During both the Obama and Biden presidencies, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry often accused the administration of waging a “war on energy.” It was a demonstrably false allegation. The most either of the Democrats did to attack the energy industry was to incrementally increase common sense regulations and environmental protections, which apparently did little to hamper energy development. The so-called shale revolution, when “fracking” opened up huge new reserves of tight oil and gas, began under Obama, and truly came to fruition under Biden, when domestic oil and gas production reached new record highs. Meanwhile, Biden’s Interior Department approved dozens of utility-scale solar and wind and long-delayed transmission projects on public lands.
But now the Trump administration is, in fact, waging a very real war on energy — renewable energy, that is, namely wind and solar power. They’ve frozen and even clawed back funds for projects, killed federal clean energy tax credits, subjected wind and solar projects on public lands to heightened reviews, and eliminated wind energy leasing areas off Oregon’s coast. And they’ve done it all as America is supposedly gripped by an “energy emergency.”
Now, the Interior Department has gone even further with a new order that threatens to kill all new renewable power development on federal lands. I know there are some readers out there who might applaud this, since so many of our public lands are not suited for sprawling utility-scale solar or wind developments. But this order — deceptively and cynically titled, “Managing Federal Energy Resources and Protecting the Environment” — would potentially replace proposed wind and solar projects with coal or uranium mines and/or power plants, oil and gas fields, or other non-renewable energy projects.
The order requires land management agencies, when reviewing proposed solar or wind energy projects, to consider “a reasonable range of alternatives that includes projects with capacity densities meeting or exceeding that of the proposed project.”
Capacity density is basically the amount of energy a project can generate per acre. According to the Interior Department’s calculations (we’ll get to the flaws there in a moment), the capacity density (megawatts/acre) for various power sources are:
Advanced nuclear reactor: 33.17 MW/acre
Combined cycle gas plant: 5.4 to 24.42 MW/acre (depending on configuration)
In other words, wind and solar are the big losers, taking up far more space to generate the same amount of electricity as, say, a nuclear plant. According to the new order, this raises the question of “whether the use of federal lands for any wind and solar projects is consistent with the law.”
This isn’t a new argument: The specter of “renewable energy sprawl” has long been wielded to push back against solar and wind development. And certainly the amount of space a project takes up should be one of many considerations in whether to permit it. But should it really have more weight than the amount of damage the project would inflict? How about pollutants emitted per megawatt, or amount of harm to people, the climate, and the environment per megawatt? Is there consideration for the fact that there is a lot of space between the turbines within a wind facility that is minimally affected? And why doesn’t their chart include hydroelectric, which has the lowest capacity density of all?
Also, the Interior Department’s calculations are a bit fishy, or at least incomplete. They say they are based on a 2023 Sargent & Lundy report commissioned by the Energy Information Administration. The report is not on capacity density, but rather the costs of building and operating various power generating technologies. When determining the acreage of the nuclear and fossil fuel plants, they do not take into account the land required for fuel production, which can be extensive.
The supercritical coal plant referenced in the report, for example, would require a mere 600 acres. Yet, the Four Corners coal plant in northwestern New Mexico — along with its associated Navajo Mine (current mining areas as well as reclaimed areas), Morgan Lake, and coal combustion waste disposal facilities — covers (and wrecks) some 15,000 acres. That acreage will continue to grow for as long as the plant operates, since the mine and waste dumps will continue to expand. Compare that to the 2,400 acres covered by the nearby San Juan solar plant.
I’d also argue that if the goal is to get the most energy out of every acre of public land (which is a silly goal, but whatever), then they should figure in the amount of energy the proposed project consumes. Coal mining and oil and gas drilling require large amounts of electricity and petroleum (along with human labor, which is also a form of energy), as does transporting coal and gas by train and pipeline. Uranium enrichment, which is necessary to produce reactor fuel, is extremely power-intensive.
None of this really matters to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, however. That’s because he knows we’re not really in an “energy emergency,” and that it is merely a fabricated excuse to give more handouts and regulatory relief to his fossil fuel-industry buddies and to get revenge on Trump’s political opponents by punishing cleaner energy sources.
Proposed utility-scale solar and wind facilities on public lands should by all means be scrutinized and subjected to the same reviews as any other projects, contrary to what the Abundance faction might believe. The projects should be denied if their impacts outweigh the benefits, with bonus benefit-points for solar or wind projects that displace or replace coal or natural gas generation.
But judging the projects based on a virtually meaningless metric is not only spiteful, unfair, and stupid, but it also will needlessly hamper the fight against health-harming pollution and climate change. And that’s simply irresponsible, at best. [ed. emphasis mine]
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
Speaking of fake energy emergencies … In May, the Bureau of Land Management completed its environmental review and approval of the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in Utah’s Lisbon Valley in just 11 days. The rush, sans public input, ostensibly was necessary to get the mine online quickly to address the supposed uranium shortage.
The mine’s proponent, Anfield Resources, apparently doesn’t share the Trump administration’s sense of urgency. At the end of April, the Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining asked Anfield for more information on its application to commence large mining operations, which was deemed technically incomplete. Anfield has yet to respond. The company is also not rushing forward to get state approval for its water treatment plant permit or to reopen its Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, where the Velvet-Wood’s uranium would be processed.
In other words, the fast-tracked permitting was merely a ruse, intended to bypass environmental regulations and public input, not to expedite the project, itself.
***
Photo-illustration of the Animas River a few days after the spill from the air. Jonathan P. Thompson photo and illustration.
It’s the tenth anniversary of the Gold King Mine blowout that affected the Animas and San Juan rivers in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. A few folks have asked if I’m going to write anything about it — since I did write a book about it — but I don’t think there’s much more to say, really.
The Gold King Mine continues to drain acidic, heavy metal-laden water — though it is being treated before it’s released into the watershed — and neighboring mines continue to do the same (though they aren’t being treated). Superfund designation hasn’t been the boon to water quality that some hoped for, nor did it stigmatize Silverton as many feared it would (property values continue to soar into the unreachable zone).
While the event did bring more attention to the problem of abandoned mine sites (even though the Gold King wasn’t technically abandoned when it blew out), and injected “acid mine drainage” into the public’s vocabulary, it hasn’t led to mining law reform or any widespread effort to address the issue. That said, Congress finally did pass a Good Samaritan bill, that might clear the way for volunteer groups to do some additional cleanup without being sued for it. Still, they need funding, and that’s in short supply these days.
If you’d like to read more on it, check out this piece by Peter Butler. And you can check out past stories in the Land Desk for more information (links below, but they are behind the paywall). Better yet, go down to your local bookstore and buy River of Lost Souls.
This image was taken during the peak outflow from the Gold King Mine spill at 10:57 a.m. Aug. 5, 2015. The waste-rock dump can be seen eroding on the right. Federal investigators placed blame for the blowout squarely on engineering errors made by the Environmental Protection Agency’s-contracted company in a 132-page report released Thursday [October 22, 2015]
An image of the Sharp Fire near Cahone, Colorado, from the Benchmark fire lookout. Source: Watch Duty.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
Fire season is really heating up, along with the summer temperatures. The relatively dry spring was followed by higher than normal temperatures in July and zero to minimal precipitation in many places, turning low- and mid-elevation forests to kindling. Officials working the Leroux Fire west of Paonia said the relative humidity was just 2%, contributing to rapid fire growth.
The Leroux blaze was just one of many new starts on Colorado’s Western Slope over the last several days. The Sharp Canyon Fire north of Cahone, Colorado, grew rapidly to 400 acres on Monday, forcing evacuations, but it seems to have quieted down overnight. The Lee and Elk fires in Rio Blanco County blew up to 13,000 and 7,700 acres, respectively, over a couple of days. The Middle Mesa Fire east of Navajo Reservoir and just south of the Colorado-New Mexico line grew to 2,500 acres as of Monday night.
Meanwhile, the Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim has lived up to its name, reaching 126,445 acres as of Tuesday morning with only 13% containment a month after it ignited.
The situation is probably going to get worse before it gets better. The National Weather Service has issued red flag warnings for parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, with extreme heat warnings in parts of Arizona and southern California. The mercury in Moab is expected to reach 100° F or more every day this week, and there’s no significant rainfall in sight.
…in his second administration, President Donald Trump is not just approaching climate science with skepticism. Instead, his administration is moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change. These moves, which are sure to be challenged in court, extend far beyond Trump’s well-documented antipathy toward solar and wind energy and his pledges to drill ever more oil even though the US is already the world’s largest oil producer. His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate. But that’s just one data point. There are many others:
Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that’s been tied to climate change.
Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump’s first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them next month.
The administration is also ending Biden-era US government incentives to bring renewable energy projects online, a move that actually appears to be driving up the cost of electricity.
Republicans in Congress and Trump enacted legislation to strip California of its authority to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles beginning in 2035.
Trump is also expected to overturn national tailpipe standards enacted under Biden’s EPA and is also to challenge California’s long-held power to regulate tailpipe emissions.
The authors of a congressionally mandated report on climate change were all fired; previous versions of the report, the National Climate Assessment, which showed likely effects from climate change across the country, have been hidden from view on government websites.
Other countries, large and small, will gather in Brazil later this year for a consequential meeting on how the world should respond to climate change. Rather than play a leading role — or any role at all — the US will not attend.
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk (Jonathan P. Thompson):
August 1, 2025
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
The monsoon is on its way, apparently, but seems to be delivering more lightning than rain to many areas that are grappling with wildfires. Meanwhile, the drought is intensifying and spreading in almost all parts of the West, especially in the deep Southwest.
Streamflows are dropping, too. The Animas River in Durango has fallen to about 200 cubic feet per second, and it’s only at about half that by the time it gets to Farmington, New Mexico’s, new surfing wave. The Rio Grande already dried up in Albuquerque a couple of weeks ago (but got a good boost from a thunderstorm early this morning). WyoFile reports that the Snake, Wind, and Bear Rivers are all at record low flows for this date, even though the snowpack was about average this winter.
And, of course, the wildfires continue to burn. The Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim has burned through 112,000 acres so far, with only 9% containment. The Monroe Canyon Fire in southwestern Utah is at 55,642 acres with 7% containment, and is causing power outages in surrounding communities. The Turner Gulch Fire northeast of Gateway is still growing “due to continuous hot and dry conditions and erratic winds.” And the Elkhorn Fire north of Durango has settled down a bit at 317 acres, but officials worry forecasted hot and dry conditions could reawaken it.
Below are some satellite moisture index maps, with blue being moist and red indicating dryness. The top image shows Dove Creek and areas south of there. This was dryland farming country for many years (Pinto Bean Capital of the World), but irrigation from McPhee Reservoir on the Dolores River was later extended out to Dove Creek. Problem is, their water rights are junior to the farmers in the Montezuma Valley near Cortez, so when reservoir levels are low, they tend to get less irrigation water. Here you can see the difference between 2023 (on the left), when snow, river, and reservoir levels were high, and this year (right), when they are not. What stands out to me is that some fields are still being irrigated this year, despite the drought, as is indicated by the circles of bright blue. But there are more fallow fields now, and the areas around the fields are especially dry.
Here are two more images showing the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s farms south of Ute Mountain in 2023 compared to 2025. Again, some irrigation is still reaching the fields, but apparently far less, given the number of fields that are apparently fallow.
📈 Data Center Watch 📊
The Land Desk is adding another beat to its roster, the Data Center Watch, which is just to say that I’ll be covering data centers and their economic and environmental ramifications a bit more frequently from here on out. Why? Because they currently are proliferating throughout the West: There are 93 data centers in the Phoenix area, 54 in the greater Denver area, and eight in Albuquerque, with many more on their way. And every one of them uses outsized quantities of electricity and water, straining power grids, and throwing utilities’ resource planning into disarray.
Cheyenne, Wyoming, is already home to six data centers. That doesn’t count Meta’s $800 million center that is under construction there, or energy firm Tallgrass’s proposed facility that would pull 1,800 megawatts of electricity from new, dedicated natural gas plants and renewable power installations (presumably solar and wind). Down in Tucson, city officials are considering Amazon Web Services’ proposed Project Blue, a massive complex that is poised to consume up to 2,000 acre-feet of water per year and become Tucson Electric Power’s largest single customer.
In Alaska, a company is looking to build a large data center and a dedicated natural gas plant that would run off of oilfield methane. Numerous data centers can be found along the banks of the Columbia River, drawn there in part by the relatively cheap and abundant hydropower. In Montana, a proposed data center would use all of the powergenerated by NorthWestern Energy’s existing resources. And Pacific Gas & Electric expects new data centers in Silicon Valley to drive a 10 GW increase in electricity demand over the next decade, which is about one-third of today’s forecast peak demand for California’s grid.
The biggest concern with these sprawling warehouses packed with processors is their power consumption. Each one can draw as much electricity as a small city — the proposed Cheyenne server farm would use more power than all of the state’s households. As recently as half a decade ago, most utilities weren’t expecting the speed and magnitude of the big data center buildout. Now it’s hitting hard, and coinciding with increased demand from a growing number of electric vehicles and electrified homes, and utilities are scrambling to bring new power sources online to meet the projected demand growth. This includes geothermal, wind, and solar power — each with impacts of their own — but also new natural gas plants and even small nuclear reactors. Some utilities are cancelling plans to retire coal plants to keep enough generating capacity online.
In other words, the data center boom is likely to radically reshape the energy landscape of the West, and will spur more debates over the costs of this sort of economic development and the impacts our cyber-world has on the environment and humanity.
📈 Data Dump 📊
In some ways, I guess you could say that as alfalfa is to the Colorado River, data centers are to the Western power grid: they both suck up a lot of the resources. That doesn’t make them bad. Alfalfa mostly goes to dairy cows, which make cheese and ice cream and other really good things. Data centers power annoying AI art, sure, but they also make everything internet possible, including me sending this newsletter to you.
Anyway, it’s worth tracking both — alfalfa and data centers, I mean. So here’s a quick update on hay exports from the U.S. (which includes alfalfa and other hay), as well as a look at acreage planted in alfalfa (excl. other hay) over time. Exports seem to have peaked in 2022 and are now in decline. Nevertheless, sending alfalfa and other hay overseas is big business.
🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡
You might think that our federal agencies under Trump would be content to wreck the environment and trample civil liberties in a quiet, not-so-noticeable way. But no, of course not: They’re so proud of their racism and fetishization of fossil fuels that they plaster social media with their proclamations thereof — they are trolling us, in other words.
Above are just two recent examples. In the first one, the Department of Energy fawns over a sparkling chunk of coal. In the other, the Department of Homeland Security posts an 1872 painting by John Gast titled “American Progress.”
Both are gross in their own way.
What the hell kind of sexualization of coal — i.e. “She is the moment” — are they going for in that first one? Friggin’ perverts, if you ask me.
As for the second, it glorifies the crimes the American military and white colonial settlers perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples in order to get more Lebensraum, one might say (it makes sense to use Hitler’s term given that he was inspired by the U.S.’s policies toward Native Americans). Not only is the use of the word “Heritage” in this way a dog whistle to white supremacists, but it’s also kind of weird to be talking about defending the “Homeland” against immigrants when, in the image, the immigrant invaders are the white settlers, and the folks trying to defend themselves and their homeland are the Indigenous people (and wildlife) fleeing from the settlers.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
I don’t want to leave y’all with that awful taste in your mouth, so here are a couple of nicer images of one of my favorite flowers out there.
About 60% of Iowa’s power comes from wind. Farmers can earn extra cash by leasing small sections of farms for power production. Bill Clark/Getty Images
Drive through the plains of Iowa or Kansas and you’ll see more than rows of corn, wheat and soybeans. You’ll also see towering wind turbines spinning above fields and solar panels shining in the sun on barns and machine sheds.
For many farmers, these are lifelines. Renewable energy provides steady income and affordable power, helping farms stay viable when crop prices fall or drought strikes.
Wind energy is a significant economic driver in rural America. In Iowa, for example, over 60% of the state’s electricity came from wind energy in 2024, and the state is a hub for wind turbine manufacturing and maintenance jobs.
For landowners, wind turbines often mean stable lease payments. Those historically were around US$3,000 to $5,000 per turbine per year, with some modern agreements $5,000 to $10,000 annually, secured through 20- to 30-year contracts.
Nationwide, wind and solar projects contribute about $3.5 billion annually in combined lease payments and state and local taxes, more than a third of it going directly to rural landowners.
States throughout the Great Plains and Midwest, from Texas to Montana to Ohio, have the strongest onshore winds and onshore wind power potential. These are also in the heart of U.S. farm country. The map shows wind speeds at 100 meters (nearly 330 feet), about the height of a typical land-based wind turbine. NREL
These figures are backed by long-term contracts and multibillion‑dollar annual contributions, reinforcing the economic value that turbines bring to rural landowners and communities.
Wind farms also contribute to local tax revenues that help fund rural schools, roads and emergency services. In counties across Texas, wind energy has become one of the most significant contributors to local property tax bases, stabilizing community budgets and helping pay for public services as agricultural commodity revenues fluctuate.
In Oldham County in northwest Texas, for example, clean energy projects provided 22% of total county revenues in 2021. In several other rural counties, wind farms rank among the top 10 property taxpayers, contributing between 38% and 69% of tax revenue.
The construction and operation of these projects also bring local jobs in trucking, concrete work and electrical services, boosting small-town businesses.
A wind turbine technician stands on the nacelle, which houses the gear box and generator of a wind turbine, on the campus of Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, N.M., in 2024. Colleges in other states, including Texas, also developed training programs for technicians in recent years as jobs in the industry boomed. Andrew Marszal/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. wind industry supports over 300,000 U.S. jobs across construction, manufacturing, operations and other roles connected to the industry, according to the American Clean Power Association.
Solar energy is also boosting farm finances. Farmers use rooftop panels on barns and ground-mounted systems to power irrigation pumps, grain dryers and cold storage facilities, cutting their power costs.
Some farmers have adopted agrivoltaics – dual-use systems that grow crops beneath solar panels. The panels provide shade, helping conserve water, while creating a second income path. These projects often cultivate pollinator-friendly plants, vegetables such as lettuce and spinach, or even grasses for grazing sheep, making the land productive for both food and energy.
Federal grants and tax credits that were significantly expanded under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helped make the upfront costs of solar installations affordable.
However, the federal spending bill signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025, rolled back many clean energy incentives. It phases down tax credits for distributed solar projects, particularly those under 1 megawatt, which include many farm‑scale installations, and sunsets them entirely by 2028. It also eliminates bonus credits that previously supported rural and low‑income areas.
Without these credits, the upfront cost of solar power could be out of reach for some farmers, leaving them paying higher energy costs. At a 2024 conference organized by the Institute of Sustainability, Energy and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I work as a research economist, farmers emphasized the importance of tax credits and other economic incentives to offset the upfront cost of solar power systems.
What’s being lost
The cuts to federal incentives include terminating the Production Tax Credit for new projects placed in service after Dec. 31, 2027, unless construction begins by July 4, 2026, and is completed within a tight time frame. The tax credit pays eligible wind and solar facilities approximately 2.75 cents per kilowatt-hour over 10 years, effectively lowering the cost of renewable energy generation. Ending that tax credit will likely increase the cost of production, potentially leading to higher electricity prices for consumers and fewer new projects coming online.
The changes also accelerate the phase‑out of wind power tax credits. Projects must now begin construction by July 4, 2026, or be in service before the end of 2027 to qualify for any credit.
Meanwhile, the Investment Tax Credit, which covers 30% of installed cost for solar and other renewables, faces similar limits: Projects must begin by July 4, 2026, and be completed by the end of 2027 to claim the credits. The bill also cuts bonuses for domestic components and installations in rural or low‑income locations. These adjustments could slow new renewable energy development, particularly smaller projects that directly benefit rural communities.
While many existing clean energy agreements will remain in place for now, the rollback of federal incentives threatens future projects and could limit new income streams. It also affects manufacturing and jobs in those industries, which some rural communities rely on.
Renewable energy also powers rural economies
Renewable energy benefits entire communities, not just individual farmers.
Wind and solar projects contribute millions of dollars in tax revenue. For example, in Howard County, Iowa, wind turbines generated $2.7 million in property tax revenue in 2024, accounting for 14.5% of the county’s total budget and helping fund rural schools, public safety and road improvements.
In some rural counties, clean energy is the largest new source of economic activity, helping stabilize local economies otherwise reliant on agriculture’s unpredictable income streams. These projects also support rural manufacturing – such as Iowa turbine blade factories like TPI Composites, which just reopened its plant in Newton, and Siemens Gamesa in Fort Madison, which supply blades for GE and Siemens turbines. The tax benefits in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helped boost those industries – and the jobs and local tax revenue they bring in.
As rural America faces economic uncertainty and climate pressures, I believe homegrown renewable energy offers a practical path forward. Wind and solar aren’t just fueling the grid; they’re helping keep farms and rural towns alive.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots wesite (Allen Best):
July 16, 2025
Four electrical utilities that deliver electricity from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins have a common problem. All have rapidly expanding demand, and all, in turn, need to add new sources of generating capacity.
Can they save money by sharing electricity? Improved transmission would be crucial. The four power providers — Colorado Springs Utilities, CORE Electric Cooperative, Platte River Power Authority, and United Power — have agreed to explore potential synergies to achieve common purposes.
Together, the four utilities provide electricity to 1.5 million Coloradans, collectively putting them just behind the 1.6 million customers of Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electrical utility.
The utilities began talking about this last November, and they are just beginning the work of figuring out how they might collaborate.
“This is a positive first step in exploring alternative ways for our four utilities to support growth and resiliency across our service territories,” stated Pam Feuerstein, chief executive of CORE. “Additional transmission would enable CORE to continue providing affordable and reliable power to our members, now and into the future.”
One option might be to use existing rights of-way to erect upgraded transmission capacity, similar to going from a two-lane highway to a four-lane highway. In this case, the utilities might decide to create a 345 kV electron highway. That’s as large as they get in Colorado right now, except for a new 500 kV line that nicks the state’s corner northwest of Craig.
“There could be some commonality where CORE, for example, has a 115kV transmission line, that those rights of way could be used to develop a larger project,” said Feurstein. “It’s way too early to tell at this stage. This is really just the beginning of us exploring opportunities.
Also an option is to create expanded transmission bypassing metropolitan Denver, in more rural areas served by United Power and CORE.
The electrical utilities share common borders. The service territory of Colorado Springs Utilities, for example, comes close to that of CORE, which serves Castle Rock and Parker and other parts of rapidly growing Douglas and Arapahoe counties.
CORE’s expansive service territory — from 60 miles east of Denver to 65 miles west of Colorado Springs —has close proximity to Brighton-based United Power, which serves one of Colorado’s fastest growing areas along the I-76 and I-25 corridors north and east of Denver. United’s service territory extends to Longmont, one of the four municipal members of Platte River.
These four utilities are also defined by what they are not. Unlike Xcel, which provides power for much of metropolitan Denver, they report only to customers, not to private investors.
By banding together, they might be able to avoid charges for sharing electricity over the transmission lines owned by Xcel Energy or possibly Tri-State.
Congestion along the north-south lines has become a growing challenge that limits flexibility as the utilities try to meet rising demand while supporting Colorado’s ambitious carbon reduction goals.
The analogy again might be to Colorado’s north-south highways. If time is of the essence, you might want to avoid I-25 by taking an alternative route, including E-470. And in this case, an alternative might provide a way to avoid paying Xcel to use its lines.
But growth in demand undergirds the effort to achieve synergies.
