obvious in Colorado than Oregon, some of our driest and least cloudy locations stand out. For instance, the San Luis Valley (south-central Colorado) is known as “The Land of the Cold Sunshine.” This area receives less than 10″ of precipitation annually, and has some of our highest solar power production potential in the state.

Wind Power: We can also take a look at wind power production potential across the United States, and dissect some of the drivers behind it. Figure 2 shows annual average wind speeds at 10 meters (~33ft) above ground level across the contiguous United States. A few patterns jump out here: 1. If we look at the western United States (including Colorado), higher elevation terrain does have higher average wind speeds. 2. The middle of the country is windy. 3. The east side of the Rocky Mountains is windy, including in Colorado. 4. Oh boy, our poor neighbors to the north (sorry, Wyoming)! 

Winds with height: On average, we do see wind speeds increase with height. This is due to increased pressure gradients, decreased friction, and reduced air density. However, Figure 2, which shows average windspeeds, does not tell the whole story. Our mountain air is only ~70-80% as dense as sea level air, so it takes stronger gusts to produce the same amount of force. Turbines at higher elevations will not generate as much power for a given windspeed as turbines at lower elevations.

The middle of the country: Figure 2 also clearly shows the “wind belt” is the high plains and southern plains around 100 degrees longitude (North Dakota down to west Texas). This area is frequently subject to sharp boundaries between air masses, or fronts. As a result, it is often windy. The terrain roughness is also an important factor. It is easier to get frequent high winds over open grasslands than forests. Eastern Colorado can be thought of as part of this wind belt, and has a relatively smooth, grassy surface with few obstacles.

East side of the Rockies: If we look at Colorado in Figure 2 we see that higher elevations are winder, but we can also see that there is an increase in winds east of the Continental Divide. There is both a sharp increase in wind speeds at high elevations immediately east of the Divide, and higher average wind speeds more generally across the eastern Colorado Plains. Our prevailing wind direction in Colorado is most commonly west-to-east, especially from October through April. Thanks to our old friend gravity, air traveling uphill slows down, and air traveling downhill speeds up. We call the days when air races down the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains downslope wind days. These blustery days are usually unseasonably warm, but can be cold if the air is coming from the north or northwest. Cross-mountain airflow does not automatically create downslope winds. Sometimes air in the valleys is too cold and dense to be forced out of the way by air moving over the Rockies. On these days we more commonly see wavy streaks of clouds instead of strong surface winds. In fact, you may also notice in Figure 2 that Denver and surrounding areas are somewhat protected, sitting in the Platte River Valley. Denver has plenty of windy days, but sometimes the strong winds pass overhead without completely mixing down to the surface.

Windy Wyoming: I love the way southern Wyoming from Cheyenne to Casper stands out in Figure 2. Southern Wyoming is the closest thing to a gap in the Rocky Mountains, so when changing weather crosses the Rockies, air gets forced through southern Wyoming like a wind tunnel. The impacts of these gap winds bleed into Colorado. For instance, Wellington is windier than Fort Collins or Denver on average. Gap winds, combined with downslope winds, also are a factor in southeastern Colorado. There are high wind warning signs on I-25 south of Pueblo as winds race down the leeward side of the Sangre de Cristos, and shoot through the gap between the Sangre de Cristos and Wet Mountains. You will see many wind turbines in this area too.

Nature sets the initial conditions for where solar and wind power can be most readily generated. Overall, Colorado experiences both plenty of sunshine and plenty of wind. Some parts of our state are especially well positioned for one or the other. Our southern valleys have strong solar production potential due to a combination of relatively low latitude, high altitude, and clear skies. Our eastern plains have strong wind production potential due to frequent exposure to strong weather fronts, relatively smooth, grassy terrain, and being downwind of the Rocky Mountains.