“We expect our growth to continue, so addressing transmission congestion is critical,” said Mark A. Gabriel, chief executive of United Power. “United Power serves an area that is growing quickly, attracting large residential developments and new businesses alike. A more reliable transmission route would help to stabilize costs and increase reliability for current and future members in the cooperative’s service territory.”
United serves 115,000 members across a 900-square mile service territory stretching from the oil-and-gas wells of the Wattenberg Field to the foothills west of Arvada. During the last four years demand in April, to cite just one month, has grown from 350 megawatts to 500 megawatts.
CORE has more members, 170,000, but less demand.
Colorado Springs has 269,000 metered-customers in the city and in surrounding areas and has been growing at a rate of 1% to 2% in demand per year. Travas Deal, the chief executive of the city’s utilities, suggested that demand could grow much more rapidly from data centers and other businesses if the city had the electrical resources.
The city recently put out a request for proposals for 1,900 megawatts of new generating capacity. The door is open for wind, solar and natural gas and whatever else may come along. Some of that generating capacity might come from individual projects, but Deal says that the electrical generating capacity might be delivered at better prices with larger economies of scale. In other words, through shared demand.
“We understand the need, we understand the opportunities,” said Deal.
In a prepared statement, Jason Frisbie, chief executive of Platte River Power Authority, alluded to this shifted dynamic. “All options are on the table to help improve reliability and reduce costs, including opportunities to enhance transmission capabilities as we move into an organized market,” he said.
In a complementary move to help manage costs and maintain reliability, Colorado Springs Utilities, Platte River Power Authority and United Power will join the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) Regional Transmission Organization on April 1, 2026. CORE is also evaluating market participation, including the SPP.
It's been a bit since I've done a meteorological deep dive, but the devastating flash #flood in central Texas this July 4th/5th deserve a closer look. #TXwxYes remnants of #Barry were involved helping enhance moisture. A remnant MCV from Mexico on 3 July also played a role.Full evolution below ⤵️
Click the link to read the article on the ProPublica website by Abrahm Lustgarten
July 9, 2025
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.
Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?
Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.
Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.
We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.
The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.
There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.”
That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.
The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It’s one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.
What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.
Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country’s industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is “in alignment with evolving priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating.
Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster — like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast — once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling “mega rain” events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.
July 20, 2023 – National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) market research analysis researcher Brittany Staie gather samples of vegetables that are being grown at the at the Photovoltaic Central Array Testing Site (PV-CATS) and agrivoltaics/solar garden near NREL’s parking garage. Staie was part of a crew that was checking for differences between plants grown in full sunlight, compared to those vegetables that were grown between the solar panels. The solar garden is part of the Innovative Site Preparation and Impact Reductions (InSPIRE) agrivoltaics project, which is studying the effects that solar panels and crops have on each other. (Photo by Werner Slocum / NREL)
Agrivoltaic solar arrays can shade crops from sun while moisture from vegetation cools the panels to increase their productivity, researchers and farmers have found.
“We were getting basil leaves the size of your palm,” University of Arizona researcher Greg Barron-Gafford said, describing some of the benefits he and his team have seen farming under solar panels in the Tucson desert.
For 12 years, Barron-Gafford has been investigating agrivoltaics, the integration of solar arrays into working farmland. This practice involves growing crops or other vegetation, such as pollinator-friendly plants, under solar panels, and sometimes grazing livestock in this greenery. Though a relatively new concept, at least 604 agrivoltaic sites have popped up across the United States, according to OpenEI.
Researchers like Barron-Gafford think that, in addition to generating carbon-free electricity, agrivoltaics could offer a ray of hope for agriculture in an increasingly hotter and drier Southwest, as the shade created by these systems has been found to decrease irrigation needs and eliminate heat stress on crops. Plus, the cooling effects of growing plants under solar arrays can actually make the panels work better.
But challenges remain, including some farmers’ attitudes about the practice and funding difficulties.
Overcoming a Climate Conundrum
While renewable electricity from sources like solar panels is one of the most frequently touted energy solutions to help reduce the carbon pollution that’s driving climate change, the warming climate itself is making it harder for solar arrays to do their job, Barron-Gafford said. An optimal functioning temperature for panels is around 75 degrees Fahrenheit, he explained. Beyond that, any temperature increase reduces the photovoltaic cells’ efficiency.
“You can quickly see how this solution for our changing climate of switching to more renewable energy is itself sensitive to the changing climate,” he said.
This problem is especially pertinent in the Southwest, where historically hot temperatures are steadily increasing. Tucson, for instance, saw a record-breaking 112 days of triple-digit heat in 2024, according to National Weather Service Data, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencyreports that every part of the Southwest experienced higher average temperatures between 2000 and 2023 compared to the long-term average from 1895 to 2023.
Evaporation and transpiration graphic via the USGS
However, planting vegetation under solar panels—as opposed to the more traditional method of siting solar arrays on somewhat barren land—can help cool them. In one set of experiments, Barron-Gafford’s team found that planting cilantro, tomatoes and peppers under solar arrays reduced the panels’ surface temperature by around 18 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s because plants release moisture into the air during their respiration process, in which they exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide.
“This invisible power of water coming out of plants was actually cooling down the solar panels,” Barron-Gafford said.
Throwing Shade
While Barron-Gafford said some laughed him off when he first proposed the idea of growing crops in the shade of solar panels, this added sun shield can actually help them grow better, especially in the Southwest, where many backyard gardeners already employ shade cloths to protect their gardens from the blazing heat.
“Many people don’t understand that in Colorado and much of the West, most plants get far too much sunlight,” said Byron Kominek, owner/manager of Jack’s Solar Garden in Boulder County, Colorado, which began implementing agrivoltaics in 2020. “Having some shade is a benefit to them.”
Jack’s Solar Garden has integrated 3,276 solar panels over about four acres of farmland, growing crops like greens and tomatoes. Meg Caley with Sprout City Farms, a nonprofit that helps with farming duties at Jack’s Solar Garden, said they’ve been able to produce Swiss chard “the size of your torso.”
May 6, 2023 – Volunteers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) ESCAPES (Education, Stewardship, and Community Action for Promoting Environmental Sustainability) program lend a hand to Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, Colo. Bethany Speer (left) goes back for more while Nancy Trejo distributes her wheelbarrow load to the agrivoltaic plots. (Photo by Bryan Bechtold / NREL)
“The greens just get huge,” she said. “You have to chop them up to fit them in your refrigerator.”
She added that the shade seems to improve the flavor of the vegetables and prevents them from bolting, when plants prematurely produce flowers and seeds, diverting energy away from leaf or root growth.
“Plants when they’re stressed out can have more of a bitter flavor,” she explained. “So the arugula that we grow is not as bitter or spicy. It’s sweeter. The spinach is sweeter too.”
Barron-Gafford and his team are seeing the same thing in Arizona, where they grow a variety of produce like beans, artichokes, potatoes, kale and basil.
“We’ve grown 30-plus different types of things across different wet winters and dry winters and exceptionally hot summers, dry summers, average or close to average summers,” he said of the solar-shaded crops. “And across everything we’ve done, we’ve seen equal or greater production down here in the Southwest, the dry land environments, where it really benefits to get some shade.”
As in Colorado, some of those crops are growing to epic proportions.
“We’ve made bok choy the size of a toddler,” Barron-Gafford said.
All that shade provides another important benefit in a drought-stricken Southwest—lower water requirements for crops. Because less direct sunlight is hitting the ground, it decreases the evaporation rate, which means water stays in the soil longer after irrigation. Barron-Gafford and his team have been running experiments for the last seven or so years to see how this plays out with different crops in an agrivoltaic setting.
“What is the evaporation rate under something that’s big and bushy like a bean or potato plant versus something thinner above ground, like a carrot?” is one of the questions Barron-Gafford said they have tried to answer. “For the most part, I would say that we are able to cut back our irrigation by more than half.”
They are partnering with Jack’s Solar Farm on water research in Colorado and have so far found similar results there.
This shade has another benefit in a warming world—respite for farmworkers. Heat-related illnesses are a growing concern for people who work outside, and one recent study predicted climate change will quadruple U.S. outdoor workers’ exposure to extreme heat conditions by 2065.
But with solar arrays in the fields, “if you really carefully plan out your day, you can work in the shade,” a factor that can help increase worker safety on hot days, Caley said.
The AgriSolar Clearinghouse performed skin temperature readings under solar panels and full sun at a number of sites across the United States, finding a skin temperature decrease of 15.3 degrees in Boulder and 20.8 degrees in Phoenix.
“I Don’t Know What the Future Holds”
Despite the benefits of agrivoltaics, the up-front cost of purchasing a solar array remains a barrier to farmers.
“Once people see the potential of agrivoltaics, you run into the next challenge, which is how do you fund someone getting into this on their site?” Barron-Gafford said. “And depending on the amount of capital or access to capital that a farmer has, you’re going to get a wildly different answer.”
While expenses are dependent on the size of the installation, a 25 kilowatt system would require an upfront cost of around $67,750, according toAgriSolar Clearinghouse. For comparison, the median size of a residential solar array in 2018 was around 6kW, the organization stated, which would cost around $16,260 to install.
Kominek said the total initial cost of implementing a 1.2 megawatt capacity agrivoltaics setup on his farm in Colorado wasaround $2 million, but that the investment has paid off. In addition to the revenue he earns from farming, all of the energy produced by the arrays is sold to clients in the community through a local utility company, earning the farm money.
The Rural Energy for America program has been one resource for farmers interested in agrivoltaics, offering loans and grants to help install solar. However, it’s unclear how this program will move forward amid current federal spending cuts.
Meanwhile, some of the federal grant programs that Barron-Gafford has relied on have suddenly come to a halt, he said, putting his research in danger. But, as federal support dries up, some states are charging on with their own funding opportunities to develop farm field solar projects. For instance, Colorado’s Agrivoltaics Research and Demonstration Grant offers money for demonstrations of agrivoltaics, research projects and outreach campaigns.
There are other challenges as well. Caley, for instance, said farming around solar panels is akin to working in an “obstacle course.” She and her team, who mostly work manually, have found ways to work around them by being aware of their surroundings so that they don’t accidentally collide with the panels or strike them with their tools. This job is also made easier since Kominek invested between $80,000 and $100,000 to elevate his farm’s panels, which better allows animals, taller crops and farming equipment to operate beneath.
Still, a 2025 University of Arizona study that interviewed farmers and government officials in Pinal County, Arizona, found that a number of them questioned agrivoltaics’ compatibility with large-scale agriculture.
“I think it’s a great idea, but the only thing … it wouldn’t be cost-efficient … everything now with labor and cost of everything, fuel, tractors, it almost has to be super big … to do as much with as least amount of people as possible,” one farmer stated.
Many farmers are also leery of solar, worrying that agrivoltaics could take working farmland out of use, affect their current operations or deteriorate soils.
Those fears have been amplified by larger utility-scale initiatives, like Ohio’s planned Oak Run Solar Project, an 800 megawatt project that will include 300 megawatts of battery storage, 4,000 acres of crops and 1,000 grazing sheep in what will be the country’s largest agrivoltaics endeavor to date. Opponents of the project worry about its visual impacts and the potential loss of farmland.
Sensitive satellite-based instruments enable scientists to measure relative variations of Earth’s gravitational field. Data gathered by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is used in a new study to show that many continental regions are experiencing long-term aridification. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Texas Center for Space Research
The Rundown
President Trump’s budget bill targets a few water projects while eliminating some climate and environment programs.
Agencies move to constrain environmental reviews under NEPA.
EPA says it will loosen wastewater pollution rules for thermal power plants later this summer.
GAO reviews NASA’s major projects, including the third generation of a water-tracking satellite.
EPA intends to take public comments on its idea to narrow state and tribal reviews under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act.
White House orders higher fees for foreign tourists visiting national parks.
And lastly, EPA’s internal watchdog notes the risks of rising seas to federally owned Superfund sites.
“If contaminants from federal facility Superfund sites are released into the surrounding communities, the health, jobs, and environment of millions of U.S. residents may be threatened. Further, the federal funds expended to implement those remedies would have been wasted.” – Report from the EPA Office of Inspector General that identifies 49 federally owned Superfund sites at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.
By the Numbers
$658 Million: Expected baseline cost of the third generation of NASA’s satellite mission that measures changes in the planet’s water storage. The GRACE-C mission is scheduled for July 2029, according to a Government Accountability Office review of NASA’s major projects. Operating for more than two decades, the GRACE satellites have been instrumental in tracking global groundwater depletion.
News Briefs
NEPA Overhaul Cabinet and other agencies – including the Interior Department, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Army Corps of Engineers – announced they will revise their rules for environmental reviews of major projects and prioritize shorter and quicker assessments of potential harms.
The agencies are shortening the administrative timeline for implementing a new rule, arguing that the standard notice-and-comment process would be an unnecessary delay and “contrary to the public interest.”
The Council on Environmental Quality, the White House arm that traditionally oversees NEPA, revoked its regulations in April in response to an executive order promoting domestic energy production. The agencies, now seeking faster, more efficient reviews, are establishing their own rules.
Besides the arrival of the new administration, recent legal rulings have also rearranged the playing field for environmental reviews.
In justifying its action, each agency cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in May in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado. That ruling, in a case which centered on a railroad line in Utah for crude oil, allowed for narrowly focused environmental reviews that assess only a specific project and not the actions – like upstream oil drilling and downstream oil refining – it would enable.
Among the few call outs: The bill delivers $1 billion for surface water storage and water conveyance in the western United States. The money is for projects that increase or restore capacity of Bureau of Reclamation water conveyance systems or increase their use. Increasing reservoir storage capacity – such as raising Shasta Dam, a Republican-driven idea that’s been on the table for years – is also acceptable. The money is available through September 30, 2034.
More broadly, climate and environment programs were chopped. Unobligated Inflation Reduction Act funds – those not yet committed to a recipient – were yanked back for programs on climate data, environmental justice block grants, reducing air pollution at schools, and more.
National Parks Fees President Trump ordered the Interior Department to increase national park entry fees for foreign visitors. The additional revenue would be channeled to infrastructure improvements at the parks or to increase park access.
Still Storm Watching, For Now NOAA said it would delay by one month the termination of certain storm-tracking satellite data, the Associated Press reports.
Studies and Reports
Superfund Sites at Risk from Rising Seas The federal government owns 157 Superfund sites. Forty-nine of those sites are at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.
The assessment comes from the EPA’s internal watchdog, which published the report to draw attention to federal liabilities related to climate change and the nation’s most toxic sites.
The at-risk Superfund sites are clustered at military sites around Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, and San Francisco Bay.
Arizona Groundwater Assessment The U.S. Geological Survey published a report on water quality in the Coconino aquifer in northern Arizona, where it could be a water source for the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation.
On the Radar
Water Quality Permitting The EPA is considering a rulemaking that would narrow the scope of Clean Water Act reviews undertaken by states and tribes.
These Section 401 reviews have been a target of the Trump administration. Energy companies complain that states have used their review authority to block fossil fuel infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines.
Before the rulemaking, the EPA is asking for public input. The agency opened a docket for written submissions, and it will hold two online events at a time to be announced.
File written comments at www.regulations.gov using docket number EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0272. The deadline is August 6.
Another Slogan Commission Through an executive order, President Trump established the President’s Make America Beautiful Again Commission.
The commission’s objectives – “promote responsible stewardship of natural resources while driving economic growth; expand access to public lands and waters for recreation, hunting, and fishing; encourage responsible, voluntary conservation efforts; cut bureaucratic delays; and recover America’s fish and wildlife populations through proactive, voluntary, on-the-ground collaborative conservation efforts” – in some ways conflict with the administration’s desire to cut budgets and greenlight fossil fuel projects.
One of the commission’s charges is to recommend to the president “solutions to expand access to clean drinking water and restore aquatic ecosystems to improve water quality and availability.” Stay tuned.
Power Plant Wastewater Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator, said his agency later this summer will relax wastewater pollution rules for thermal power plants that burn fossil fuel and nuclear fuel.
The Biden administration placed stricter limits on these wastewater discharges last year. In a press release, Zeldin said compliance deadlines would be extended. The agency will also reconsider technological requirements for preventing polluted discharges.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
The North Fork River valley. Photo credit: Colorado Farm & Food Alliance
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Caroline Llanes). Here’s an excerpt:
July 1, 2025
At Thistle Whistle Farm in Hotchkiss, farmer Mark Waltermire grows a wide variety of crops on his 16 acres.
“A lot of greens, onions, shallots, cabbage, kohlrabi, carrots, beets, parsnips, burdock root, scorzonera and saltapie, and then heirloom tomatoes…” he lists when prompted.
Waltermire’s farm is in Colorado’s North Fork Valley, in the West Elk Range of the Rockies. The growing season is short, and the climate is semi-arid. As Waltermire notes, climate change is impacting how he operates…Waltermire is considering a solution [to the warmer atmosphere] that would create a dual use of his land. He wants to build five acres of solar panels on his land — about a megawatt of power — and continue growing his tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes, and leafy greens under them. The solar panels would provide shade, something that would benefit his many crops, as well as his goats, chickens, and ducks…It’s called agrivoltaics, combining agriculture with photovoltaic, or solar, panels…[Byron Kominek] explains that selling the energy from these solar panels can help farmers, even during bad years.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
July 3, 2025
Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.
Josh Shipley rides a Harley in his spare time and likes to take his family on off-road Jeep trips and has hunted across North America.
On Wednesday morning, Shipley had to fight tears as he talked about the impact on his business, Alternative Power Enterprises, and the families of the employees of the earthquake-inducing bill now being debated in Congress.
“Removing these tax credits at the end of the year is going to be extremely detrimental,” he said on a press call orchestrated by the staff of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper. “We actually don’t believe we’re going to be able to stay in business.”
The business is based in Ridgway, one of two smaller solar installation companies there. It has eight employees, and they have five spouses and seven children. They do work from Paonia to Silverton.
“It’s not just eight people that are going to be affected by this,” he said. The business, he explained, has been around for 30 years, and in recent years it has been able to start helping low-income families to get solar.
“I think in the last three years, 120 families in our area have benefited,” he said. “If I can’t survive, the other parts of this business are going away. I can’t be there to help those individuals.”
Shipley said he bought the business in 2020 with the assumption that federal tax credits would be phased out, but not until 2032.
The bill, he said, is a tragedy for U.S. energy policy.
“Republicans are always talking about independence and being — sorry, I’m getting a little emotional — getting and being dominant in our industries. This is how we become energy dominant. It’s not just wind. It’s not just solar. It’s not just natural gas plants. It’s not just nuclear power plants.
“It takes every single one of these technologies for us to create that — excuse me — and to keep these families — I’m sorry, excuse me — but it will take all of these forms of energy to create that dominance,” he said. This bill’s going to kill that. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. Small businesses will go out of business because of it. There will not be the workforce that is going to be required to create that energy dominance later, when they’ve realized what they’ve done.”
Hickenlooper, who had arrived late the night before from Washington D.C., touched on several provisions of what he called the “cruel, reckless bill” that the Senate had passed on Sunday morning.
“This was a vote that would strip 17 million Americans, including many, many children, of their health care, push more than 300 rural hospitals to close, gut investments in affordable clean energy,” he said “It would expand our national debt at a level that we have never imagined before, and all this just to accommodate these lavish tax cuts for wealthy Americans, most of whom aren’t asking for the tax cuts. It is a form of madness, fiscal madness, and I think it’s cruel.”
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper called the bill passed by his fellow senators “cruel.” Credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Later, he explained that the bill would gut the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. “It was a major step towards addressing climate change, and now it’s been it’s like running into a brick wall,” he said.
“We’re going to lose over a million jobs in this country. I mean, these are careers, hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GDP, lost wages. We’re going to see the cost of electricity go up. We’re going to kill new renewable energy that prevents blackouts just when we’re in the process of trying to accommodate AI. We need more energy. We’ve got over 8,000 solar jobs just in Colorado.”
Speaking later, KC Becker described the bill as triggering an all-hands-on-deck moment for the solar industry in Colorado. In April, she became the executive director of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association.
“People are nervous from the smallest companies to the largest companies. It’s been a whirlwind,” she said. “The bill was expected to get better in the Senate. It actually got worse in the Senate because of the excise tax (on solar and wind production, now discarded).”
Right now, many solar providers are working hard, because they have inventories of panels. But the demand, if this bill gets passed as new constructed, will cause demand to drop off a cliff after Dec. 31.
The big question in Colorado — and part of the national dialogue — is whether any of Colorado’s representatives in Congress who are Republicans will buck the marching orders of President Donald Trump. Rep. Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd, both freshman and both Republican, voted for the bill after saying nice things about renewable energy.
Fort Lupton-based Evans was barely elected last November from the Eighth District north of Denver, his first run at Congress. Grand Junction-based Hurd has a more comfortable position in the Third District, which covers much of the Western Slope plus much of southern Colorado.
Also speaking on the webcast press conference were the four Democrats who are members of Colorado’s delegation in the House of Representatives, Gov. Jared Polis, and various individuals from health care providers, most from more rural parts of Colorado.
The take-away message was that this bill will dramatically hurt poorer people who are unable to afford health care without governmental assistance. That, however, can also be true in urban areas.
U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen was momentarily reduced to fighting tears when she talked about the giant erosion of programs to help low-income people. “When I think about my mom who works a low-wage job, without access to medical care,” said Pettersen, who then choked up. For her, this was politics, but the bill was also deeply personal.
A serious mess, also known as the NE Hogback #53 well and associated infrastructure. Chuza, the most recent owner of the site in the Horseshoe Gallup oil field in northwestern New Mexico, went bankrupt. That left New Mexico and federal taxpayers holding the cleanup bill. The site has been partially reclaimed, but only partially. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
A new report on New Mexico’s abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells presents an alarming and expensive scenario for the state. It reveals that while the industry generates a lot of revenue for the state, cleaning up its mess is also poised to cost state and federal taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. No, this report was not put out by an environmental or progressive advocates, but by the state’s legislative finance committee.
New Mexico has been an oil and gas hotspot for more than a century, during which drillers have sunk at least 121,000 wells, mostly in the San Juan and Permian basins in the northwest and southeast portions of the state. Newly drilled wells typically kick out a large volume of oil and/or gas during the first months after drilling, generating a lot of cash for their operators and for state coffers, and helping to push production numbers for the state through the roof.
Decline curve generated by decline curve analysis software, utilized in petroleum economics to indicate the depletion of oil & gas in a petroleum reservoir. By Richard Banks – Sent to me personally, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33914059
But the wells are soon afflicted with what’s known as the decline curve, meaning that the longer they pump, the less they pump. You know, it’s kind of like aging in people. Eventually, aging will render all oil and gas wells into low-producing stripper wells (I’m not sure how this analogy extends to the human realm, but hey …) that kick out less than 10 barrels of oil per day. Thousands of New Mexico wells are extreme strippers, producing one barrel or less daily. Yet they continue to spew methane, hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds at the same as or an even higher rate than their younger, more vital counterparts.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, the operators of stripper wells are likely to be smaller, less financially secure companies, and it’s easier and cheaper for them to keep the wells in a nearly inactive state — during which the wells continue to ooze pollutants into the air and groundwater — than to decommission, plug, and reclaim them. It may make economic sense to abandon these wells, or for the companies to cease to exist and “orphan” the wells, leaving them to the state or federal taxpayers to clean up, since reclamation bonds are woefully inadequate. And, finally, these wells generate almost nothing in production taxes, meaning that they aren’t contributing much to the state’s conservation fund, a portion of which is used to clean up abandoned and orphaned wells.
The near constant drone of drilling for over a century has resulted in a near-constant addition of low- to non-producing wells to New Mexico’s rosters. While responsible and financially solvent companies plug and reclaim their own wells, many smaller operators simply walk away.
New Mexico’s Oil Conservation Division is currently responsible for plugging close to 1,000 abandoned and orphaned wells, including 700 on state or private land, and for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sites (such as leaky tank batteries).
Detail of interactive map showing orphaned, inactive, and low-producing wells on state and private land in the San Juan Basin (this leaves out hundreds of additional such wells on federal lands).
At recent rates, plugging them will take close to a decade, not including remediation/reclamation. OCD is also responsible for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sties. In total, plugging, remediation, and reclamation of all currently orphaned wells and infrastructure on state and private land is estimated to cost a minimum of $208 million, and likely more. And that’s just for now.
The report goes on to say: “… in addition to wells the state already has legal authority to plug, thousands of inactive and low-producing wells are at risk of being orphaned, potentially increasing the state’s liability by many orders of magnitude.” There are about 1,400 inactive at high risk of being orphaned on state and private land, according to the OCD. And there are thousands more that are extremely low-producing wells — putting out less than one barrel of oil equivalent per day — for which the “expected cost of cleanup far exceeds predicted future revenues, increasing their risk of being orphaned.”
And the kicker: “Altogether, the state’s current and near-future liability for well plugging and site remediation is estimated to be between $700 million and $1.6 billion.”
More data from the report:
38,817 Number of stripper wells, meaning they produce less than 10 barrels of oil-equivalent daily, in New Mexico, making up about 64% of the state’s active wells. This number will continue to increase.
$100,000 Average cost to plug single oil and gas well.
450% Percent the average state-contracted cost to plug an oil and gas well in New Mexico has increased since 2019.
$250,000 Maximum amount of financial assurance an operator in New Mexico must post to cover the costs of plugging and reclaiming its wells. This cap applies whether the operator has five wells or 500 wells, meaning it actually provides almost no financial assurance whatsoever.
$46.4 million Amount spent by the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division to plug and reclaim 360 wells and associated infrastructure between 2019 and 2024.
9% Percent by which the cost of plugging a gas well exceeds that of an oil well. Most of the wells in the San Juan Basin are gas wells.
$208 million Estimated cost to New Mexico to plug, remediate, and reclaim all existing orphaned and abandoned wells and infrastructure on state and private land.
$5.6 million Amount in financial assurance associated with orphaned wells or their operators, meaning most of the costs will be shouldered by the taxpayers — either via the state reclamation fund or federal grants.
$66.7 million April 2025 balance of New Mexico’s oil and gas reclamation fund (which is funded by a portion of conservation tax revenues).
$6 million Tax revenue New Mexico’s 3,024 wells producing less than 1BOE/day would generate with the West Texas Intermediate oil price at $70/barrel (it’s currently lower than that). Plugging and reclaiming those same wells would cost an estimated $531 million to $885 million. “The vast majority of the wells—87%—are owned by private companies whose financial health is difficult for regulators to assess.”
$1.6 million Amount New Mexico paid in 2024 to plug six of Ridgeway Arizona’s wells under a 2023 settlement agreement with the company. Under the agreement, the state pays to plug 299 of the company’s wells, and the company reimburses the state $2 for each barrel of oil it sells, with a minimum payment of $30k per month. But at current rates, the total cost to plug the remaining wells could be $60 million or more, meaning it would take the company as long as 170 years to pay it off.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
By now you’ve probably heard that Sen. Mike Lee pulled his public land sell-off provision from the budget reconciliation bill that the Senate just passed following intense backlash. And perhaps you’re planning on celebrating the salvation of America’s public lands on July 4.
There’s so much BS in Lee’s statement. How, for example, does selling public land to developers keep it from being ruined for the next generation? It doesn’t, it just locks up that land for every generation except those that can afford to buy a house in the new subdivision that would go there. Public land is not “locked away from the people who live there.” But it would be locked away if it was privatized. And while there is no property tax on public lands, there are federal payments in lieu of taxes, or PILT, which a county can use to fund schools and search and rescue operations. Plus, public lands generate billions in revenue for gateway communities through public land users’ sales and lodgers taxes and local spending.
Well, I hate to be Mr. Buzzkill, but while this victory may be sweet, it does little to offset the bitterness brought by continuing attacks on public lands, along with democracy, morality, decency, and, well, America, itself, this Independence Day week.
The “Big, Beautiful Bill” perpetuates and amplifies the massive transfer of wealth from low- and middle-income and working-class Americans to the richest 10%. It will slash Medicaid and other vital programs Americans have paid into and rely upon, while also dismantling tribal sovereignty. And yet, it will also drive up the deficit by trillions of dollars due to additional spending on the military industrial complex, which is reaching its tentacles further into immigration enforcement, wildlife blocking border walls, deportations, and $450-million-per-year concentration camps. With Trump threatening to revoke citizenship from U.S.-born citizens whom he considers threats (e.g. Zohran Mamdani and Elon Musk), those camps may end up housing his political opponents. I really hate to make this comparison, but that is some severe Nazi-esque nastiness.
The Senate’s bill gives more handouts to the oil and gas and coal industries, while revoking tax credits for wind and solar power, which could kill those industries when they are needed most.
And yes, some of you may cheer a weaker renewable-energy industry, since it will mean fewer utility-scale installations blanketing the desert. I get that. But it will also hurt rooftop solar and larger installations on big box stores, over parking lots, or in fallow agricultural land, brownfields or other appropriate sites. A western Colorado farmer’s plan to install solar panels to generate electricity and shade his crops, for example, is imperiled by the GOP’s plans.
This at a time when strain on the power grid is exponentially increasing due to the outsized demand of more and more AI-powering, hyperscale data centers. That power will come from somewhere, and if it’s not solar or wind or batteries, then it’s likely to be from pollution-intensive coal and natural gas (mined and drilled from public lands), fish-killing hydropower, or new nuclear reactors (that will require uranium mined from public lands).
And keep in mind, oil and gas leasing and mining claims represent a sort of quasi-privatization of public lands. Sure, the government retains title to the land, but the corporations get access to the minerals within, can rip the land apart to get to them, and can cut off public access with the necessary permits. With its accelerated 14-day “energy emergency” permitting process, the Trump administration is making it a heck of a lot easier for corporations to mine, drill, and otherwise develop public lands, sans public input. The latest beneficiaries include:
NorthWestern Energy, which was given the Bureau of Land Management green light to build a 74-mile natural gas pipeline between Helena and Three Forks, Montana.
Ormat got the BLM go-ahead to move forward on three separate geothermal projects in Nevada: • Exploration work at the Diamond Flat project near Fallon; • Upgrades at the McGinness Hills project in Lander County; • Exploration drilling at the Pinto Geothermal Project near Denio.
I’m not suggesting that these are horrible projects that shouldn’t have been approved. Geothermal holds a lot of potential as a relatively clean, round-the-clock baseline power source, and these are merely upgrades and exploration, not full on developments. Still, geothermal development and even exploration have impacts and can affect groundwater aquifers, springs, and wetlands. Land agencies should have as much time as it takes to adequately analyze potential effects, and tribal nations should be consulted and have time to do their own analysis. And if it’s happening on public lands, then the public deserves to know about it and have an opportunity to weigh in. None of that is possible under this 14-day permitting process.
So, yeah, happy Fourth of July, y’all and welcome to the Divided States of Project 2025. And on that note, the Land Desk will be taking the rest of the week off.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Just getting into the ol’ July Fourth spirit with this picture of Raymond “Squeek” Hunt’s signs near his mutton meat slaughterhouse and shop in Waterflow, New Mexico. I mean, it does have an American flag in it, after all.
Solar panels San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 3, 2025
Not much to like in this bill. But then, it’s only half-time. How hard will key Republicans in Senate push back?
Higher electricity rates? In Colorado as elsewhere, that’s the given if the U.S. Senate adopts the recent budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives that would end a whole host of federal tax credits.
Tax credits shorn by the bill include those now available to consumer who purchase electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids
How exactly will that impact Glenwood Springs-based Holy Cross Energy? In the short term, the legislation adds uncertainty as the electric cooperative works to move from 80% emission-free energy in 2025 to its goal of 100% in the next five years. It serves the Aspen- and Vail-dominated resorts valleys.
Brighton-based United Power has a different problem posed by the sharp-elbowed bill if it remains intact after review by the U.S. Senate. An electrical cooperative also, United serves one of Colorado’s fastest growing areas for population growth, but the electrical demand from new homes is dwarfed by that from new industrial and commercial development.
By a one-vote margin, the House approved the sweeping tax and spending bill on May 22. In addition to other sweeping provisions, the bill largely guts incentives created by Congress in 2022 in the Inflation Reduction Act to advance clean energy and storage. The IRA is widely regarded as the most significant climate change legislation ever adopted in the United States.
Supporters of the controversial bill included two Republicans from swing districts in Colorado, Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton and Jeff Hurd of Grand Junction. Two Republicans and all 212 Democrats voted against the bill. Another two Republicans did not vote and one merely registered presence.
Evans and Hurd were among 21 House Republicans who signed a letter in March that calls for preserving energy tax credits as necessary to “increase domestic manufacturing, promote energy innovation and keep utility costs down.” Hurd, but not Evans, was among 26 who signed a May letter calling for preservation of tax credits necessary to accelerate deployment of next-generation nuclear power technologies.
After the vote, Evans posted a press release that said the bill “eliminates Green New Deal-style giveaways.”
Two days before the vote, President Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill to inform on-the-fence representatives that they could face primary opposition if they voted against what the president had called his “one big beautiful bill.” Big Pivots requested comment of both Evans and Hurd but without response.
he Senate, where Republicans hold a three-vote advantage, may act on the budget bill as early as July. However, the Washington Post on Monday noted that four Republicans senators in April sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune cautioning against “the full-scale repeal of current credits.”
“We just hit half-time. We’re still very much in the middle of this game,” said Harry Godfrey, who manages federal priorities for Advanced Energy United, a national industry association that monitors Colorado and 16 other states.
Differences would be negotiated by a conference committee before being returned to the two chambers for review.
“They really went after just about everything that they could in the realm of clean energy and electric vehicles,” said Will Toor, who directs the Colorado Energy Office.
“I would certainly hope that cooler and wiser heads will prevail in the Senate,” Toor added. “The benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act are widespread, not just for clean energy but for consumers and for jobs, especially in red states and districts. We’re hopeful that the Senate will reject this incredibly unwise bill that was adopted by the House of Representatives.”
Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, had described the bill as being “somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer” approach to the IRA. Abigail Ross Hopper, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, called it a “sledgehammer masquerading as a scalpel.”
The IRA along with the earlier Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have produced a proliferation of announcements about expanding battery production and other business ventures along the Front Range.
For example, Louisville-based Solid Power is developing next-generation solid-state batteries and has agreements with EV manufacturers Ford and BMW. The company’s business model assumes continued rapid expansion of the market for EVs. See October 2024 story.
Wind turbines near Pawnee Buttes in northeastern Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
Employment at the Vestas factories in Brighton and Windsor may suffer if clean energy incentives get gutted. The manufacturer of blades and nacelles for wind turbines invested $40 million at its plants. In the last year it hired 700 people in anticipation of orders for 1,000 turbines during 2025. Orders for wind turbines would be impacted by loss of the manufacturing production tax credit, according to Advanced Energy United.
At Namaste Solar, chief executive Jason Sharpe said he is unsure whether to plan for expansion or constriction.
“As a business owner, how do you plan a business with this amount of uncertainty, trying to thread the needle between coping with political change and not creating panic among my employees? It’s challenging,” he said.
Namaste sees the bill having a target on residential solar because it would eliminate tax credits that homeowners can apply for directly.
The bill also has a provision that would disrupt the transfer of tax credits, harming existing renewable energy and storage projects and making funding more difficult for other, less proven technologies.
“If Xcel Energy, for example, builds a large solar project, they might not have enough tax obligation to fully utilize the tax credit. So, they could sell that, or transfer it, to other investors to monetize the tax credit.”
Advanced Energy United’s Godfrey says that a conventional big bank will be more risk adverse, but the transferrable tax credit enlarges the pool of potential investors. As such, this sweetener, as the Economist describes it, will also be lost for nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage, technologies currently absent in Colorado but which remain theoretically possible. The State Land Board has leased subterranean rights to several parcels for carbon capture.
As for Colorado’s solar sector Sharpe says Namaste will survive if the bill becomes law but with fewer employees. Now 20 years old, the company has 200 employees “We will have a smaller market but not a zero market,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet met last week with Sharpe as well as representatives of Vestas, electrical utilities, and others to hear how they saw the proposed shift in tax incentives impacting them.
“This casts a broad shadow on lots of the progress that the state has made in terms of power supply,” said Mark Gabriel, the CEO of United Power, in a later interview. The bill as written, if it becomes law, will impact “virtually all of our members and virtually all of Colorado.”
Project developers will find it more difficult to get financing, said Gabriel. Those projects that do go forward will cost more.
United serves 115,000 members across a 900-square mile service territory stretching from the oil-and-gas wells of the Wattenberg Field to the foothills west of Arvada. During the last four years demand in April, to cite just one month, has grown from 350 megawatts to 500 megawatts.
“I am a practical businessman. I don’t have dreadlocks. I don’t wear Birkenstocks. This is not a crusade,” said Gabriel.
Resource adequacy and reliability lie at the heart of Gabriel’s concerns. Colorado has plans to close all of its coal plants in the next six years. Coal has become expensive when compared to renewables. Most Colorado utilities plan major investments in natural gas plants, and United Power has one nearing completion about 40 miles northeast of Denver.
United also plans new renewable generation and battery storage in what Gabriel calls a hyper-localization strategy. Cheap renewables from other states and time zones could be part of the long-term strategy, but getting new transmission built remains a daunting, long-term challenge.
“Replacing base-load generation takes time,” said Gabriel. “The transmission is not coming over the hill to save us between now and 2030. What resources can we install in a relatively expeditious manner? They tend to be solar and storage and some gas.”
Perversely, the higher cost of electricity would also add to the cost of production of oil and gas in Colorado. Chevron, said Gabriel, has reported plans to drill 262 wells north of Denver in the Wattenberg Field, some of which is served by United.
“If you think about it, oil and gas is moving to electrify many of their fields. Certainly, the folks in the mid-stream arena are under certain requirements of the state,” Gabriel observed.
Xcel Energy CEO Robert Kenney was also at the meeting. He told Bennet that the existing tax credits will help Xcel reach its goals for emissions reduction while simultaneously reducing the cost of projects, all while keeping customers’ bills well below the national average.
In a filing with state regulators in October, Xcel said it needs 700 megawatts of new generating capacity, about two-thirds of it for a wave of new and large data centers.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, Colorado’s second largest electrical wholesaler, said that the House version presents challenges to meeting its priorities of maintaining reliable and affordable energy for rural communities.
Residents of Castle Rock and other communities served by CORE Electrical Cooperative could also expect higher electricity prices. The utility, Colorado’s largest in terms of members, has entered into contracts for renewable and battery projects. Any reduction of the tax credits will result in increased costs to CORE’s members,” said the utility in a statement. “These tax credits are critical to keeping costs, and therefore rates, stable for our members.”
Holy Cross Energy has no large data centers on its horizon and serves only a few gas wells in the Western Colorado’s Piceance Basin. Growth in electrical demand from the Aspen and Vail-dominated resort valleys has been modest. It has a different challenge. It wants to erase all emissions from its electrical generation by 2030.
Bryan Hannegan, the chief executive, said six years ago that achieving 85% to 90% emissions-free energy would be the easier task. Holy Cross is close to complete. For 2025, the utility expects to surpass 80% emissions-free energy. That compares to 50% in 2022. Last October and again in April, it surpassed 90% emissions-free electricity.
Holy Cross did this while maintaining some of Colorado’s lower electrical rates.
Now, the utility has started work on that last 10% to 15%. After securing large amounts of wind and solar energy from Colorado’s eastern plains, Holy Cross now is focused on adding local resources with greater flexibility and in precise locations within its service territory or base-load generation that can be relied upon when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Geothermal is one of the options.
A program called Power+FLEX encourages Holy Cross members to install batteries that can benefit the homes and businesses where they are located but in a way that Holy Cross can draw upon them when needed to support the local power grid. Roughly 850 batteries have been installed as part of the program with a combined capacity for 4.25 megawatts.
The batteries are financed through a combination of upfront rebates, low-interest financing by the utility, the federal investment tax credit and the direct pay provisions in the current tax code. These provisions allow Holy Cross to subtract the value of the tax credit from the amount financed. Loss of the tax credit will make the batteries more expensive, dampening future demand.
Bryan Hannegan has been leading Holy Cross Energy in a quest to mostly end emissions in generation of electricity nad, possibly, become a model for larger utilities. Photo/Allen Best
On May 22, the same day the House passed its bill, Holy Cross issued a request for proposals for solar combined with battery storage and other technology that may allow it to produce 90% clean energy consistently in coming years.
“These resources are different from what they were in the past: much more flexibility, much more localized, even specific locations. That reflects the success of the energy transition so far. To go further, we will need different things than what we have had in the past,” said Hannegan.
How might the bids — which are due by the end of June — impact Holy Cross’s plans? The uncertainty about federal law will introduce a large amount of uncertainty, said Hannegan.
“These tax changes will be far reaching throughout the entire energy system, and without some clarity, it is hard to say what those impacts will be,” he said. “But if you increase the cost of something, people tend to reduce their consumption of it.”
In other words, if solar and energy storage become more expensive because tax credits go away, the costs to utilities will increase.
Wouldn’t it be fair for the renewable sector to stand on its own now? Prices for first wind and then solar have dropped with jaw-dropping speed during the last decades with energy storage now echoing their successes.
Namaste’s Sharpe says that time is approaching but has not yet arrived.
“I think we are getting close, and I do look forward to that day,” he said, while noting that the fossil fuel industries had what he called a 200-year head start in their subsidies.
Solar, he said, has become the lowest cost resource and the fastest dispatching. But it does have a vulnerability, as does wind: variability.
“The problem with high-penetration renewables is that variability,” said Sharpe. “That is the last hurdle.”
Colorado — and the world, actually — are on the “cusp of what we need to get over that hurdle,” said Sharpe, as we work on new storage technologies such as the Form Energy iron-air project in Pueblo. For that, innovation — which has started coming in great spurts, particularly by companies along the Front Range — must continue, and that innovation has been driven by the favorable tax credits.
“It’s wrong to abruptly end incentives at a time when we are on the cusp of innovation that will solve this problem,” he said.
On its surface, floating solar appears to conserve water while generating carbon-free electricity. River managers are cautious, but some say the West can’t afford to wait.
GILA RIVER INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz.—About 33 miles south of Phoenix, Interstate 10 bisects a line of solar panels traversing the desert like an iridescent snake. The solar farm’s shape follows the path of a canal, with panels serving as awnings to shade the gently flowing water from the unforgiving heat and wind of the Sonoran Desert.
The panels began generating power last November for the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh tribes—known together as the Gila River Indian Community, or GRIC—on their reservation in south-central Arizona, and they are the first of their kind in the U.S. The community is studying the effects of these panels on the water in the canal, hopeful that they will protect a precious resource from the desert’s unflinching sun and wind.
In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely-watched water users in the West in the process.
The community’s investments come at a critical time for the Colorado River, which supplies water to about 40 million people across seven Western states, Mexico and 30 tribes, including GRIC. Annual consumption from the river regularly exceeds its supply, and a decades-long drought, fueled in part by climate change, continues to leave water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead dangerously low.
Covering water with solar panels is not a new idea. But for some it represents an elegant mitigation of water shortages in the West. Doing so could reduce evaporation, generate more carbon-free electricity and require dams to run less frequently to produce power.
But, so far, the technology has not been included in the ongoing Colorado River negotiations between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, tribes and Mexico. All are expected to eventually agree on cuts to the system’s water allocations to maintain the river’s ability to provide water and electricity for residents and farms, and keep its ecosystem alive.
“People in the U.S. don’t know about [floating solar] yet,” said Scott Young, a former policy analyst in the Nevada state legislature’s counsel bureau. “They’re not willing to look at it and try and factor it” into the negotiations.
Several Western water managers Inside Climate News contacted for this story said they were open to learning more about floating solar—Colorado has even studied the technology through pilot projects. But, outside of GRIC’s project, none knew of any plans to deploy floating solar anywhere in the basin. Some listed costly and unusual construction methods and potentially modest water savings as the primary obstacles to floating solar maturing in the U.S.
A Tantalizing Technology With Tradeoffs
A winery in Napa County, California, deployed the first floating solar panels in the U.S. on an irrigation pond in 2007. The country was still years away from passing federal legislation to combat the climate crisis, and the technology matured here haltingly. As recently as 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis, most of the world’s 13 gigawatts of floating solar capacity had been built in Asia.
Unlike many Asian countries, the U.S. has an abundance of undeveloped land where solar could be constructed, said Prateek Joshi, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who has studied floating solar, among other forms of energy. “Even though [floating solar] may play a smaller role, I think it’s a critical role in just diversifying our energy mix and also reducing the burden of land use,” he said.
This February, NREL published a study that found floating solar on the reservoirs behind federally owned dams could provide enough electricity to power 100 million U.S. homes annually, but only if all the developable space on each reservoir were used.
Lake Powell could host almost 15 gigawatts of floating solar using about 23 percent of its surface area, and Lake Mead could generate over 17 gigawatts of power on 28 percent of its surface. Such large-scale development is “probably not going to be the case,” Joshi said, but even if a project used only a fraction of the developable area, “there’s a lot of power you could get from a relatively small percentage of these Colorado Basin reservoirs.”
The study did not measure how much water evaporation floating solar would prevent, but previous NREL research has shown that photovoltaic panels—sometimes called “floatovoltaics” when they are deployed on reservoirs—could also save water by changing the way hydropower is deployed.
Some of a dam’s energy could come from solar panels floating on its reservoir to prevent water from being released solely to generate electricity. As late as December, when a typical Western dam would be running low, lakes with floating solar could still have enough water to produce hydropower, reducing reliance on more expensive backup energy from gas-fired power plants.
Joshi has spoken with developers and water managers about floating solar before, and said there is “an eagerness to get this [technology] going.” The technology, however, is not flawless.
Hoover Dam with Lake Mead in the background December 3, 2024.
Paddling Powell. Photo by Jonathan P. Thompson.
Solar arrays can be around 20 percent more expensive to install on water than land, largely because of the added cost of buoys that keep the panels afloat, according to a 2021 NREL report. The water’s cooling effect can boost panel efficiency, but floating solar panels may produce slightly less energy than a similarly sized array on land because they can’t be tilted as directly toward the sun as land-based panels.
And while the panels likely reduce water loss from reservoirs, they may also increase a water body’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which in turn warm the climate and increase evaporation. This January, researchers at Cornell University found that floating solar covering more than 70 percent of a pond’s surface area increased the water’s CO2 and methane emissions. These kinds of impacts “should be considered not only for the waterbody in which [floating solar] is deployed but also in the broader context of trade-offs of shifting energy production from land to water,” the study’s authors wrote.
“Any energy technology has its tradeoffs,” Joshi said, and in the case of floating solar, some of its benefits—reduced evaporation and land use—may not be easy to express in dollars and cents.
Silver Buckshot
There is perhaps no bigger champion for floating solar in the West than Scott Young. Before he retired in 2016, he spent much of his 18 years working for the Nevada Legislature researching the effects of proposed legislation, especially in the energy sector.
On an overcast, blustery May day in southwest Wyoming near his home, Young said that in the past two years he has promoted the technology to Colorado River negotiators, members of Congress, environmental groups and other water managers from the seven basin states, all of whom he has implored to consider the virtues of floating solar arrays on Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Young grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, about 40 miles, he estimated, from the pioneering floating solar panels in Napa. He stressed that he does not have any ties to industry; he is just a concerned Westerner who wants to diversify the region’s energy mix and save as much water as possible.
But so far, when he has been able to get someone’s attention, Young said his pitch has been met with tepid interest. “Usually the response is: ‘Eh, that’s kind of interesting,’” said Young, dressed in a black jacket, a maroon button-down shirt and a matching ball cap that framed his round, open face. “But there’s no follow-up.”
The Bureau of Reclamation “has not received any formal proposals for floating solar on its reservoirs,” said an agency spokesperson, who added that the bureau has been monitoring the technology.
In a 2021 paper published with NREL, Reclamation estimated that floating solar on its reservoirs could generate approximately 1.5 terawatts of electricity, enough to power about 100 million homes. But, in addition to potentially interfering with recreation, aquatic life and water safety, floating solar’s effect on evaporation proved difficult to model broadly.
So many environmental factors determine how water is lost or consumed in a reservoir—solar intensity, wind, humidity, lake circulation, water depth and temperature—that the study’s authors concluded Reclamation “should be wary of contractors’ claims of evaporation savings” without site-specific studies. Those same factors affect the panels’ efficiency, and in turn, how much hydropower would need to be generated from the reservoir they cover.
The report also showed the Colorado River was ripe with floating solar potential—more than any other basin in the West. That’s particularly true in the Upper Basin, where Young has been heartened by Colorado’s approach to the technology.
In 2023, the state passed a law requiring several agencies to study the use of floating solar. Last December, the Colorado Water Conservation Board published its findings, and estimated that the state could save up to 407,000 acre feet of water by deploying floating solar on certain reservoirs. An acre foot covers one acre with a foot of water, or 325,851 gallons, just about three year’s worth of water for a family of four.
When Young saw the Colorado study quantifying savings from floating solar, he felt hopeful. “407,000 acre feet from one state,” he said. “I was hoping that would catch people’s attention.”
Saving that much water would require using over 100,000 acres of surface water, said Cole Bedford, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s chief operating officer, in an email. “On some of these reservoirs a [floating solar] system would diminish the recreational value such that it would not be appropriate,” he said. “On others, recreation, power generation, and water savings could be balanced.”
Colorado is not planning to develop another project in the wake of this study, and Bedford said that the technology is not a silver bullet solution for Colorado River negotiations.
“While floating solar is one tool in the toolkit for water conservation, the only true solution to the challenges facing the Colorado River Basin is a shift to supply-driven, sustainable uses and operations,” he said.
Denver Water’s sustainability operations include generating energy from solar power panels installed on the roof of its Administration Building, parking garage and over its visitor’s parking lot at its Operations Complex near downtown. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Some of the West’s largest and driest cities, like Phoenix and Denver, ferry Colorado River water to residents hundreds of miles away from the basin using a web of infrastructure that must reliably operate in unforgiving terrain. Like their counterparts at the state level, water managers in these cities have heard floatovoltaics floated before, but they say the technology is currently too immature and costly to be deployed in the U.S.
Lake Pleasant, which holds some of the Central Arizona Project’s Colorado River Water, is also a popular recreation space, complicating its floating solar potential. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News
In Arizona, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) delivers much of the Colorado River water used by Phoenix, Tucson, tribes and other southern Arizona communities with a 336-mile canal running through the desert, and Lake Pleasant, the company’s 811,784-acre-foot reservoir.
Though CAP is following GRIC’s deployment of solar over canals, it has no immediate plans to build solar over its canal, or Lake Pleasant, according to Darrin Francom, CAP’s assistant general manager for operations, power, engineering and maintenance, in part because the city of Peoria technically owns the surface water.
Covering the whole canal with solar to save the 4,000 acre feet that evaporates from it could be prohibitively expensive for CAP. “The dollar cost per that acre foot [saved] is going to be in the tens of, you know, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Francom said, mainly due to working with novel equipment and construction methods. “Ultimately,” he continued, “those costs are going to be borne by our ratepayers,” which gives CAP reason to pursue other lower-cost ways to save water, like conservation programs, or to seek new sources.
An intake tower moves water into and out of the dam at Lake Pleasant. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News
The increased costs associated with building solar panels on water instead of on land has made such projects unpalatable to Denver Water, Colorado’s largest water utility, which moves water out of the Colorado River Basin and through the Rocky Mountains to customers on the Front Range. “Floating solar doesn’t pencil out for us for many reasons,” said Todd Hartman, a company spokesperson. “Were we to add more solar resources—which we are considering—we have abundant land-based options.”
GRIC spent about $5.6 million, financed with Inflation Reduction Act grants, to construct 3,000 feet of solar over a canal, according to David DeJong, project director for the community’s irrigation district.
Young is aware there is no single solution to the problems plaguing the Colorado River Basin, and he knows floating solar is not a perfect technology. Instead, he thinks of it as a “silver buckshot,” he said, borrowing a term from John Entsminger, general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority—a technology that can be deployed alongside a constellation of behavioral changes to help keep the Colorado River alive.
Given the duration and intensity of the drought in the West and the growing demand for water and clean energy, Young believes the U.S. needs to act now to embed this technology into the fabric of Western water management going forward.
As drought in the West intensifies, “I think more lawmakers are going to look at this,” he said. “If you can save water in two ways—why not?”
If all goes according to plan, GRIC’s West Side Reservoir will be finished and ready to store Colorado River water by the end of July. The community wants to cover just under 60 percent of the lake’s surface area with floating solar.
“Do we know for a fact that this is going to be 100 percent effective and foolproof? No,” said DeJong, GRIC’s project director for its irrigation district. “But we’re not going to know until we try.”
The Gila River Indian Community spent about $5.6 million, with the help of Inflation Reduction Act grants, to cover a canal with solar. Credit Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News
GRIC’s panels will have a few things going for them that projects on lakes Mead or Powell probably wouldn’t. West Side Reservoir will not be open to recreation, limiting the panels’ impacts on people. And the community already has the funds—Inflation Reduction Act grants and some of its own money—to pay for the project.
But GRIC’s solar ambitions may be threatened by the hostile posture toward solar and wind energy from the White House and congressional Republicans, and the project is vulnerable to an increasingly volatile economy. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump, aided by billionaire Elon Musk, has made deep cuts inrenewableenergy grants at the Environmental Protection Agency. It is unclear whether or to what extent the Bureau of Reclamation has slashed its grant programs.
“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, the Department is working to cut bureaucratic waste and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently,” said a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees Reclamation. “This includes ensuring Bureau of Reclamation projects that use funds from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act align with administration priorities. Projects are being individually assessed by period of performance, criticality, and other criteria. Projects have been approved for obligation under this process so that critical work can continue.”
And Trump’s tariffs could cause costs to balloon beyond the community’s budget, which could either reduce the size of the array or cause delays in soliciting proposals, DeJong said.
While the community will study the panels over canals to understand the water’s effects on solar panel efficiency, it won’t do similar research on the panels on West Side Reservoir, though DeJong said they have been in touch with NREL about studying them. The enterprise will be part of the system that may one day offset all the electrical demand and carbon footprint of GRIC’s irrigation system.
“The community, they love these types of innovative projects. I love these innovative projects,” said GRIC Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, standing in front of the canals in April. Lewis had his dark hair pulled back in a long ponytail and wore a blue button down that matched the color of the sky.
“I know for a fact this is inspiring a whole new generation of water protectors—those that want to come back and they want to go into this cutting-edge technology,” he said. “I couldn’t be more proud of our team for getting this done.”
DeJong feels plenty of other water managers across the West could learn from what is happening at GRIC. In fact, the West Side Reservoir was intentionally constructed near Interstate 10 so that people driving by on the highway could one day see the floating solar the community intends to build there, DeJong said.
“It could be a paradigm shift in the Western United States,” he said. “We recognize all of the projects we’re doing are pilot projects. None of them are large scale. But it’s the beginning.”
Grasses growing in the shade of a solar array were only a little less productive than those growing nearby in open grassland during years of average and above-average rainfall – but in a dry year, the shaded plants grew much better than those growing in full sun. That’s the result of a four-year study we conducted in a semi-arid grassland of northern Colorado.
When choosing a location for generating solar power, consistent sunlight and interconnection to the electric grid are key criteria. In Colorado the combination of new electrical transmission infrastructure, abundant sunlight and short vegetation that is easy to maintain have made grasslands a prime target for solar development.
Grasslands, like those that dominate the eastern plains of Colorado, provide important habitat for wildlife and serve as a critical food source for livestock. Although these grasslands have long been productive despite their normally arid environment, a warmer climate has increased the potential for more frequent and severe drought. For instance, a recent global study found that previous research likely underestimated the threat of extreme drought in grasslands.
Semi-arid grassland near Cheyenne, Wyo., with close-ups of flowers of some of the plants that grow there. Matthew Sturchio, CC BY-ND
At Colorado State University, biology professor Alan Knapp and I started the ecovoltaics research group to study the effects of solar development in grasslands. Our primary goal is to ensure an ecologically informed solar energy future.
Solar panels create microclimates
Strings of solar panels redirect rain to the edge of panels. Because of this, small rain events can provide biologically relevant amounts of water instead of evaporating quickly.
Simultaneously, solar panels shade plants growing beneath them. Some arrays, including the ones used in our study, move the panels to follow the path of the Sun across the sky.
This results in a combination of sun and shade that is very different from the uninterrupted sunlight beating down on plants in a grassland without solar panels. In turn, patterns of plant stress and water loss also differ in grasses under solar arrays. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Up4HoJYVbR4?wmode=transparent&start=0 A time-lapse video shows how a single-axis tracking solar array at Jack’s Solar Garden modifies patterns of sunlight availability.
How grasses respond to a solar panel canopy
To get a handle on how these different conditions affect grasses, we measured plant physiological response during the early stages of our study. More specifically, we tracked leaf carbon and water exchange throughout daylight hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., over 16 weeks in summer 2022 at Jack’s Solar Garden, a solar array over grassland in Longmont, Colorado.
In general, plants that are adapted to full sun conditions, including most grasses, might not be expected to grow as well in partial shade. But we suspected that growth benefits from reduced water stress could outweigh potential reductions in growth from shading. We call this the “aridity mitigation potential” hypothesis.
Sure enough, we found evidence of aridity mitigation across multiple years, with the most pronounced effect during the driest year.
When water is scarce, increases in grassland productivity are more valuable because there isn’t as much around. Therefore, increasing grassland production in dry years could provide more available food for grazing animals and help offset some of the economic harm of drought in rangelands.
Informing sustainable solar development in grasslands
So far, our research has been limited to a grassland dominated by a cool season grass: smooth brome. Although it is a perennial commonly planted for hay, fields dominated by smooth brome lack the diversity of life found in native grasslands.
Future work in native shortgrass prairies would provide new information about how solar panels affect plant water use, soils and grazing management in an ecosystem with 30% less precipitation than Jack’s Solar Garden. We’re beginning that work now at the shortgrass ecovoltaic research facility near Nunn, Colorado. This facility, which will be fully operational later in 2025, was constructed with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, through the wider SCAPES project.
Testing the effects of solar panels over grasslands in a native ecosystem with even greater aridity will help us develop a clearer picture of ways solar energy can be developed in concert with grassland health.
Matthew Sturchio, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Natural Resources and the Environment, Cornell University; Faculty Afffiliate in Ecology, Colorado State University
The shiny new cold-weather air source heat pump installed during summer 2023 at Coyote Gulch Manor.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
May 12, 2025
A Boulder County couple — we’ll call them Fred and Wilma — decided to live their values and reduce the carbon footprint of their house. This is what they did.
This was originally published in the Boulder Weekly on April 16.
Fred and Wilma (not their real names) take climate change very seriously. For the last several years, they have been members of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, an organization that advocates for a tax on greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet like most of us, they were burning natural gas to heat the space and water in their 2,800-square-foot house near Niwot. Last year, they decided to live their values. They set out to go nearly all electric.
You, too, can be like Fred and Wilma. Here’s how.
Step 1: Assess
Energy audits provide great value in guiding investment choices. They can be had for $190 after rebates.
Even more valuable are blow-door tests. Most effective in cold weather, they provide visual images of heat escaping a house. Many Boulder residents can expect to pay $60 to $150 for a conventional blow-door test. In other jurisdictions, these advanced tests typically run $200 to $450.
EnergySmart
For Boulder County residents, EnergySmart is an excellent place to start on this journey. It’s a partnership of Boulder County, Boulder and Longmont with Xcel Energy and Platte River Power Authority.
Advisors can address everything from building insulation to solar panels to the needs of electric vehicles.
Efficiency Works (Longmont Power)
An Efficiency Works assessment will cost Longmont residents $60. While funds last, assessments are free of charge for rental properties in 2025.
Xcel Energy
The state’s largest utility provider currently offers two options for audits:
Home Energy Squad Plus Visit. The current cost is $100 (limited-time discounted rate; the cost without the discount is $150)
Stuart Cummings, a former pilot, and others created Go Electric Colorado with a goal of sharing their knowledge with homeowners who wanted to figure out ways to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their homes. Here Stuart Cummings explains heat pumps to an audience in East December. Photo/Allen Best
Go Electric Colorado coalesced in 2023 after Stuart Cummings, Julia Moravcsik and Nick Stevens met and realized how many people were interested in electric cars but remained fearful about ranges and reliability. They suspected the same was true about suppressing emissions in buildings.
Abundant information about home electrification can be found on the internet. But, as Moravcsik points out, “people kind of don’t know what they don’t know.”
“Even in Boulder, where people know a lot about this kind of stuff, most people knew nothing or next to nothing about home electrification,” she says.
Go Electric Colorado’s volunteer counselors have now provided nearly 400 consultations, about half in Boulder County, with others ranging from the eastern plains to the desert valleys of the Western Slope.
Step 2: Getting started
Insulation: Fred, who recently retired after several decades as a home remodeler, knew insulation was the most important thing in reducing energy use, no matter the fuel source. He and Wilma hired Net Zero Insulation to boost the attic insulation to R-60, the gold standard. (The R-value is the capacity of an insulating material to resist heat flow. The higher the R-value, the greater the insulating power.)
It cost $3,200, and the impact was immediate. The house stayed warmer in winter, cooler in summer — and lowered their utility bills.
Windows and doors: Many older houses have single-pane windows, which have an R-value of 1. Replacing them with double-pane windows can cost $10,000 to $20,000 depending upon the house size and number of windows. Some newer homes have triple-pane windows. Windows produced by Alpen High Performance at its Louisville factory can get up to R-11. They are also far more pricey.
The federal Energy Star program allows you to claim 30% of product cost up to a maximum of $600.
In the basement of their 1967 home, Fred installed six small double-paned windows at a cost of $2,000. Upgrading a single-paned patio door cost $3,200.
Go Electric Colorado’s Paul Bousquet counsels caution before upgrading from double to triple-pane windows. He instead advises having an energy auditor use an infrared camera to find imperfections in seals around windows.
Heat pumps: Heat pumps can replace gas-burning furnaces. Using electricity, they milk the heat from outdoor air then feed it into the building’s interior. During summer, the reverse process can replace air conditioners and swamp coolers. Heat pumps can also use the same process to produce hot water in lieu of natural gas.
Metro Denver-Boulder has several companies that specialize in heat pump installation. Xcel Energy has a list of contractors registered with the company. So does Energy Smart. Go Electric Colorado endorses a handful of contractors; Bousquet advises getting at least three bids.
Fred and Wilma used Elephant Energy for the air-source heat pump to warm and cool their house and heat their 50-gallon water heater. The $22,000 cost (after rebates) included an electrical upgrade. The Flintstone house stayed comfortable in January even when the temperature dipped to 9 below. Fred strongly advises finding a company that knows all the rebates.
(For example, Superior has a host of rebates for projects that serve up to four residential units, everything from insulation to electric induction cookstoves).
Kitchen stoves: Going electric also means replacing the kitchen gas-burning stove with an electric model. Plus, studies have shown that gas fumes while cooking the tamales can be unhealthy to cooks and others.
Boulder County offers an induction cook-top lending program for people who are curious about switching to an electric range: rebuildingbetter.org/induction-resources.
While roof-top solar is abundant in this Jefferson County housing development along Highway 93 between Golden and Arvada, Go Electric Colorado counselors say it should not be the first, second or even third investment for homeowners wanting to shrink the carbon footprint of their buildings. Photo/Allen Best
Solar: Going all-electric in your house may not get you 100% clean of fossil fuels. You might achieve that by investing in solar and battery storage, a path that Go Electric Colorado can also help with.
Locally, Boulder-based Namaste Solar — an employee-owned co-op — offers free quotes. Federal tax incentives can cover up to 30% of the cost of solar panels and battery storage.
Fred and Wilma, however, decided against going with rooftop solar. Solar farms can generate electricity at scale, and roof-top solar is a long-term investment.
That has also been the advice of Go Electric Colorado. Nice, they say, but it’s not the first, second or even third priority.
Getting electricity from the utilities will include some fossil fuel. But that should diminish to near zero during the next 15 to 25 years.
Fred says that upgrading their house was a reflection of their resolve to be a part, if a small one, of the climate solution. “You can tell how much people care by what they do,” he says.
On Tuesday, February 25th, Tommy Beaudreau, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, delivered the Schultz Lecture, offering a sobering analysis of the structural, legal, economic, and political hurdles to the energy transition on public lands. His talk, “The Lords of Yesterday and the Imperatives of Now,” constituted a tribute to the late Charles Wilkinson’s coined phrase. Harkening back to Wilkinson’s work, Beaudreau traced these contemporary challenges to the legacy of westward expansion and Indigenous displacement, illustrating how outdated laws and entrenched interests continue to shape today’s energy policies.
American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation. By John Gast – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID 09855.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=373152
Beaudreau framed public lands as a political flashpoint in the energy transition. While state and private lands—particularly in North Dakota and the Southwest—have played significant roles in the oil and gas boom, debates over renewables, permitting, and leasing disproportionately focus on federal lands. Ironically, legal tools once used to block fossil fuel projects are now being turned against renewables, complicating efforts to decarbonize.
Beyond regulatory hurdles, fossil fuel revenues remain deeply embedded in state economies, funding schools, public safety, and infrastructure. Many Tribal nations, too, rely on fossil fuel revenues, balancing economic interests with environmental concerns. Beaudreau stressed that a “just transition” must provide financial alternatives before communities can fully embrace renewables.
Outdated laws, like the 1872 Mining Law, remain a major obstacle to energy reform. Beaudreau highlighted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as a key step in shifting energy policy, but legal battles persist over leasing rights, mineral access, and state-federal control. He pointed to Louisiana’s lawsuit over the Biden administration’s oil and gas lease moratorium, which raised critical questions about governmental statutory and commercial contractual rights in energy development.
Economic arguments also dominate the debate. Critics claim renewables are too costly for federal subsidies, mirroring past fights over offshore oil incentives. Meanwhile, global competition—especially China’s control of solar panel and battery supply chains—adds geopolitical complexity to the transition.
Despite these challenges, Beaudreau offered a measured note of optimism. He pointed to Western landowners and ranchers, historically conservation advocates, as potential allies in sustainable land management. Their interest in wildlife migration corridors and outdoor access could foster new conservation coalitions.
Ultimately, Beaudreau underscored that energy transition requires modernizing laws, addressing economic realities, and building broad political consensus. As attendees left Wittemyer Courtroom, they carried with them a clear message: the road ahead is uncertain, but public lands remain central to shaping America’s energy future and, as Wilkinson’s “lords of yesterday” remain, the imperatives of change have arrived.
The recording of the 16th annual Schultz Lecture can be found here.
Native land loss 1776 to 1930. Credit: Alvin Chang/Ranjani Chakraborty
From email from the Getches-Wilkinson Center (Annie Carlozzi):
Thank you for joining the Getches-Wilkinson Center and the Center of the American West for the Schultz Lecture in Energy on February 25th! We are so grateful to Tommy Beaudreau for making time in his schedule to spend lunch with our law students and the evening with all of our attendees in person and online.
We have a few things to share with you:
Conference Photos
Barb Colombo of 11:11 Productions Photography has provided us with wonderful images of the lecture with Tommy Beaudreau. We’ve added them to a Flickr album for easy viewing here.
Conference Recordings
The Law School IT Team has released the recording from the lecture.
GWC Blog Current Colorado Law students Victoria Matson and Oliver Skelly shared their reflections on Tommy Beaudreau’s visit to the Colorado Law School on the GWC blog. You can read their piece here.
Upcoming Event
We hope you will consider joining us for the annual Colorado River Conference co-convened by GWC and the Water & Tribes Initiative. You can find more information on our website regarding this year’s theme: Turning Hindsight into Foresight: The Colorado River at a Crossroads.
On March 13, 2025 Gabe Evans visited a five-megawatt solar installation near LaSalle. Photo courtesy of Rep. Gabe Evans
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
March 21, 2025
Colorado sends four Democrats and four Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives. Of them, Jeff Hurd, a Republican from Grand Junction, and Gabe Evans, a Republican from Fort Lupton, will be the most interesting to watch during the next two years.
These two representatives, both new to Congress in January, were among 21 Republican signatories in the House to a letter calling for restraint in efforts to gut the Inflation Reduction Act.
The letter expresses concern about “disruptive changes to our nation’s energy tax structure.” The New York Times and Utility Dive both interpreted the language as a reference to the IRA, the landmark climate legislation adopted in August 2022. President Donald Trump, the Times notes, often talks about repealing the law.
Atlas Public Policy, a research firm, reported in February that 80% of funds authorized by the law have gone to Congressional districts represented by Republicans.
Hurd, an attorney who formerly was chief counsel for the Delta-Montrose Electric Association, essentially replaced Lauren Boebert in the Third Congressional District. Boebert was almost certainly headed for defeat had she tried to run against Aspen’s Adam Frisch a second time in the Western Slope-dominated and Republican-leaning district after squeaking out just 50.6% of votes in the strongly Republican-leaning district. With a new home in Windsor, she easily won election in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District.
While Boebert inevitably echoes Trump, Hurd signaled his measured distance from MAGA hat-wearing positions when he criticized Trump’s blanket pardon of rioters who had invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. At the same time, his bill, Productive Public Lands Act, rhymes with Trump’s drill-baby-drill slogan. Never mind that the United States has already been setting records for oil and gas extraction.
As long as he can survive Republican primaries. Hurd can probably return to Washington for a good many terms. His drill bill is likely part of that political dance.
Evans has a more tricky path to negotiate. He narrowly beat the incumbent Democrat, Yadira Caraveo, in the Eighth Congressional District. The district extends from the edge of Denver to the farm country of northern Colorado. Although a former police officer in Arvada, he nonetheless refrained from criticizing Trump’s pardons of the rioters, as Denver TV newscaster Kyle Clark pointed out.
Most of Weld County lies in his district. The county delivers 82% of Colorado’s crude oil and 56% of its natural gas extraction. The district also has the Vestas factory in Brighton that produces nacelles for wind turbines. Vestas has 1,800 employees in Colorado between that factory and another in Windsor. Evans’ district also has many solar energy installations.
On March 13, Evans visited the Vestas factory, a five-megawatt solar installation near LaSalle, and an oil installation. Bayswater, operator of the latter, proclaims itself a producer of “some of the cleanest energy molecules in the country and world.”
Invited to tag along, Channel 4 gave Evans the time to say that he favored an “all-of-the-above safe, affordable, secure energy supply to bring costs down to consumers and jobs back to the United States.”
That “all-of-the-above energy approach” was a key element of the letter signed by Evans and Hurd. Combined with a robust advanced manufacturing sector, the approach “will support the United States’ position as a global energy leader,” the letter said. “Both our constituencies and the energy industry alike remain concerned about disruptive changes to our nation’s energy tax structure.”
Tax credits adopted over the last decade “allowed energy developers to plan with these tax incentives in mind. These timelines have been relied upon when it comes to capital allocation, planning, and project commitments, all of which would be jeopardized by premature credit phase outs or additional restrictive mechanisms such as limiting transferability.”
The Evans all-of-the-above tour was arranged by a former Republican state senator, Greg Brophy. Brophy grows watermelons north of Wray and operates an organization called The Western Way. Brophy has been a strong supporter of renewable energy for eastern Colorado and also has a presence on the Western Slope.
Brophy told me that he has organized a similar tour for another member of Congress from Colorado, but it has not been scheduled. He declined to identify the representative.
What if Trump succeeds in rolling back the federal energy tax credits? Energy Innovation, a think tank, estimates increased average household energy costs in Colorado of $180 per year by 2030.
Will other Republicans in Colorado’s congressional delegation join Evans and Hurd? After all, renewable energy didn’t start out as a partisan issue.
Colorado’s energy industry has had a slightly rougher go of it, mainly because it specializes in natural gas, not crude oil, and methane prices have been low since the 2009 crash. Note to Jeff Hurd: Revenues were substantially higher under Biden than under Trump I. Just sayin’. Source: ONRR via The Land Desk/Jonathan P. Thompson
The construction project to build the Kayenta solar farms on the Navajo Nation, shown here in 2018, employed hundreds of people, nearly 90 percent of whom were Navajo citizens. Renewable energy is drawing increasing attention from tribes and others as a way to build jobs for the future. (Photo from the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority / Navajo Nation)
The Getches-Wilkinson Center and Center of the American West will co-host the 16th Annual Schultz Lecture in Energy on February 25, 2025 with special guest, Tommy Beaudreau, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior.
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 6:00-7:30 p.m. (Mountain Time) Wolf Law Building, Wittemyer Courtroom
A reception will be held immediately following the lecture for all in person registrants.
Two general CLE credits have been approved for Colorado attorneys.
“The Lords of Yesterday and the Imperatives of Now”
Beaudreau will discuss the structural, legal, and political challenges to energy transition on public lands. He will provide an exploration of the contemporary problems that must be solved for bringing public lands to bear in energy transition efforts, and how the roots of those issues rest in the legacy of American westward expansion and the displacement of Native people.
Student Lunch and Learns Tues, February 25, 2025 at the Center of the American West Wed, February 26, 2025 in Room 207 in Wolf Law
GWC and CWA respectively, will host a lunch and learn for students, where Tommy Beaudreau will share his professional experiences and offered advice and guidance to students and engage in a Q&A session.
Tommy Beaudreau
Tommy Beaudreau is co-chair of WilmerHale’s Energy, Environment and Natural Resources and Native American Law Practices. Mr. Beaudreau focuses his practice on a broad range of areas including conventional and renewable energy and large-scale infrastructure projects; environmental regulatory, litigation and enforcement matters; crisis management and response; and Tribal matters. In addition, Mr. Beaudreau leads internal investigations and responses to government investigations and congressional oversight.
Mr. Beaudreau served in senior leadership roles in the United States Department of the Interior for nearly a decade across two administrations. Most recently, he served as the Deputy Secretary of the Interior after being confirmed by the US Senate in June 2021 by a vote of 88-9, reflecting his strong reputation as a bi-partisan problem solver. In this role, Mr. Beaudreau was point on the most pressing and high-profile matters before the Department, including energy development on public lands and waters, water infrastructure and delivery to address sustained drought in the American west, infrastructure permitting and critical minerals development, implementation of the historic investments through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, and a broad range of priorities relative to Indian Country.
Mr. Beaudreau previously served for nearly seven years at the Department of the Interior (DOI) during the Obama Administration, including as the first director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, and chief of staff for the Interior Department.
He is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
The Schultz Lectureship in Energy
In 2007, the Schultz Lecture in Energy was launched to support an annual lecture by renowned scholars in energy or natural resources law. This series was made possible by the generosity of John H. and Cynthia H. Schultz and allows the Getches-Wilkinson Center (GWC) to bring in thought leaders from across the country. Our speakers address emerging issues and challenges in the oil and gas, energy, and natural resources fields, providing valuable information to policymakers, practitioners, business executives, students, and the academic community.
John Schultz (CU Econ, Political. Science ‘51) (CU Law ‘53) was an oil and gas attorney whose impactful career in Colorado and the Western U.S. spanned the second half of the 20th century. John Schultz passed away on April 5, 2020, surrounded by family in the comfort of his own home in Lafayette, Colorado. Cynthia Schultz was a University of Colorado administrative staff member who served the University in many ways. She was a member of the Graduate School Advisory Council, the Graduate School Resource Committee, and on the Ad Hoc Task Force on Graduate Education. Cynthia passed away on December 20, 2011. Both John’s and Cynthia’s generosity of time with our students was exceptional.
Their legacies continue, in part, through their substantial gifts to the University of Colorado, Colorado Law, and to the GWC where we are so appreciative of the Schultz family’s generosity. The family’s continued commitment means that this lecture can be free and open to the public. The format (normally) includes a public reception following the talk, providing the opportunity to continue a lively discussion, as well as a dinner with the speaker, the extended Schultz family, the Dean, GWC faculty, and several law students.
January 2025 – Surface air temperature and sea surface temperature highlights
Global Temperatures
January 2025 was the warmest January globally, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 13.23°C, 0.79°C above the 1991-2020 average for January.
January 2025 was 1.75°C above the pre-industrial level and was the 18th month in the last nineteen months for which the global-average surface air temperature was more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level.
The last 12-monthsperiod (February 2024 – January 2025) was 0.73°C above the 1991-2020 average, and 1.61°C above the estimated 1850-1900 average used to define the pre-industrial level.
*Datasets other than ERA5 may not confirm the 18 months above 1.5°C highlighted here, due to the relatively small margins above 1.5°C of ERA5 global temperatures observed for several months and differences among the various datasets.
Europe and other regions
The average temperature over European land for January 2025 was 1.80°C, 2.51°C above the 1991-2020 average for January, the second warmest after January 2020, which was 2.64°C above average.
European temperatures were most above the 1991-2020 average over southern and eastern Europe, including western Russia. In contrast, they were below average over Iceland, the United Kingdom and Ireland, northern France, and northern Fennoscandia.
Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over northeast and northwest Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. They were also above average over southern South America, Africa, and much of Australia and Antarctica.
Temperatures were most notably below average over the United States and the easternmost regions of Russia, Chukotka and Kamchatka. The Arabian Peninsula and mainland Southeast Asia also had below-average temperatures.
Sea surface temperature
The average sea surface temperature (SST) for January 2025 over 60°S–60°N was 20.78°C, the second-highest value on record for the month, 0.19°C below the January 2024 record.
SSTs were below average over the central equatorial Pacific, but close to or above average over the eastern equatorial Pacific, suggesting a slowing or stalling of the move towards La Niña conditions. SSTs remained unusually high in many other ocean basins and seas.
Monthly global surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to 1850–1900 from January 1940 to January 2025, plotted as time series for each year. 2025 is shown with a thick red line, 2024 with a thick orange line, 2023 with a thick yellow line, and all other years with thin grey lines. Data source: ERA5. Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service /ECMWF.
According to Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at ECMWF:
“January 2025 is another surprising month, continuing the record temperatures observed throughout the last two years, despite the development of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific and their temporary cooling effect on global temperatures. Copernicus will continue to closely monitor ocean temperatures and their influence on our evolving climate throughout 2025.”
January 2025 – Hydrological highlights
January 2025 saw predominantly wetter-than-average conditions over regions of western Europe, as well as parts of Italy, Scandinavia and the Baltic countries; heavy precipitation led to flooding in some regions.
Conversely, drier than average conditions established in northern UK and Ireland, eastern Spain, and north of the Black Sea.
Beyond Europe, it was wetter than average in Alaska, Canada, central and eastern Russia, eastern Australia, south-eastern Africa, southern Brazil, with regions experiencing floods and associated damage.
Drier than average conditions established in southwestern United States and northern Mexico, northern Africa, the Middle East, across Central Asia and in eastern China as well as in much of southern Africa, southern South America and Australia.
January 2025 – Sea Ice highlights
Arctic sea ice reached its lowest monthly extent for January, at 6% below average, virtually tied with January 2018.
In the Arctic region, sea ice concentration anomalies were well below average in the eastern Canadian sector, including Hudson Bay and the Labrador Sea, and in the northern Barents Sea.
Antarctic sea ice extent was 5% below average and thus relatively close to average compared to other recent years. This contrasts with the record or near-record values observed in 2023–2024.
In the Antarctic region, sea ice concentrations were above average in the Amundsen Sea and generally mixed in other ocean sectors.
More information about climate variables in January and climate updates of previous months as well as high-resolution graphics can be downloaded here.
Other useful links:
Answers to frequently asked questions regarding temperature monitoring can be found here.
Follow near-real-time data for the globe on Climate Pulse here.
More on trends and projections on Climate Atlas here.
Change is the only constant, all around us at all times. In our natural, human, and political systems, the pace of change feels particularly intense right now. How will we participate in this change, appropriate to its scope and scale, to shape or be shaped by it?
For the past several years, the Colorado Farm & Food Alliance has focused on three broad “avenues” (or approaches) for local solutions regarding rural climate action. In each of these, the new federal administration and shift in Congress could impede or derail progress already made and potentially into the future.
Avenues for climate action that the CO Farm & Food Alliance has focused on are (1) meeting landscape-level conservation goals to secure water supplies and boost ecological and climate resilience; (2) producing more locally generated and community-centered clean energy; and (3) helping small-acreage agricultural producers benefit from and support the shift to more regenerative practices that increase climate mitigation and adaptation, and boost farm health.
In 2025, we expect ongoing attempts to rollback current environmental and conservation policy – based on stated intent from the new administration and Congress, along with early action and leadership changes in agencies and on committees – with a hard shift away from natural resource protection, environmental justice, and climate action.
The CO Farm & Food Alliance is troubled by this change in federal direction. We will work with partners to defend the progress made and seek opportunities to continue that progress.
With our model of local action and community-rooted solutions, the CO Farm & Food Alliance will work to prevent harm and continue to advance on all of these fronts in partnership with national and local allies.
meeting landscape-level conservation goals to secure our water supplies, wildlife, and quality of place
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance began with the premise that healthy lands and clean water protect Colorado farms, food, and drink. At the time of our founding, we sought to unify as a local voice for farm and food leaders who supported the protection of the public lands and water source areas surrounding the North Fork Valley.
As our focus broadened to include food security and climate change, among other issues, we also recognized that land use, specifically the conservation and restoration of natural places and systems is a powerful way to help address climate anomalies.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance remains committed to working with our partners to secure and maintain protection for critical public and watershed lands in western Colorado. Protecting cherished places such as the Thompson Divide and Clear Fork area, the North Fork Valley, and Dolores Canyons enjoys broad public appeal.
Conservation also helps address the biodiversity crisis and makes watersheds and Colorado farms more resilient to drought. These iconic landscapes are foundational to the character of this place and its residents. They protect our water supplies, essential wildlife habitats, and popular hunting and recreation areas. This means we will join with others to defend public lands and conservation policies from rollbacks and other emerging threats in Washington. However, there will also be opportunities to champion the importance of public lands to Colorado and highlight their values.
producing more locally produced and community-centered clean energy
Rural communities’ powering of farms, businesses, and homes—and the growth of renewable energy projects in rural areas—can significantly improve people’s lives and livelihoods. However, rollbacks to clean energy, environmental justice, and other climate programs could set western Colorado back and be a “gut punch” we do not need.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance supports deploying more community-based renewable energy for farms and rural communities. We will closely monitor how Washington’s changes might impact local communities’ ability to develop their own home-grown power solutions.
For transitioning coal and power-plant communities, like the North Fork and other places in Colorado, environmental justice means supporting local solutions for front-line communities. This is recognized in climate funding laws passed during the last Congress, which directly benefit places like Craig, Naturita, and Pueblo, as well as communities in Delta County. However, a recent January 2025 White House Executive Order seeks to defund many of these programs.
Despite this, we will continue working with partners to help advance innovative community-based clean energy projects – like the Thistle Whistle Community Solar project. We will advocate for the preservation of funding that allows coal-mining and power-plant communities – whether rural or urban, red or blue – to envision and implement their own home-grown energy solutions.
The North Fork River valley. Photo credit: Colorado Farm & Food Alliance
supporting small-acreage agricultural producers in benefiting from a shift to more regenerative practices
The Farm Bill, which is central to agriculture in the United States, was recently extended for a third time. This has made a normally five-year bill into an eight-and-counting ordeal. It is not certain that it will be settled this year, but it will have a far-reaching impact when it is.
That’s because the Farm Bill touches many things, from nutrition to farming to clean energy. Even with an uncertain passage, the debate over this bill will continue in committees in both the House and the Senate, now under narrow Republican control.
The Farm Bill is one place rural renewables get funded, through the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP). This is another place where cuts might come to clean energy under a new Congress and priority shifts in the administration.
Clean energy is just one small part of the Farm Bill. Several vital programs funded by this legislation could be at risk of cuts or elimination. These include nutrition programs such as SNAP (“food stamps”) and Doubleup Foodbucks. This program, which could be targeted, addresses hunger in our communities and supports local farmers by increasing SNAP benefits at local farmers’ markets.
Farm and ranch conservation funding is another area likely to see proposed Farm Bill cuts. This includes helping small-acreage farmers implement more regenerative and climate-adapted practices. Programs that support small-acreage farmers are essential for conservation. In the U.S., the number of farmers is decreasing, but the average size of farms is increasing. Many small farms will be converted to other uses and will not stay in agriculture if farming becomes nonviable.
The loss of a farm is personally devastating and sends ripples through the local economy. It also limits the type and scope of nature-based climate solutions that can be implemented. In important headwaters and agricultural areas, like the Gunnison River basin, ensuring the viability of agriculture–which smaller and mid-sized farms and ranches dominate–and protecting our farm economies are critical strategies to support rural, farm-based climate action.
Conservation funding and nutrition programs that allow farmers to provide food directly into local markets are key tools that improve farm outputs, provide income, boost resilience, and address food insecurity in western Colorado.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance is sharing and we will continue to develop new and additional resources to help farmers and others navigate policy and program changes at the USDA and other agencies. We will also highlight growers and ranchers practicing techniques that make their farms and pastures more resilient, productive, and sustainable. Showcasing our successes and our shared work will be important in the years ahead.
A North Fork Orchard. Photo credit: Colorado Farm & Food Alliance
The Future is here: We are it.
Despite all these changes and challenges coming our way, we can find security in our community and shared endeavors. We can create something new, sustainable, and fair that emerges right here.
But first, we must persist. This means securing and defending what we have and value most. It means standing up for the vulnerable and those people and places that are targets of attack.
Still, that cannot be all we do. We should neither feel defeated nor content to just wait for a different time. We should imagine new ways to connect with each other now, to celebrate what we cherish and to replicate and share out what we do well.
The future is up to us, but we are mighty together. Now we must become the change we seek.
74% of Gen Zers say climate change threatens the clean water supply in the U.S.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jan. 28, 2025 — The Walton Family Foundation and Gallup releaseda new report today examining Gen Z’s experiences with climate change and water issues, shedding light on their concerns about climate events and the potential impact on their generation’s future. The research finds water issues top the list of Gen Z’s climate worries, with individual perspectives shaped by diverse experiences and beliefs.
Of 12 climate-related issues measured in the study, majorities of Gen Zers express “some” or “a great deal” of worry about nine, including five related to water. This is true regardless of location, with water pollution and the health of fish and oceans ranking among the top three concerns in every U.S. Census region. While a majority of Gen Zers nationwide (61%) have reported experiencing a water-related climate issue in the past two years, water-related problems are more commonly reported by those in the Central and Western U.S.
When considering how these issues may affect their future, Gen Zers report concern about the availability of clean water and the potential need to relocate. Those who have experienced climate-related events at a higher rate are more likely to worry about these impacts . T here are notable differences across demographic groups. Hispanic (36%) and Black (34%) Gen Zers are more likely than their White (27%) peers to have experienced unsafe tap water . They are also more likely to believe there will not be enough clean water for their generation to live in the future (41% of Hispanic and 34% of Black Gen Zers, compared with 24% of W hite Gen Zers). Adult Gen Zers are significantly more likely to worry about needing to move due to climate change compared with their 12- to 17-year-old counterparts (40% vs. 27%, respectively).
Denver School Strike for Climate, September 20, 2019.
There is large-scale unity among young people on the importance of protecting water quality. Seventy-four percent of Gen Zers say it is “very important” to protect oceans, lakes and rivers from pollution, with another 19% saying it is “somewhat important.” Gen Z acknowledges the adverse effects of climate change on water resources: 74% of Gen Zers say climate change impacts the amount of clean water available in the U.S. “somewhat” (47%) or “a great deal” (27%). There is solid bipartisan agreement on the inadequacy of current water protection efforts: M ajorities of both Democratic (88%) and Republican (63%) Gen Z adults say the U.S. is “probably” or “definitely” not doing enough to protect water.
“Gen Z is united in their deep concern for water protection and availability, recognizing it as a critical issue that touches us all — regardless of where we live or who we are,” said Moira Mcdonald, Environment Program Director at the Walton Family Foundation. “As we look to the future, there’s a growing sense of urgency. Young people fear inheriting a world where clean water is scarce and climate change continues to worsen. We need to work on solutions to ensure clean, safe water remains accessible for generations to come.”
Looking ahead, Gen Zers are pessimistic about the trajectory of climate change — 67% believe climate change will worsen in their lifetime. And rates of pessimism are about 10 percentage points higher among those who have recently experienced a climate-related issue such as flooding, drought or unsafe tap water. Among voting-age Gen Zers, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans believe it is very or somewhat unlikely that climate change will be stopped.
Methodology
Results are based on a Gallup Panel™ web survey conducted Aug. 6-14, 2024, with a sample of 2,832 12- to 27-year-olds from across the U.S. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based panel of U.S. adults. Data were weighted to match demographic targets of age, gender, education, race, Hispanic ethnicity and Census region for 12- to 27-year-olds, using the most recent five-year population estimates from the American Community Survey.
Twelve- to 17-year-old children, as well as some 18-year-olds, were reached through adult members of the Gallup Panel who indicated they had at least one child aged 18 or younger living in their household. The remaining 18- to 27-year-old respondents are members of the Gallup Panel.
For the total sample of 2,832 respondents, the margin of sampling error is +/-2.9 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Margins of error for subgroups are higher; selected subgroups are reported below. All margins of error reported are adjusted to account for the design effect.
Colorado Farm & Food Alliance leads effort to advance in Department of Energy Community Power Accelerator Prize
HOTCHKISS, CO (January 27, 2025) — The U.S. The Department of Energy (DOE) announced this month that a North Fork Valley solar partnership is one of four teams to win a national $200,000 Community Power Accelerator Prize. The North Fork based team now advances to the third and final round, and a $150,000 prize, in this community solar competition sponsored by the DOE National Solar Energy Technologies Office.
The Colorado Farm and Food Alliance-led team seeks to advance several community-based solar projects that prioritize agriculture, community benefit and renewable energy generation. The Accelerator Prize award will be used for engineering and other studies at Thistle Whistle Community Solar project near Hotchkiss and to study the feasibility of a second installation at a former coal mine site near Paonia. Both locations are in Delta County, Colorado.
Partners in developing these projects include Colorado Farm & Food Alliance, Thistle Whistle Community Solar, Mirasol Agrivoltaics and Switchback Restoration, along with community leaders. The award will help to advance at least two community solar projects, starting with a small agrivoltaic array at Thistle Whistle Farm near Hotchkiss. This innovative project will pair agricultural production with solar energy and provide clean power to local farms and residents through the Delta Montrose Electric Association (DMEA) grid.
“I am eager to see this project completed, to benefit my farm and to help provide energy cost savings to other local farms and households,” said Mark Waltermire, owner of Thistle Whistle Farm. “The Community Power prize has been vital in helping to keep this project moving forward.” Now completing pre-development, the Thistle Whistle Community Solar project will:
Generate clean, renewable energy for local communities
Preserve agricultural land through dual-use farming practices
Increase energy equity through community-solar, returning cost savings to system subscribers
Create new economic opportunities for local farmers
Support local food systems while advancing clean energy goals
Document best practices for agrivoltaic system design and lessons learned for community solar
Monitor wildlife corridors and habitat enhancement
Research water conservation benefits in dual-use systems
The second project is in early pre-development, but will help support mine-site remediation and climate harm reduction at a former coal mine as well as provide an additional community-solar benefit. “This recognition from the Department of Energy validates our vision for community-based rural renewables that support both our agricultural heritage and greater energy equity,” said Pete Kolbenschlag, with the Colorado Farm and Food Alliance and prize team captain. “These projects demonstrate how rural communities can lead the way in innovative clean energy solutions that preserve farmland, benefit residents and integrate with local livelihoods.” The North Fork Valley team is still participating in this national competition. In the third, and final, round teams must demonstrate that they have secured the funding necessary to develop their community solar projects. As part of the Phase 3 competition, the project team will be able to present their vision at the Community Power PitchFest event at the DOE Headquarters in Washington, D.C. on March 6,
The Community Power Accelerator Prize is part of the American Made Challenge program, with funding coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by Congress in 2021. As part of its mission, the Colorado Farm and Food Alliance provides a platform for rural leadership to develop and implement local solutions that model climate action and strengthen farm and food system resilience. It is the named partner of the Community Power Accelerator Prize.
Mirasol Agrivoltaics is a recently established Colorado nonprofit with a mission to educate about and to help develop community solar projects in the North Fork Valley. With this award it will be able to fill a new and needed leadership role in supporting clean energy, cost savings, and community-based solutions through the Thistle Whistle Community Solar and future projects.
Learning and demonstration gardens at Arbol Farm, Paonia, CO. Photo credit: Colorado Farm and Food Alliance
John Kerry, then U.S. secretary of state, with China’s special representative on climate change, Xie Zhenhua, at the 2015 Paris climate conference. FRANCOIS MORI / AP PHOTO
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Joseph Winters & Naveena Sadasivam):
January 20, 2025
Within hours of being sworn into office on Monday, President Donald Trump announced a spate of executive orders and policies to boost oil and gas production, roll back environmental protections, withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and undo environmental justice initiatives enacted by former president Joe Biden.
Conventional wisdom — and political donations — would indicate that Republicans are friendlier than Democrats to the oil and gas industry. And, in fact, that’s probably true: Democrats are more likely to pass regulations on drilling; Republicans are more likely to give oil corporations massive tax cuts. But in spite of all of that, Over the last fifty years, Republican presidents have been more likely to oversee crude oil production declines, while production has generally increased under Democrats, with the exception of the Clinton administration. In fact, the current surge in production began during Obama’s first year, and has continued through Biden’s entire term. This doesn’t mean that Democrats spur production. What it means is that more regulations don’t hamper production, and rescinding those regulations — and corporate tax cuts — don’t spur production. There are many forces in play, and the occupant of the White House is merely one of them, and a relatively insignificant one at that. Source: EIA, Land Desk.
Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and appointed oil industry executives and climate skeptics to his Cabinet. His first-day actions represent a complete remaking of the country’s climate agenda, and set the tone for his administration’s approach to energy and the environment over the next four years.
‘Drill, baby, drill‘
Among the most significant actions Trump took Monday was declaring “an energy emergency,” which he framed as part of his effort to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living. He pledged to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure,” an unprecedented move that could grant the White House greater authority to expand fossil fuel production. He also signed an executive order “to encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf,” and another expediting permitting and leasing in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“We will have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it,” Trump said during his inaugural address. “We are going to drill, baby, drill.”
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve can store 714 million barrels of crude oil, but currently holds about 395 million. Under his administration, he said, the cache will be filled “up again right to the top.” He also said the country will export energy “all over the world.”
“We will be a rich nation again,” he said, standing inside the Capitol Rotunda, “and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help.”
Richard Klein, a senior research fellow for the international nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute, noted that fossil fuel companies extracted record-high amounts of oil and gas during the Biden administration. Even if it is technologically possible to boost production further, it’s unclear whether that will reduce prices.
Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, said it is a “direct falsehood” that increasing fossil fuel extraction would drive down inflation. He agreed that the U.S. should declare a national energy emergency — but for reasons exactly the opposite of what Trump had in mind. “We need to quickly move to clean energy, to invest in new companies across the U.S.,” Kammen told Grist.
Denver Water’s sustainability operations include generating energy from solar power panels installed on the roof of its Administration Building, parking garage and over its visitor’s parking lot at its Operations Complex near downtown. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Exiting the Paris Agreement (again)
Trump delivered on his promise to once again withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations pact agreed upon by 195 countries to limit global warming that the new president referred to on Monday as a “rip-off.” In addition to signing an executive order saying the U.S. would leave the agreement — titled Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements — Trump also signed a letter to the United Nations to set the departure in motion. Due to the rules governing the accord, it will take one year to formally withdraw, meaning U.S. negotiators will participate in the next round of talks in Brazil at the end of the year. By this time next year, however, the U.S. could join Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only nations that aren’t part of the accord.
“It simply makes no sense for the United States to voluntarily give up political influence and pass up opportunities to shape the exploding green energy market,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the nonprofit World Resources Institute, said in a statement. Only 2 in 10 Americans support quitting the Paris Agreement, according to a poll by the Associated Press.
Trump’s announcement came just 10 days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2024 Earth’s hottest year on record, one marked by life-threatening heat waves, wildfires, and flooding around the world. Experts say things will only get worse unless the U.S. and other countries do more to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
“Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled,” climate scientists wrote last October. They noted then, even before Trump’s election, that global policies were expected to cause temperatures to climb 2.7 degrees Celsius (6.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. One analysis by Carbon Brief estimated that a second Trump administration would result in an extra 4 billion metric tons of climate pollution, negating all of the emissions savings from the global deployment of clean energy technologies over the past five years — twice over.
Coyote Gulch’s Leaf in Byers Canyon on the way to Steamboat Springs August 21, 2017.
“In other words, you’ll be able to buy the vehicle of your choice,” he said during his inaugural address — even though there is no national mandate requiring the sale of electric vehicles and consumers are free to purchase any vehicle of their liking. [ed. emphasis mine] The Biden administration did promote the technology by finalizing rules that limit the amount of tailpipe pollution over time so that electric vehicles make up the majority of automobiles sold by 2032. Under Biden, the U.S. also launched a $7,500 tax credit for consumer purchases of EVs manufactured domestically and planned to funnel roughly $7.5 billion toward building charging infrastructure across the country.
“Rolling back incentives to build electric vehicles in the United States is going to cost jobs as well as raise the price of travel,” said Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who served as a senior policy leader in the Biden White House. “Fueling up an electric vehicle costs between one-third and one-half as much as driving on gasoline, not to mention the benefits for reducing air pollution. Ultimately, to lower the price of energy for U.S. consumers, we need to diversify the sources of energy that we’re using and ensure that these are clean, affordable, and reliable.”
Youth activists rally for climate justice in front of the US Capitol in Washington,DC (photo from earlier in the year). Image: Lorie Shaull,CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Rescinding environmental justice initiatives
Trump signed a single executive order undoing nearly 80 Biden administration initiatives, including rescinding a directive to federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into their missions. The Biden-era policy protected communities overburdened by pollution and directed agencies to work more closely with them.
That move was part of a broader push that Trump described as an attempt to create a “color-blind society” by stopping the government from “trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Klein said the objective was “embarrassing.” Kammen said it was a “huge mistake” to move away from environmental justice priorities.
Cheyenne Ridge, located between Burlington and Cheyenne Wells, near the Kansas border, is one of many wind projects on Colorado’s eastern plains. Soon, new transmission will enable far more wind and solar projects. Photos/Allen Best Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News
Blocking new wind energy
Trump officially barred new offshore wind leases and will review federal permitting of wind projects, making good on a promise to “end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.” The move is likely to be met with resistance from members of his own party. The top four states for wind generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are solidly red, and unlikely to acquiesce. Even Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, refused to disavow wind power during a hearing last week, saying he would pursue an “all of the above” energy strategy.
Many state and local policymakers, including the members of America Is All In, a climate coalition made up of government leaders and businesses from all 50 states, pledged to take up the mantle of climate action in the absence of federal leadership.
“Regardless of the federal government’s actions, mayors are not backing down on our commitment to the Paris Agreement,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, in a statement. “Our constituents are looking to us to meet the moment and deliver meaningful solutions.”
For the first time, researchers have used more detailed criteria—like water depth and temperature—to get a more accurate idea of how many floating solar panels some U.S. reservoirs could hold. Even in their most conservative estimates, the country’s reservoirs offer huge potential for future development and could host projects with capacities of up to 77,000 megawatts. Floating solar array via the Colorado Times Recorder.
Click the link to read the release on the NREL website:
For the study, Evan Rosenlieb and Marie Rivers, geospatial scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), as well as Aaron Levine, a senior legal and regulatory analyst at NREL, quantified for the first time exactly how much energy could be generated from floating solar panel projects installed on federally owned or regulated reservoirs. (Developers can find specific details for each reservoir on the website AquaPV.)
And the potential is surprisingly large: Reservoirs could host enough floating solar panels to generate up to 1,476 terawatt hours, or enough energy to power approximately 100 million homes a year.
“That’s a technical potential,” Rosenlieb said, meaning the maximum amount of energy that could be generated if each reservoir held as many floating solar panels as possible. “We know we’re not going to be able to develop all of this. But even if you could develop 10% of what we identified, that would go a long way.”
Levine and Rosenlieb have yet to consider how human and wildlife activities might impact floating solar energy development on specific reservoirs. But they plan to address this limitation in future work.
This study provides far more accurate data on floating solar power’s potential in the United States. And that accuracy could help developers more easily plan projects on U.S. reservoirs and help researchers better assess how these technologies fit into the country’s broader energy goals.
Floating solar panels, also known as floating PV, come with many benefits: Not only do these buoyed power plants generate electricity, but they do so without competing for limited land. They also shade and cool bodies of water, which helps prevent evaporation and conserves valuable water supplies.
“But we haven’t seen any large-scale installations, like at a large reservoir,” Levine said. “In the United States, we don’t have a single project over 10 megawatts.”
Previous studies have tried to quantify how much energy the country could generate from floating solar panels. But Levine and Rosenlieb are the first to consider which water sources have the right conditions to support these kinds of power plants.
In some reservoirs, for example, shipping traffic causes wakes that could damage the mooring lines or impact the float infrastructure. Others get too cold, are too shallow, or have sloping bottoms that are too steep to secure solar panels in place.
And yet, some hydropower reservoirs could be ideal locations for floating solar power plants. A hybrid energy system that relies on both solar energy and hydropower could provide more reliable and resilient energy to the power grid. If, for example, a drought depletes a hydropower facility’s reservoir, solar panels could generate energy while the facility pauses to allow the water to replenish.
And, to build new pumped storage hydropower projects—which pump water from one reservoir to another at a higher elevation to store and generate energy as needed—some developers create entirely new bodies of water. These new reservoirs are disconnected from naturally flowing rivers, and no human or animal depends on them for recreation, habitat, or food (at least not yet).
In the future, the researchers plan to review which locations are close to transmission lines or electricity demand, how much development might cost at specific sites, whether a site should be avoided to protect the local environment, and how developers can navigate state and federal regulations. The team would also like to evaluate even more potential locations, including other, smaller reservoirs, estuaries, and even ocean sites.
The research was funded by the Solar Energy Technologies Office and the Water Power Technologies Office in DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).
Access the study to learn more about the immense potential for floating solar plants in the United States, or visit AquaPV to dig into the data on specific reservoirs.
NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.
QTS Data Center Aurora June 2024. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 2, 2025
Gov. Polis and many utilities say that data centers can benefit just about everybody in Colorado. But others fear impacts to rates and potential setbacks in reduction of emissions.
Under the umbrella of the energy transition were dozens of interesting, important stories in Colorado during 2024, including:
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association got the lifeline it so desperately needed to make the transition from coal in the form of $679 million in assistance from the federal government. Sen. Michael Bennet — a key partner in the Inflation Reduction Act sausage-making in D.C. in 2022 — was there to commemorate it. And United Power, itself independent of Tri-State on May 1, is getting $261.6 million.
Pueblo talked a lot about nuclear — and inexplicably began cleaving itself from the renewable energy that had been very nearly the sole bright spot of its economy in recent years.
Holy Cross Energy achieved 90% renewable generation for a month this fall.
United Power broke ground on a natural gas plant, and Platte River Power Authority and everybody else laid plans similar plans for natural gas.
Seeds were planted for geothermal to become a viable part of Colorado’s energy story in Vail, Steamboat and easily a dozen other places across Colorado.
Important stories — these and many others in this energy transition. But easily surpassing them was the story of data centers and their voracious hunger for energy. Could their looming demand derail Colorado’s decarbonization plans? Defenders say no, but they are not convincing. And will interests of ratepayers be protected?
Figuring out the public policy to balance public interests and private gain will be a major issue in the 2025 legislative session.
Three years ago, few people outside of Virginia’s data center alley were talking about data centers. In 2019, there was a half- or less-baked idea of a cryptocurrency mill in Pueblo. Later came a crypto outfit near Montrose.
The era of hyperscale data centers — hyperscale is often defined as having “massive” power needs — arrived in early 2022 when Microsoft purchased a 260-acre parcel in Aurora, south of DIA, for $63.5 million.
In February 2023, Mile High CRE, an online news site about commercial development, described the purchase as the first in metropolitan Denver for a hyperscale data center.
“Denver has an edge over more established markets like Silicon Valley or Northern Virginia in that cost of power, cost of land, and cost of construction are lower, environmental risks are not as high, and the central location grants access to a plethora of networks,” it said. What Colorado lacked, the article added, was a competitive incentive package.
In February 2024, State Sen. Kevin Priola introduced a bill that would have extended more tax breaks to data center developers. Big Pivots did write about that in a column that got broad play across Colorado. See: “Why do data center need tax breaks in Colorado? They’re coming anyway.” A few weeks later came news that the data center subsidy bill was postponed. It never got one committee hearing.
Colorado already has one hyperscale data center. It’s in Aurora, and Mark Jaffee of the Colorado Sun broke the story about QTS in October 2023. (Big Pivots was too busy on a series about water and urban landscapes to chase it).
Two guest columnists in Big Pivots weighed in on the value of data centers. Morey Wolfson, a one-time staffer at the Colorado Energy Office and at the PUC, in September argued against subsidies. Jeff Ackermann, a former chair of the PUC as well as director of the state energy office, in October argued that data centers can have upsides. Meanwhile, the Economist, the New York Times and the Washington Post began writing frequently about data centers — including this story from last week: “Energy hungry AI firms bet on these moonshot technologies.”
Xcel Energy in October delivered the statistics that made this a compelling Colorado story. The electrical utility, responsible for more than half of electrical sales in Colorado, said it needed a staggering 12,500 to 14,000 megawatts of new generation to meet rising demand. To put that into perspective, Rush Creek, Xcel’s wind farm between Limon and Colorado Springs, has a capacity of 600 megawatts.
After average annual growth of 0.7% during the preceding five years, said Xcel, it projected 4% growth compounded annually from 2023 to 2031.
Data centers lie at the center of this projected growth, 62% for energy growth overall and 72% for peak demand, according to Xcel’s Jack Ihle. In an Oct. 15 filing with Colorado regulators, he also said the same base-case forecast saw electric vehicles producing 19% and building electrification 12% of its new demand.
Even without this new demand, Xcel has had trouble getting renewable energy across the finish line. These are projects approved through the electric resource plan from 2021. Supply chain issues have something to do with that.
How will Xcel be able to meet burgeoning demand? And does this imperil Colorado’s drive to meet its 2030 goal of 50% economy wide reduction in emissions? The state’s existing modeling already showed the state falling short, and that was without the data centers becoming a major part of the equation. Now comes speculation — and, at this point it is merely that, speculation — that Xcel may find it necessary to keep Comanche 3, its newest and largest coal-fired unit, operating beyond 2030.
That speculation is not completely out of the blue. That is indeed what has happened in Virginia.
Here, I have described Xcel Energy. But data centers could be part of the stories of Tri-State and its members as well as Platte River Power Authority, Black Hills Energy and perhaps others. Even Fort Morgan — a town of 12,000 northeast of Denver, which is supplied by electricity by the Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska. A Wyoming company, Prometheus Energy, says it intends to create a data center there as well as in Pueblo in 2026, according to one report.
Chris Hansen, one of Colorado’s most important state legislators in the energy transition, told Big Pivots in November that one of his larger disappointments in leaving the Legislature to manage La Plata Electric was that he wouldn’t be able to advance legislation to address the data center issue and help Colorado avoid the problems of Virginia. Hansen has handed the work off to State Rep. Kyle Brown, a Democrat from Louisville. Brown has a background in health care, and he will never have the adroit voice of a Chris Hansen or a Steve Fenberg, but he has demonstrated in his two years that he is a capable, solid legislator.
Yesterday, Gov. Jared Polis was in my neighborhood, and I got in a few minutes to talk with him about passenger rail and data centers. I asked him explicitly whether the growth in demand from data centers would imperil Colorado’s goal of achieving 50% economy wide decarbonization.
No, he said. Done right, growth in data centers can be a win-win for consumers and the utilities.
“Data centers are a broad category of electricity users, but I would say in the right time, in the right place, data centers can play a very important role in improving the reliability and sustainability of the grid, just like if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, they can add transmission costs,” he replied. “It’s really about what, when and where, and how that factors into grid resiliency as we move towards clean energy.”
I persisted with a question about the need for legislation. He did not answer directly:
“If there’s a way to bring in more data centers working with some of the larger providers in areas that make sense, that help us reduce costs for Colorado consumers and improve grid resiliency, then we should explore those.”
I suspect Xcel would be happy with his phrasing. However, we are already seeing upward price pressures in renewables because of supply chain and other issues. If that upward migration coupled with rapid growth in demand produces sharply higher consumer costs, there could be strong pushback. That could delay Colorado’s progress toward its decarbonization goals. The debate in the PUC proceedings about Xcel’s just transition electric-resource plan in coming months should be lively. That applies, too, to the debates in the Colorado Legislature.
There’s lots of good journalism to be had here for Big Pivots going into 2025. It’s one of many good stories across Colorado deserving deeper dives.
Xcel was reluctant to go forward with its first major wind farm, completed in 2004, but now has much wind — and will add far more in the next few yeas. Photo near Cheyenne Wells, Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 2, 2024
Jimmy Carter had an underappreciated role in Colorado’s story. It started in May 1978 when he announced that the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden would get $100 million in federal funding.
“Nobody can embargo sunlight,” Carter said. “No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters. It’s free from stench and smog. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored and used.”
It was a rare umbrella day in Golden. Carter’s timing for his proclaimed “Sun Day” was off. But he was on the mark about solar energy in ways that we have yet to fully appreciate.
Carter had advanced schooling in nuclear energy, but by 1975 he was thinking about renewables. He invited Ron Larson, an electrical engineering professor from Georgia Tech, to share lunch and talk about renewable energy.
“At that time there wasn’t much to photovoltaics,” says Larson. “It was over $100 a watt. Now it’s less than $1 a watt.”
Larson moved to Colorado in 1977 to work as SERI’s first principal scientist and stayed in multiple roles in helping pivot our energy use. Since then, thousands have followed.
One component of SERI’s mission to advance use of solar energy was outreach to 300 builders and architects in Colorado to help them learn how to construct houses with lessened need for fossil fuels.
John Avenson, an engineer with AT&T/Bell Labs, was among the beneficiaries. The house in Westminster that he built in 1981 faces south and has large windows coupled with effective shades.
On Facebook the day after Carter’s death, Avenson rued the widespread failure to acknowledge Carter’s early thinking. “Every house built since then should have been this good or better but the program was cancelled by (President Ronald) Reagan,” he wrote.
Avenson’s house near Standley Lake Reservoir was built with a natural gas furnace. He rarely used it, his gas bills never surpassing $180 for a full year. After tweaking and new technology, he was finally satisfied the house would do fine at 20 below without the furnace. In 2016 he had Xcel Energy stub the gas line.
When I visited him on New Year’s Eve, he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. “I’m an Arizona kind of person,” he said. He keeps the house at 72 to 78 degrees. It will be featured on a Jan. 25 broadcast on PBS.
I asked Avenson about Carter’s death. “Oh, so sad,” he replied. “He influenced my life and didn’t know it.”
Steve Andrews was also influenced by Carter. A veteran of the Vietnam War, he had used the GI Bill of Rights to take college classes in basic engineering. That led to an internship and then a job at SERI. He wrote the guidebook for the 1981 Denver Homebuilders annual Parade of Homes featuring a dozen passive-solar homes across the Denver metro area.
Then, Andrews got laid off. As president, Reagan had no real use for renewable energy. He famously removed the 32 solar panels that Carter had placed atop the White House. He also halved SERI’s budget. Andrews, a recent hire, was among the first to go. The mission of SERI was also narrowed, pushing outreach to the back burner. The director, Denis Hayes, was fired after accusing his bosses at the U.S. Department of Energy of being “dull gray men in dull gray suits thinking dull gray thoughts.”
Later, under a former oilman, President George H.W. Bush, SERI was resurrected as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. NREL has now expanded to a staff of 3,675 employees and broadened its influence.
Can it be mere coincidence that Colorado, in 2004, had the nation’s first voter-initiated renewable energy portfolio standard? Or that Colorado in recent years has adopted a dozen or more first-in-nation policies and regulations designed to curb greenhouse emissions? We might be guilty of parochial pride, but there can be no doubt that Colorado belongs in any national conversation about the pivot to a new energy economy, to use the title of former Gov. Bill Ritter’s center that is affiliated with Colorado State University.
Ironically, passive-house building has gotten little traction. The economics are unassailable, and the technology just isn’t that difficult. It does take basic site-planning. Andrews, in his post-SERI career, once calculated that 85% of houses in metro Denver face east or west. That results in unwanted summer heat, but little in winter, when it is wanted. Housing should face north and south.
Colorado has decades of work ahead in decarbonizing its buildings. We need to remember what Jimmy Carter understood nearly 50 years ago.
Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States.Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.
In mid-November, 10 days after 77 million of our fellow Americans chose Donald J. Trump to be their next president, I found myself at the old Navajo Bridge, which spans Marble Canyon and the Colorado River downstream from Lees Ferry in northern Arizona. I got out of my car, stretched and ambled toward the pedestrian bridge, which mirrors the newer one for automobiles.
As I reached the bridge, I noticed some onlookers looking intently downstream with binoculars. I followed their gaze to see a trio of giant, bald-headed, feathered creatures perched on the steel beams of the automobile bridge, looking a bit like the flying monkeys in the old Wizard of Oz film. They were California condors, maybe 10 in all, apparently waiting for an afternoon carrion snack to float by on the slow-moving emerald waters far below.
I wandered back and forth on the bridge for the next hour or so, stopping frequently to snap another photo, meditate vertiginously on the river and limestone cliffs or to gaze again in awe at the magnificent, uncanny creatures. Politics and the election results became irrelevant, at least for a moment, and it was with a newfound sense of serenity that I finally got back into the car and headed north.
Condors 6Y and 2A (I’m sure they have their own, more interesting names, but …) at the Navajo Bridge. According to condorspotter.com, 6Y is a male born in March 2019 at the Oregon Zoo. And 2A is a female hatched at the World Center for Birds of Prey in May 2021. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
My mental calm was quickly shattered, however, as news trickled out about Trump’s Cabinet picks and plans. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are entering a perilous political era in which the federal government’s role is fundamentally altered. This includes a multi-pronged assault on our public lands and the rules, regulations, laws and agencies designed to protect them. Those condors on the Colorado River could be among the many victims.
Judging from the record of Trump’s first term, his campaign platform, his Cabinet picks so far and Project 2025, the right wing’s “presidential playbook,” it’s clear that he will once again attempt to dismantle the administrative state — and he’ll likely be better at it this time. The destruction will include gutting federal agencies, replacing experienced staffers with Trump loyalists and eviscerating protections for human health and the environment. The goal is to shrink the government, slash spending on safety nets and social programs to fund more tax cuts for the wealthy, and (of course) remove regulatory barriers standing in the way of ever-growing corporate profits. With the likes of Elon Musk buying his way into the administration, it promises to be a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.
Trump actually summed up this ethos better than I ever could in a social media post, when he vowed to give anyone who invested at least $1 billion “in the United States of America … fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!” He seemed to be responding to global mining corporation Rio Tinto, which is behind the proposed Resolution Copper Mine at Oak Flat in Arizona, urging the new administration to weaken environmental laws and expedite permitting for big mines.
During his first term, Trump made his hostility toward public lands clear as he reduced national monuments and rolled back regulations on fossil fuel extraction. This time, he promises a repeat performance, backed by a GOP-dominated Congress, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court and an army of professional ideologues who have been eagerly preparing for this moment for the last four years.
We can expect him to try to shrink or entirely rescind national monuments — particularly Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon — potentially reopening hundreds of thousands of acres of uranium-rich lands to new mining claims during a time when the domestic uranium industry is experiencing a revival.
He will likely reward petroleum companies for donating generously to his campaign by implementing his “drill baby drill” policies. He’ll open up more public land to oil and gas leasing, including in the Alaskan Arctic, and rescind drilling bans on Thompson Divide in western Colorado and around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. He’ll roll back new EPA rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gas and mercury pollution from coal power plants.
If Trump’s hunger for “energy dominance” and corporate freedom don’t come for your public lands, the “Cult of Efficiency” probably will. Musk donated $277 million to Trump’s campaign. In return, he has been chosen to co-chair the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, where he has vowed to slash some $2 trillion in allegedly “wasteful” spending.
What this will actually mean remains unclear. But Trump’s suggestion that he may try to privatize the U.S. Postal Service because it’s not “profitable” and must be “subsidized” gives a good indication of what Musk’s quasi-department will be targeting. The USPS is designed to provide a public good, not a profit, and its priorities are fulfilling that mission, not maximizing efficiency. After all, how could delivering a letter to some remote rural backwater for some 50 cents ever be efficient?
And if the USPS is a problem, then what about public lands and the agencies that manage them? Sure, they provide ecological benefits, stewardship of and free access to millions of acres of stunning landscapes, wildlife habitat and so much more. And yet, they are “subsidized” to the tune of tens of billions of dollars each year, making them ripe for Musk’s chopping block. Utah, with the support of other conservative states, has offered to make Musk’s job easier with a lawsuit seeking to seize control of the “unappropriated” federal land in its midst. Because those states can’t afford to manage those lands at a loss, they would almost certainly sell them off to private interests.
And what about those condors? For years, industry and conservative politicians have tried to weaken the Endangered Species Act because it stood in the way of development and profits. Project 2025 calls for an escalation of these efforts, which now have more support in Congress — and from the efficiency cult.
The federal government has spent at least $35 million so far on the California condor program. It’s an effort that has so far paid off by helping to bring the species back from the brink of extinction; the wild population is up to almost 600 from an 1980s low of just 22 birds. Public goods such as species restoration simply don’t fit into narrow Musk’s profit-focused vision. And the condor remains fragile, threatened by lead poisoning, power lines, wind turbines and avian influenza, and it is not yet self-sustaining.
In the weeks since the election, I’ve seen a number of pundits, politicians and even advocates calling on land, water and air defenders to take a more conciliatory approach, to forge alliances with oil and gas companies, to abandon calls to “keep it in the ground,” to work with Republicans to speed up permitting reform in order to expedite renewable energy development, even if it does mean more fossil fuel development as well. Yet if ever there was a time not to give in, this is it. America’s public lands are under unprecedented attack from nearly every front. Now we need to be even more vigilant and fierce in our defense of it. [ed. emphasis mine]
Out on that bridge, something compelled me to hang my body a little too far over the rail so I could gaze straight through the empty space toward the river. My vertigo was overcome by the thrill of seeing, just below me on a steel girder, a juvenile condor, its pink beak jutting from a thatch of dark brown feathers. That, I thought, is certainly worth fighting for.
Condors perched on steel girders some 450 feet above the Colorado River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Colorado Springs. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 19, 2024
Transmission line in southeast Colorado a cause for guarded optimism among utility leaders
Interstate highways have transformed Colorado and America altogether. People growing up in the 1950s rarely had fresh fruit or vegetables in winter. Now, broccoli beheaded yesterday in a field near Yuma, Ariz., can be on a store shelf in metro Denver within a day or two. Much of that journey will be on an interstate highway.
High-voltage transmission lines are our four-lane highways of electricity. They worked well enough when giant coal plants provided most of our electricity. Now, as Colorado and other states strive to replace fossil fuels with renewables, new connections must be built, to knit us together across broader areas.
A federal agency this week delivered cause for cautious optimism. The Department of Energy has picked three transmission corridors among 10 national candidates for advanced work. One of them, the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor, would begin in southeast Colorado near Lamar, and work south into New Mexico and then somewhat west.
The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law authorized the secretary of energy to designate any geographic area as a national interest electric transmission corridor. The energy department has found that absence of transmission harms consumers. With more transmission, we can share low-cost renewable generation across broader areas. We need an electric grid larger than one weather system and covering more than one time zone.
The existing transmission network is akin to our highways of 50 to 60 years ago. We have transmission, but it’s as if Interstate 70 stopped at the state line. In fact, transmission lines do. Colorado is in the Western electrical grid of 10 states and some adjoining areas. This grid, however, is better understood as a collection of 34 different islands connected by narrow causeways.
“A cautious hurrah,” said Mark Gabriel, the CEO of United Power when I asked his reaction. The Brighton-based electrical cooperative supplies 113,000 members from the foothills to Weld County’s oil and gas fields, including many new industrial centers along I-76.
“Anything that promotes additional transmission is a good thing,” said Gabriel. “However, the challenge remains in actually getting something constructed in a reasonable period of time to make a difference.”
Gabriel pointed out that more than $40 billion in transmission projects have been announced. “Only a fraction are actually being built.”
Permitting has been the bane of many transmission projects. For example, it took 18 years before the TransWest Express Transmission project that will ferry wind-generated electricity from southern Wyoming to Utah and West Coast markets finally broke ground in 2023. It nicks the corner of northwest Colorado.
A bill being negotiated in Congress would ease federal permitting requirements to allow more rapid creation of transmission lines. Other provisions of the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 would also benefit oil and gas extraction.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the wholesale provider for 17 of Colorado’s 22 electrical cooperatives, pointed to the need for streamlined permitting in its reaction to the transmission line in southeastern Colorado.
Transmission doesn’t come cheap. And just as interstate highways have their unsavory aspects — my companion and I can routinely hear I-70 roaring a mile away — transmission lines have their downsides. Who wants one in their backyard?
Baca County has Colorado’s best wind resource and it gets plenty of sunshine. Lacking has been transmission. Top photo transmission in Colroado Springs. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Some want to believe nuclear energy will solve all of our problems. The Pueblo City Council, while saying nice things about nuclear, intends to scrap a goal of 100% renewables by 2035. Maybe nuclear will be an answer, but recent projects have had eye-bulging costs. Natural gas has problems, too, as was evident in Winter Storm Uri of February 2021 when costs soared.
Chris Hansen, as a state legislator from Denver, sponsored key legislation to push transmission planning in Colorado. Now in Durango as CEO of La Plata Electric, he has started working on guiding his electrical cooperative to 97% emission-free electricity in the next decade. Transmission, he says, will be crucial.
Capacity of existing transmission lines can be expanded by reconductoring and other technology. But we altogether need to be better connected east and west, north and south.
One crucial question, says Hansen, is whether Denver-based Chris Wright, the choice of Donald Trump to be secretary of energy, will support continued transmission planning. His Colorado-based career has been in oil and gas. Wright sees renewables as a distant solution.
Southeastern Colorado brims with renewable energy potential. Baca County has Colorado’s best wind, according to a 2017 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It also has strong solar. That’s why corn grows so well there — assuming it has water. The water of the Ogallala Aquifer won’t last, but the solar and wind almost certainly will. What it lacks now is a farm-to-market transmission highway.
The Interior Department on Friday finalized its updated Western Solar Plan, potentially opening 31.7 million acres of federal public lands in the West to industrial solar energy development, including some 3.8 million acres in Wyoming.
The decision comes just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, and just hours before a potential federal government shutdown.
The Wyoming acreage considered suitable for solar energy represents about 20% of land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management in the state, according to the BLM. Suitable areas in Wyoming exclude sage grouse core areas and avoid ungulate migration corridors and unindustrialized areas, according to federal officials.
The plan updates an effort initiated in 2012, when the federal government under then-President Barack Obama envisioned industrial-scale solar would be concentrated in very high solar potential areas of the southwest. The updated version, however — part of President Joe Biden’s goals to expand renewable energy development to address climate change — expanded the study area to include several more western states, including Wyoming.
This planning map depicts Bureau of Land Management managed areas in Wyoming that may be suitable and unsuitable for industrial-scale solar energy development. (U.S. Bureau of Land Management)
Both the Interior and BLM have insisted that although the plan identifies 31.7 million acres as suitable for development, only about 700,000 acres across the West are “anticipated” to be developed.
“The larger available area allows for greater flexibility in considering solar proposals,” according to the Interior, which stressed that each solar project will be analyzed individually and include opportunities for public input.
“With an updated Western Solar Plan, created with extensive input from the public, the Department will ensure the responsible development of solar energy across the West for decades to come,” outgoing Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a prepared statement.
Initial reactions
Conservation groups expressed tentative support for the finalized plan hours after the decision was published Friday in the Federal Register.
“The Western Solar Plan will play a crucial role in securing our country’s energy independence and security over the coming decade,” Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Policy Advocate Josh Axelrod said in a prepared statement. “This is a rare piece of policy that can drive job growth, boost rural economies and ensure conservation of fragile environmental resources.”
The updated Western Solar Plan “represents a compromise that will allow Wyoming to continue to innovate and grow its energy economy while protecting our important conservation resources on BLM-managed public lands,” The Nature Conservancy said in a prepared statement.
he conservancy published a study of the Western Solar Plan revision effort in 2023. “There’s an abundance of low-impact spots for the development of solar energy in Wyoming — more than enough to meet market demand,” TNC’s Wyoming Energy Program Director Justin Loyka told WyoFile at the time.
But whether federal officials fully embraced input from conservation groups and others wasn’t clear during first-blush readings of the final plan on Friday.
“The plan is just really haphazard,” San José State University Professor of Environmental Studies Dustin Mulvaney told WyoFile. “To me, it’s a recipe for more litigation and more lawsuits and more people getting upset just because of the free-for-all-nature of it.”
This map, provided by The Nature Conservancy, depicts areas where the group, during the Bureau of Land Management’s planning process, noted potential impacts to big game migration corridors and crucial winter habitat. The agency largely addressed those concerns in its final plan, according to The Nature Conservancy. (The Nature Conservancy)
It was unclear, Mulvaney said, whether federal officials fully integrated many innovative strategies tested to avoid negative impacts in sensitive landscapes.
Although Interior officials attempted to correct course — learning from mistakes in past sitings of solar energy development in the southwest — the agency strayed into new, dangerous territory when it expanded its solar energy scope to other western states, according to Mulvaney.
For example, one criteria it used to essentially disqualify public lands from being off limits to solar development was the presence of invasive plant species such as cheatgrass. Not only does that overlook other landscape values like wildlife habitat connectivity, such invasive plant species typically spread by following other forms of development like wind farms.
“Because of the presence of cheatgrass, it opens up a lot of those landscapes to solar development,” Mulvaney said. “It’s not thinking about questions about, like, ‘Where might we be interrupting migration corridors and [genetic connections]?’ All these things are connected.”
Although the relationship between conservatism and solar energy has historically been contentious, some conservatives, like Weld County Commissioner Lori Saine (R-Dacono), see solar power as a key part of a “free-market” energy economy — as well as a step on the path to energy independence.
In early December, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization of state legislators that espouses free market principles and federalism, unanimously passed “The Resolution in Support of Farming and Energy Production” at its States & Nation Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. Introduced by Saine, the resolution advocates for the permitting of community solar and agrivoltaics projects on farmland. Proponents of the measure hope it will spur consumer choice and energy options to help family farmers and increase domestic energy production.
Agrivoltiacs, or agrisolar, is the practice of using the same land you use for traditional agricultural practices for the production of solar energy.
“American farmers and ranchers deserve to have choices about how they produce energy on their farmlands,” Saine said in support of the resolution. “Small-scale community solar and agrivoltaics can play an important part in our national energy future, providing opportunities for farmers and keeping farmland in production. We have seen firsthand in Colorado the positive impact these types of projects have in preserving our agricultural communities and I urge conservatives around the nation to embrace it.”
China connected the world’s largest floating solar power plant in central Anhui province to its power grid in early June 2017. The solar farm will generate electricity for 15,000 homes. Photo via Science.HowStuffWorks.com
Weld County has already seen a push for improved solar capabilities. A project funded through the federal Department of Energy moved forward earlier in the year with plans in Fort Lupton to replace a diesel-powered generator that powers a water purification plant with a solar-powered one.
Saine admits that she is somewhat of an unlikely ally for the burgeoning solar industry, especially considering she received several zero scores from environmentalist groups when she was in the state Legislature. Saine said in an interview that she thinks some of the conservative opposition to solar and other forms of renewable energy was coming from partisanship.
“My own journey on this began in 2021 when I had farmers approach me as a commissioner to tell me they needed more fairness when it comes to this type of energy production on farmland,” Saine said. “I did face pushback from some of my constituents; the two main things I was hearing in opposition were, ‘Oh, this is just going to be giving money to Joe Biden,’ and that some people just thought that solar panels were ugly.”
Saine, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2022, worked to find a way to bridge that gap between the solar advocates and skeptics in her rural community. She sees solar as a way to meet the needs of Weld County.
“This is really exciting as a burgeoning industry, just five years ago solar panels were effective at about 15%, now they’re about 25%. We have really seen massive leaps in technology over the past few years, and we’re excited that Weld County can be a national leader on this front,” said Saine.
The measure provides what advocates call an “actionable path forward” for counties and localities considering the adoption of community solar and agrivoltaics. According to the resolution, “Solar facilities on unproductive or nonproductive farm ground can provide passive income for farmers to weather adverse events or uncertainty,” and “Solar production and agrivoltaics can also help young farmers afford to buy land for farming production.”
Larry Ward, the president and CEO of Conservatives for a Clean Energy Future, was optimistic about the prospects of community solar being embraced by the conservative movement.
“Conservative policymakers across the country are embracing community solar as an opportunity to prioritize economic development and increase consumer choice,” Ward said. “We are hopeful that this ALEC resolution will encourage more conservative lawmakers to explore how community solar can promote energy freedom and prosperity in their counties.”
As it currently stands, 19 states and D.C. have policies in place that allow for third-party community solar development. Multiple state legislatures are advancing bills to enable these new programs, including Republican-sponsored legislation in states like Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Missouri, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
Research from the Conservative Energy Network has found that 60% of Republicans and 65% of Independents support community solar. For conservatives, the growing support for community solar has to do with more competition and freedom in the energy market than for anything related to climate. Support typically comes for economic reasons. Conservative states are currently the largest producers of wind energy and often lie in what is called by those in the energy industry as the “wind belt” in the Midwest. Conservatives in these states have seen a sizable return on investment in wind power, for both the state and local landowners, and have provided rural communities and agricultural centers with a reliable source of energy.
“Conservatives should hold on to free market values. Nothing in this resolution prescribes who should operate the companies or how one gets financial incentives. Just energy choice,” Saine concludes. “Conservatives should hold on to free market values even when it isn’t popular, because principles don’t change.”
Solar installation in the San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Western Resource Advocates
The White House and North Lawn during the Lincoln administration in the 1860s. Public Domain, Wikipedia
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
October 31, 2024
Colorado aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2030 and achieve net-zero by 2050. Would a second Donald Trump presidency frustrate those ambitions?
Not entirely. The energy transition train has already left the station. Colorado has become a national leader in transforming our energy systems, beginning with how we produce electricity. No president can stop that. The economics of renewable energy are too compelling. Coal has become the high-priced fuel, and even natural gas is being crowded out to the margins.
Beyond 2028 coal will almost entirely be gone. Electricity in Colorado will be upwards of 70% emissions-free. Some utilities will aim higher. Holy Cross Energy already surpasses 80% and hopes to surpass 90% sometime next year.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 has pledged more than $3 billion to Colorado electrical cooperatives to make the transition for their members in the state’s four corners More money is likely , and more is likely coming. The state’s 22 cooperatives together serve 20% of the state’s residents but about 70% of its geographic area.
In July, Colorado’s two senators were at the EPA headquarters near Denver’s Union Station to announce a $200 million grant for work in the nine-county Denver-Boulder metro area to begin retrofitting houses to use less natural gas. The state government got $129 million at the same time for various efforts to reduce methane and carbon dioxide emissions.
Might Trump try to kill this landmark law, the most important climate legislation yet enacted if he ends up in the White House? He’s “going to claw back every penny he can claw back from the Inflation Reduction Act,” U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper told me when I asked his view. “He thinks climate change is a hoax.”
Trump made that statement about a hoax when he was running for president in 2016. At times, he has softened his stance, but even recently he called climate change “one of the greatest scams of all times.” More clearly, he has promised to dismantle the EPA and roll back regulations. He has solicited $1 billion in financial contributions from the oil and gas industry.
Whether Trump could succeed in curbing the renewable energy outlays is another matter. Remember, he vowed to bring back coal. He declared he would kill Obamacare. He almost succeeded with the latter but he makes no mention of it now. It’s too popular in too many places, including red states. The Inflation Reduction Act might have the same trajectory. As in Colorado, much of the money awarded for the energy transition has been earmarked for red states.
Too, Trump would need Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. That’s possible but unlikely.
Clearly, Colorado can go far on its own. It has among the nation’s best wind, solar, and hydroelectric resources. It has strong leadership and political cohesion. It has an educated workforce. It has innovators and entrepreneurs.
But Colorado can move even more rapidly and cost-effectively in this energy transition with aid and in concert with the federal government, says Tanuj Deora, a director of the state energy office in the Hickenlooper administration. That includes crafting trade policies that aid, not slow, the energy transition.
A major concern for the Colorado Solar and Storage Association is the cost of solar panels. The industry in Colorado is poised for a gigantic boom through the end of this decade as Xcel Energy, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, and other utilities prepare to close their coal plants.
Mike Kruger, the executive director, warns that tariffs that Trump has promised to impose on all Chinese imports will hammer the solar sector, which has 9,000 employees in Colorado. The United States does not have the domestic production capacity to meet domestic demand. The result will be huge price increases.
“You would see massive hemorrhaging of solar jobs and solar companies going bankrupt. A tariff that produces a 70% rate hike on imported panels will result in total costs on solar installations going up 25% or more. I don’t know of any product that goes up 25% in price or more without massive impacts.”
This has been the hottest year for the globe in recorded history. Colorado is far behind Phoenix, with its 113 consecutive days of 100-plus temperatures, but it’s warming rapidly. Grand Junction, for example, had an average temperature of more than 80 degrees this summer, an all-time high.
The full and necessary energy transition will happen. In question is whether it can occur as rapidly as climate scientists say it must. Colorado can provide a national example. It already has. But can move faster with teamwork.
Denver Water’s sustainability operations include generating energy from solar power panels installed on the roof of its Administration Building, parking garage and over its visitor’s parking lot at its Operations Complex near downtown. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The Gila River Indian Community, alongside partners from the White House, Congress and the Bureau of Reclamation, celebrated the activation of the first power generated by the Western Hemisphere’s first-ever solar-over-canal project on Oct. 3, 2024. (Photos Courtesy of the Gila River Indian Community)
The Gila River Indian Community celebrated a historic milestone in its work to provide solutions for water conservation and renewable energy by activating the first-ever solar-over-canal project in the country.
“The Gila River Indian Community is proud to be at the forefront of this groundbreaking solar-over-canal project, which not only generates renewable energy but also conserves our most precious resource — water,” Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said in a written statement.
The project spans over 2,700 linear feet of the Casa Blanca Canal, which is located along Interstate 10 near Sacaton.
The tribe said the project represents a groundbreaking solution to the intertwined crises of energy, water and climate change, specifically addressing the unique needs of the Gila River Indian Community, the State of Arizona, the southwest region and the Colorado River Basin.
“This project builds on the work of our ancestors, who found innovative ways to harness our water and natural resources throughout the generations,” Lewis said.
The Gila River Indian Community held an event on Oct. 3 to commemorate activating the power of the solar project near Sacaton and hosted federal leadership: White House Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President Tom Perez, Bureau of Reclamation Deputy Commissioner David Palumbo and U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton.
The project is the first solar-over-canal initiative of its kind in the Western Hemisphere, according to the tribe, and it is setting a new standard for sustainable water and energy management.
“The Gila River Indian Community, known for its long-standing leadership in water conservation and irrigation innovation, continues to pave the way for cutting-edge solutions to the challenges of the 21st century,” the tribe stated.
The Casa-Blanca Canal Solar project is developed by the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project a department of the Gila River Indian Community and funding support from the Bureau of Reclamation.
The $5.6 million for the project came from President Joe Biden’s Investing in America Agenda. The tribe said the project was developed as part of the administration’s broader strategy to promote innovative renewable energy solutions and water conservation technologies.
“The Gila River Indian Community is a national leader in creating practical solutions to some of the most pressing environmental challenges we face today,” Perez said in a statement.
“This project serves as a model for communities across the country as the Administration continues to invest in America and work to build a sustainable, resilient future,” he added.
The tribe highlighted how the solar-over-canal project offers numerous environmental and operational benefits, including generating clean and renewable energy, reducing water evaporation from the canal, reducing maintenance requirements for the canal infrastructure, and contributing to the tribe’s goal of a carbon-neutral energy footprint.
The Gila River Indian Community announced that two additional phases of the project are planned, with funding and design work already in progress. The next phase involves work covering a larger portion of the irrigation system.
“Water savings here on Gila River Indian Community Land means savings for the entire Colorado River System – and in this drought, every acre-foot counts,” U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton said in a statement. “These projects show what’s possible with strong partnerships between the federal government, states and Tribal leaders.”
From warbler research to transmission line placement, Audubon staff worked on planning with birds and people in mind.
This year wind and solar generation in the U.S. surpassed coal for the first time, and solar is expected to supply most of the growth in electricity generation through 2025. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) continues to be a major catalyst for this momentum by providing substantial incentives that include tax credits for renewable energy and transmission projects. At the state and local level, clean energy goals and mandates, new jobs, and economic and community benefits are driving the growth of renewables.
Transitioning to clean energy is crucial for protecting hundreds of North American bird species from climate change, but infrastructure must be sited and operated with birds and people in mind. Audubon staff and chapters across the U.S. are working with planners, developers, and federal and state agencies to achieve this goal. Over the last 12 months, Audubon has been involved in the planning, permitting, siting, or operation of over 36 gigawatts of onshore and offshore wind and solar projects, as well as almost 45 gigawatts of transmission capacity. This conservation work includes providing recommendations on siting, permitting, monitoring, and research, grounded in Audubon’s extensive science and policy advocacy for birds and their habitats.
Here are some of this year’s efforts across the network:
Transmission Lines in Minnesota
In May, Minnesota made a significant move by passing legislation to allow transmission lines alongside highways, thanks to the efforts of Audubon Upper Mississippi River and their work with the NextGen Highways coalition. Audubon’s Birds and Transmission report shows that placing transmission lines on existing rights-of-way minimizes the overall transmission footprint, leaving more habitat intact and reducing the chance of collisions. This approach advances the clean energy transition while ensuring that Minnesota’s birds and communities benefit from responsibly sited transmission.
Getting Build Ready for Clean Energy in Washington
Audubon Washington is working with local chapters Lower Columbia Basin Audubon Society, Vancouver Audubon Society, and others to accelerate the state’s transition to clean energy on several fronts. The Audubon Washington team is championing a new Build Ready Clean Energy Program and advocating for the creation of a Clean Energy Development Authority to help meet the state’s clean electricity mandates. By joining forces with the NextGen Transmission coalition and actively participating in the Western Clean Energy Advocates (WCEA), Audubon is making its voice heard on key energy and transmission issues. They’ve also weighed in on the state’s environmental impact assessments for major transmission projects, utility-scale solar, and onshore wind. Audubon has also conducted in-depth spatial analyses, pinpointing areas in Eastern Washington as candidate sites for low-conflict solar development.
Monument Planning in California
While Audubon California co-leads the effort to designate the Chuckwalla National Monument in California’s desert, Audubon has joined solar industry leaders and conservationists to secure monument status for this unique landscape while ensuring the designation would not impede solar development in designated areas outside the monument and existing and planned transmission development through the monument. By balancing conservation with clean energy needs, this collaborative effort aims to protect the Chuckwalla’s important habitat and natural beauty while paving the way for responsible development.
A Prothonotary Warbler is fitted with a tracker. Photo: Erik Johnson/Audubon Delta
Warbler Research in Louisiana, Kansas, Arkansas, and Ohio
In May and June, Audubon Delta and partners fitted over 50 Prothonotary Warblers with tiny trackers across Louisiana, Kansas, Arkansas, and Ohio. The multi-sensor geolocators will collect data on the flight behavior of these songbirds as they migrate across the Gulf of Mexico. The information gathered from returning birds will offer new insights into their use of airspace and their responses to inclement weather. This research will aid in assessing collision risks for offshore wind projects in the region and support improved planning and siting efforts.
Reasonably foreseeable development scenario solar area relative to total area of lands available for application. Credit: Bureau of Land Management
Solar Development in Western States
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finalized in a plan for how utility-scale PV solar will be sited and permitted on 30 million acres of public lands across 11 states. In April, Audubon filed detailed comments on the Draft EIS that recommended improvements to BLM’s Solar PEIS, with a focus on avoiding and minimizing impacts to birds by prioritizing project development on degraded lands and close to transmission lines. Audubon also filed similar joint comments in a letter to BLM leadership in collaboration with four conservation organizations and five solar development companies. More than 2,900 Audubon supporters sent comments to the BLM in support of this approach. The Final EIS, released in August, improves on the initial draft, but further improvements are needed in plan implementation to streamline permitting for rapid deployment of solar energy on low conflict lands.
In February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) made their incidental take permitting program under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act more efficient in ways that support the buildout of wind energy while benefitting Bald and Golden Eagle conservation. As part of the permit program, clean energy developers will commit to conservation measures and monitoring at their wind project and transmission sites, and the FWS will set the maximum number of eagles and eagle nests that might be harmed by wind energy and transmission without prosecution under the federal law. Audubon advocated for these improvements alongside conservation and industry partners to help advance wind energy development while protecting eagles.
The Offshore Wind panel during Climate Week NYC 2024. Photo: Darien Fiorino/Audubon
Offshore Wind Development
During Climate Week NYC, Audubon hosted a panel on the future of offshore wind in the United States. As of September, the U.S. has approved ten lease areas for offshore wind projects, representing more than 15 gigawatts of energy. That’s enough to power 5.25 million homes, and equivalent to half of the capacity needed to achieve the national goal of permitting 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Audubon has been engaged on each project every step of the way, filing science-based comments that point to key areas that should be avoided for birds and sharing recommendations for research and operation. This is a collaborative effort with conservation partners as well as Audubon’s coasts and seabird experts and state coastal offices in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific. In the Atlantic, Audubon has a seat on the Regional Wildlife Science Collaborative for Offshore Wind (RWSC), which released a new research plan in January and announced funding commitments from federal agencies and developers to implement the plan.
The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best
President Joe Biden signs H.R. 5376, the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022”, Tuesday, August 16, 2022, in the State Dining Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
President Joe Biden’s signature climate change law passed Congress by the narrowest of margins, without a single Republican in favor. GOP leaders have attacked the bill and promised to repeal it.
Yet despite the law’s hyper-partisan creation story, the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, could prove difficult to roll back, whatever the outcome of next month’s election.
The IRA was the nation’s largest single investment in reducing climate-warming pollution, with an array of programs that are beginning to shower the economy with grants, loans and tax incentives. The total sum is expected to reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade, funding that will leverage much more in private investment. And by design, the money is flowing throughout the country, with most of it being spent in conservative-leaning states.
One report by E2, a pro-environment business group, identified at least 334 “clean energy and clean vehicle” projects announced since the law’s enactment, with the potential to create 110,000 jobs. Those projects were spread across 40 states, with nearly 60 percent in congressional districts represented by Republicans.
Another assessment, by the Rhodium Group, examined total “clean technologies and infrastructure” investment by businesses and consumers in the two years after the bill’s enactment, and found it had climbed to nearly $500 billion, a 71 percent increase from the two preceding years.
“This is a huge investment. We are really seeing its impacts,” said Jackie Wong, a senior advisor to the NRDC Action Fund, an environmental political advocacy group that has endorsed Kamala Harris. “This isn’t just about climate. This is also about public health and about jobs and about revitalizing American manufacturing.”
Trump and his advisers and spokespeople have said he would seek to roll back the law’s spending, a step Wong said “would be devastating for climate and economic health.”
And yet all the spending that has begun going out helps explain why there might not be much appetite in Congress for a wholesale repeal. In August, 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson urging caution in any efforts to reform or repeal the law, noting that its tax credits for clean energy “have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts represented by members of our conference.”
The law’s design—which created, expanded or extended a wide array of tax credits for everything from wind and solar power generation to battery manufacturing, electric vehicles, clean hydrogen production and sustainable aviation fuel—has made it broadly popular among businesses big and small. Now that those credits are in place, industry leaders expect them to last, said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at Bracewell LLP, a law and lobbying firm that represents clients across the energy industry.
“They think this is not going away because of the good things it can do,” Maisano said. He added that the bill included policies that have generally drawn bipartisan support, and that while it may get tweaked, “I don’t think Congress is going to go back on these things that are happening in their districts.”
But if a full repeal is unlikely, many of the law’s supporters worry that a second Trump administration or a Republican-controlled Congress could use executive authority, hearings or oversight to constrain or reshape spending in ways that would undermine the law’s goals.
The tax credits, for example, require guidance issued by the Treasury Department to help define which projects are eligible. In the case of a clean hydrogen tax credit, a Trump administration could issue guidance that would skew the credit toward more polluting fossil fuel projects. For electric vehicles or wind and solar generation, new guidance could restrict how many vehicles or projects qualify for the credits or could simply cast uncertainty over the programs’ future, discouraging private investment.
Derek Sylvan, strategy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said the tax credits have the potential to drive tremendous emissions cuts with hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits. But many, like the hydrogen credit, have the potential to be skewed in favor of fossil fuels or other polluting technologies.
“That could be really huge,” Sylvan said. “You could imagine that for any particular tax credit, if that changes and suddenly a lot of funds are going to activities that have pretty limited or even negative climate benefits, that could certainly undermine the climate impacts of the IRA.”
A study published last year in Science estimated that the IRA is expected to slash the nation’s climate pollution 43 percent to 48 percent below 2005 levels by 2035, compared to an expected reduction of 27 percent to 35 percent without the legislation.
This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratory’s global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML
Many of the IRA’s programs came in the form of grants, loans or direct spending that has already been committed. One of the largest is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion “green bank” program. Most of that money was awarded in August to nonprofits, which will now be able to lend the funds directly to emissions-cutting projects or distribute them to a network of green banks around the country. Some of its programs are intended to benefit communities that have limited access to financing for things like rooftop solar or energy-efficiency retrofits.
Reed Hundt, chief executive of the Coalition for Green Capital, one of the recipients, said the fund differs from tax credits because his group can choose projects that will have outsized climate impacts. It is also looking to fund projects in rural and often conservative states that might be less likely to get commercial loans for renewable energy projects, Hundt said.
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money has been obligated, meaning it would take violating a contract to pull it back. But a hostile administration or Congress could use hearings, oversight or staff cuts to make it harder for the banks to spend the money, said Kyle Kammien, policy director of the Green For All program at Dream.org, an advocacy group focused on green jobs and criminal justice.
“In some ways it’s safe, but you could see how political levers could make it less effective or slow it down,” Kammien said.
For other programs, simply cutting staffing at agencies could make it harder to spend money that’s already been obligated.
Still, the architects of the IRA designed it with elections in mind, said Kate Gordon, a former senior adviser to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and now chief executive of California Forward, an economic development nonprofit. The bill’s timelines, its broad distribution of funding across the economy and the country, were all meant to make it more popular and durable.
“It brings a lot more people and places into the conversation versus your typical government policy that says, ‘We are going to build a big thing,’” Gordon said. She told the story of a visit she made to a summit in Wyoming organized by the state’s governor and senators, neither of whom had voted for the IRA.
“They didn’t vote for it for political reasons, I’m sure, but they were 100 percent in in taking advantage of it,” Gordon said. She compared the IRA to President Barack Obama’s health care legislation, which was attacked for years but has remained in place.
“My gut is that there will be a lot of talk about repealing things,” she said, “and not a lot of action.”
NREL has developed a tool that enables developers to evaluate the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with new, domestic closed-loop pumped storage hydropower facilities.
In a 2023 study, NREL researchers compared the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of closed-loop PSH with other energy storage technologies, finding PSH to have the lowest life cycle emissions among the technologies studied. The black bars represent a range of scenarios explored in the study. Graphic by Tara Smith, NREL
Pumped storage hydropower (PSH) is an established technology that can provide grid-scale energy storage and support an electrical grid powered in part by variable renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Despite recent interest in PSH, questions remain regarding the overall sustainability of PSH projects, and information about the life cycle of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with PSH technologies has been limited—until now.
In 2023, NREL researchers published a wide-ranging study that included a full life cycle assessment of new closed-loop PSH projects in development in the United States. The majority of GHG emissions from PSH are attributed to the grid mix of energy used to pump water from a facility’s lower reservoir to its upper one, as this mix is not usually made of 100% carbon-free energy sources. As such, GHG emission levels decrease in locations with a higher level of renewable energy sources in the grid mix. Additional emissions stem from a plant’s construction (e.g., from diesel-powered equipment, concrete, or steel) and ongoing plant operations.
In the study, researchers compared their results to published data on the GHG emissions of other energy storage technologies, including compressed air energy storage and different battery types. The results showed that GHG emissions associated with PSH were lowest among the group studied.
JOAN CARSTENSEN
Interactive Data
The success of the study inspired the creation of an interactive tool on OpenEI that uses the study data to enable developers to calculate the GHG emissions of potential PSH sites in the United States—with the goal of promoting PSH development with configurations and locations with the lowest global warming potential.
Users can input specifications for PSH facilities at varying levels of detail, such as reservoir volume, dam material and dimensions, number and capacity of turbines, and the length of the transmission line that connects the PSH system to the grid. They can then compare different PSH scenarios side by side and view the emissions by component, material, and life cycle phase.
Using the Tool
To use the tool, users first select between a Basic and an Advanced scenario, in which they can specify a site configuration and explore GHG outcomes. Basic mode offers a smaller set of options for a simpler user experience, whereas Advanced mode allows the user to submit detailed specifications for PSH system components (e.g., number of reservoirs being built, dam material, and distance to grid connection).
Multiple scenarios with different inputs can then be viewed side by side and subsequently edited with different inputs to produce the desired outcome.
Tool Methodology
The tool was built using the data and methods from the 2023 study, where researchers conducted a life cycle assessment of closed-loop PSH under a variety of assumptions. This data includes all GHG emissions from facility construction, operation, and maintenance and exclude any emissions that might occur during decommissioning or any reservoir-based emissions. We do not consider nonpower uses of the PSH site, which in practice could bear some responsibility for life cycle GHG emissions.
Although Vice President Kamala Harris touts clean energy and Donald Trump makes misleading assertionsand false claims about it, neither candidate has set forth a comprehensive energy plan. Even if they do, a gridlocked Congress would be unlikely to pass it.
Instead, the next president’s greatest influence on clean energy will come through their handling of legislation and regulations put in place since 2021 under the Biden-Harris administration. As an environmental engineer who studies energy and climate change, I expect that Harris, who has strongly supported these policies, would follow through on them, while Trump’s record as president suggests that he would try to roll them back. Trade policies toward China, the leading producer of clean energy technologies, will also be key. https://www.youtube.com/embed/hoycdE1G0C0?wmode=transparent&start=0 Donald Trump and Kamala Harris discuss clean energy policy during their presidential campaign debate on Sept. 10, 2024.
Legislation and regulations
Three bills passed by Congress under Biden and Harris – the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act – have transformed U.S. energy policy. The three bills allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for building infrastructure, providing incentives for clean energy manufacturing and purchases, and funding clean energy research.
None of these measures is likely to be completely overturned, since each funds numerous projects in red states. But implementation by the next administration will determine how effectively they stimulate clean energy growth.
The Environmental Protection Agency will also play a crucial role. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the EPA issued its most stringent regulations ever for controlling emissions from fossil fuel power plants and motor vehicles. Those rules could accelerate the transition to clean electricity and electric cars.
Currently, the U.S. has a backlog of nearly 2,600 gigawatts of projects waiting to be added to the nation’s electricity grids. That’s roughly eight times the amount of wind and solar generating capacity on U.S. grids today.
However, Congress is deadlocked over competing proposals for streamlining permitting rules. State and local governments and regional grid operators also play key roles and are not easily swayed by federal action.
Still, the next president can influence policy through his or her selection of commissioners to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates interstate transmission of oil, gas and electricity. Presidents also can push Congress to pass permitting reforms.
Trade policy
As fast as U.S. clean energy manufacturing and deployments have grown under the Biden-Harris administration, that increase is dwarfed by China’s output. Chinese companies manufacture over three-quarters of the world’s solar cells and modules, more the half of the world’s wind turbines and three-quarters of the advanced batteries needed for electricity storage and electric cars. China also sells more electric cars than the rest of the world combined. https://www.youtube.com/embed/rkxMdmipYqM?wmode=transparent&start=0 China’s dominance in clean energy manufacturing poses challenges for nations wary of relying on Chinese components.
Like it or not, America’s ability to rapidly deploy clean energy and electric cars will require importing at least some materials from China. After falling behind for decades, there’s simply no way to scale up U.S. manufacturing fast enough to meet national climate goals. Even if solar panels, batteries or electric cars are assembled here, they’ll depend upon critical minerals that are mostly refined in China.
Biden and Harris have also tried to tilt the playing field to favor U.S. companies. The administration is offering loans and incentives for domestic manufacturing, and has also imposed a 100% tariff on electric vehicles and a 50% tariff on solar cells from China.
Such policies may shelter domestic manufacturers for a while, but are unlikely to make them competitive on global markets that are pivoting to electric cars and solar energy.
U.S. standing under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a legally binding treaty that sets targets for curbing climate change, will also be key. Countries around the world have pledged to shift to clean energy to reduce emissions. The European Union is enacting carbon border tariffs that will penalize imports from high-emitting producers.
If Trump were to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement again, as he did in 2017, and roll back emissions rules, U.S. manufacturers could face new hurdles in exporting their products overseas. For her part, Harris has supported the Paris accord and criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from it.
No reversing the revolution
Markets worldwide are rapidly transitioning to renewable energy and electric cars, which are becoming cheaper, cleaner and more appealing than their fossil-fueled alternatives. Popular subsidies for clean energy would be difficult to claw back. China’s dominance in clean energy technologies will not soon be shaken, whatever trade policies the next administration adopts.
Based on their records, Harris could be expected to build on the legislation and regulations passed under the current administration, while Trump would be likely to roll back some but not all of its advances. Neither candidate is proposing policies as transformative as the ones enacted in the past several years. Whoever is elected will govern within a clean energy landscape that has been reshaped by those policies, and by market forces that are beyond the control of any president.
Denver Water’s sustainability operations include generating energy from solar power panels installed on the roof of its Administration Building, parking garage and over its visitor’s parking lot at its Operations Complex near downtown. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Denver Water’s mission is water, but efforts to cut energy use and carbon emissions have become more front and center over the last decade.
After all, climate change threatens water supplies, so water utilities need to do their part to reduce the fossil-fuel ingredients that are warming the atmosphere and jeopardizing snowfall and river flows. [ed. emphasis mine]
Already, Denver Water powers its main Administration Building with solar panels, harnesses the power of water to generate enough hydroelectricity to juice 6,000 homes and employs a system that uses water, not air, to heat and cool its headquarters, making it easier and cheaper to keep temperatures comfortable.
But it’s not stopping there.
Always on the lookout for new sustainability features, Denver Water last year set a goal to cut its energy use by one gigawatt-hour. That’s 1 million kilowatt-hours — a ton of electricity (or, in some cases, the equivalent amount of fuel, like gasoline) — enough to power 750,000 homes for one hour, or roughly 100 homes for a year.
And, in the last 12 months, the utility accomplished its goal.
Employees scoured the organization for low-hanging fruit, the relatively easy fixes that could be done at little or no cost or would provide a rapid payback by quickly cutting energy expenses.
It takes all kinds of passionate people to ensure a clean, safe water supply for 1.5 million people. Join the team at denverwater.org/Careers.
And it unleashed its in-house expertise, including personnel specializing in electrical, HVAC, plumbing, information technology, vehicle fleet, dams, reservoirs and the network of pipes that moves water through the city.
Teams pinpointed energy savings that could be snared by closing unused facilities that were still drawing power, replacing outdated boilers in the utility’s Winter Park facilities, updating old lighting, reducing the idling of fleet trucks (which wastes gas and diesel) and adding its first batch of electric vehicles — among other steps.
“This was an energy treasure hunt,” said Adam Hutchinson, an energy management specialist and part of Denver Water’s Sustainability Team. “We’ve focused on energy efficiency for many years now, but we wanted to take another hard look across the organization for relatively quick and easy energy-saving opportunities.”
Hunt they did, and Denver Water employees put their expertise to work to find savings large and small.
A new, more efficient boiler saves some 300,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Some of the finds were big, like taking out a problem boiler used to heat a key Denver Water facility in Winter Park, home to workers and a fleet of heavy equipment that helps keep things running in the high country.
The new equipment installed in Winter Park was more energy efficient, with an efficiency rating of 96% (compared to the old boiler’s 80% efficiency), and the switchover saved some 300,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.
“We installed a more efficient boiler that uses flue gas that would otherwise be expelled. The new equipment keeps it in the boiler to provide more heat,” said Jeffrey Gulley, who leads the trade shop for Denver Water. “We wanted to have efficiency and reliability with the frigid temperatures up there.”
The utility’s transmission and distribution employees determined that a few small, scattered facilities in the metro area could be closed and their functions consolidated. That amounted to cutting another 100,000 kilowatt-hours via reductions in heating, cooling and lighting.
Smaller changes also added up.
At Marston Treatment Plant in southwest Denver, an air bubbler keeps the water intake from freezing in winter months. Typically, the bubbler stays on constantly from November through May. But the simple addition of a temperature sensor means the bubbler can shut down when winter weather hits a warm stretch.
And boom! That simple sensor produced another 9,000 kilowatt-hours of savings — enough to pay for itself in 18 months.
Installing a temperature sensor on a water intake at Marston Treatment Plant in southwest Denver produced additional energy savings. Photo credit: Denver Water.
All told, the gigawatt project fit cleanly into the second phase of Denver Water’s Sustainability Plan, which includes a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2025 from a 2015 baseline.
And it chips away at a broader strategy: To drive down energy usage as low as possible, then get what power you still need through renewable energy.
“All of this aligns with Denver Water’s overall push to aggressively do our part to address climate change,” said Kate Taft, the utility’s sustainability manager. “On the water planning side, we must adapt to the ongoing changes, but we can work on our operations side to reduce our own footprint. That is why we continue to move forward with change.”
And continue it does. After reaching the 1-gigawatt (that is, 1 million kilowatt-hours) goal, ongoing work has found more savings.
Denver Water is now at 1.2 million kilowatt-hours in energy savings since setting the goal a bit over a year ago.
And all of this isn’t good news only for the environment. By cutting energy costs, Denver Water can also keep expenses down.
“We’re driven on our sustainability goals,” Hutchinson said. “Along with that, we’re keeping in mind our customers and our rates.”
In the two years since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was passed, domestic capacity for producing solar modules has nearly quadrupled, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight report released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie. Generous incentives in the Biden administration’s landmark climate law have driven solar module manufacturing capacity to more than 31 gigawatts. That’s a stark change from August 2021, one year before the IRA became law, when the country could produce just 8.3 gigawatts. The U.S. installed 32.4 gigawatts of solar in 2023, a figure expected to climb even higher this year, meaning the country’s solar manufacturing capacity is now close to matching its pace of solar deployment. The massive expansion of home-grown solar manufacturing ensures that the U.S. is no longer dependent on the market’s hyperdominant supplier, China, for its solar modules. “Module” is the industry term for what’s more commonly known as a solar panel…
Most solar modules are constructed with photovoltaic cells based on polysilicon wafers. While the U.S. has roughly enough polysilicon capacity to meet its needs, it still has no operational facilities that can turn that raw material into the solar wafers and cells that do the physics magic act of transforming light into power. That could change early next year, when Hanwha Qcells starts manufacturing wafers and cells at its end-to-end factory in Cartersville, Georgia. In the meantime, China still makes most of the U.S.’s solar wafers…
Nevertheless, U.S. module capacity continues to expand faster than the rest of the domestic supply chain. Last quarter, production started up at a new Qcells factory in Georgia, a Sirius PV, facility in Georgia, and a Meyer Burger pant in Arizona. Since the IRA was signed, the big names in Chinese module manufacturing, along with more than 30 other companies, have announced plans to launch U.S. factories or grow their current capacity. The recent rush to produce solar panels in the U.S., spurred by the IRA’s cleantech manufacturing incentives, stands as proof that the carrots approach of the climate law is far more effective than the dead-end sticks approach of imposing tariffs on Chinese goods taken by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.
THE NEWS: Last week the Bureau of Land Management released the final environmental review of its Western Solar Plan, which guides utility-scale solar development on public lands. The proposed “roadmap” is similar to the draft proposals and puts millions of acres off-limits to any future solar development, while making 31 million acres available for potential development — subject to BLM approval on a project-by-project basis. The proposal has drawn mixed reactions from industry, conservation groups, and politicians.
THE CONTEXT: When the feds approve a big oil and gas drilling project or propose ending coal leasing, the response from various quarters is usually predictable. Not so with big solar and wind. So when a big plan like this comes out, I tend to check out the responses to it, often even before delving into the plan, itself.
Here’s a sampling from across the spectrum:
The Solar Energy Industries Association, in a prepared statement, tentatively celebrated the proposal, writing: “… we’re pleased to see that BLM listened to much of the solar industry’s feedback and added 11 million acres to its original proposal. While this is a step in the right direction, fossil fuels have access to over 80 million acres of public land …” Now, the group added, it would work to push the feds to streamline the permitting process for individual projects.
The Wilderness Society, a national environmental group, also likes the plan, saying it focuses “solar projects toward lands near transmission with fewer resource conflicts and away from protected landscapes, habitats, and other places where development is not appropriate.” That, it said, will help in the fight to mitigate climate change.
The Center for Biological Diversity, which had pushed the agency to limit large-scale solar projects to previously disturbed lands near existing transmission lines, was decidedly less enthused. In a statement, the group wrote: “There’s room on public lands for thoughtfully sited solar energy projects. We don’t need to destroy tens of millions of acres of wildlife habitat to achieve our clean energy goals. This plan allows for death by a thousand cuts, where inappropriately sited industrial projects can proliferate across sensitive public lands throughout the West.”
And desert-preservationist Chris Clarke’s subhead on his Letters to the Deserttake says is it all: “I ordered a solar eclipse, not a solar apocalypse.” He points out that Nevada will take the brunt of the plan, with “the equivalent of 130 Las Vegases being offered up” to solar developers. All of that land won’t be developed — it doesn’t need to be to generate all the power the nation needs. Which makes the plan, as Clarke puts it, “a recipe for solar sprawl, with 3,000-acre plots and 7,000-acre plots spread across the landscape.”
And then there’s U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, who came out with a scathing statement in which, predictably, she rails about Democrats destroying the so-called western way of life: “The Biden-Harris administration is hellbent on destroying the western way of life by closing off access to public lands for oil and gas drilling, grazing, recreation and industries our states rely on to stay afloat, all in the name of climate extremism.”
Okay, I probably shouldn’t have included Lummis’ statement, simply because it is rather misinformed and might give readers the wrong idea. But it’s important to include because it brings up a common misperception about this plan. It is not opening up an additional 31 million acres to development (nor is it closing any land to other uses). A lot of BLM land was already open to solar leasing and right of way applications under the 2012 plan; this proposal simply extends the plan to more states and tweaks the focus for the existing states. Under the “no action” alternative, i.e. the status quo, 59.5 million acres would be open to solar applications, nearly twice as much as under the proposed alternative.
Lummis can rest assured that few if any oil rigs will be blocked under this plan. The BLM was careful to exclude most oil and gas leasing areas from solar development and where it doesn’t, the agency will prioritize existing oil and gas leases over new solar development (though an existing solar right-of-way would block new oil and gas leases). Most of the San Juan Basin, big swaths of southwestern Wyoming, and virtually all of southeastern Utah, for example, are off-limits to solar, less because of cultural or environmental impacts than because those are major oil and gas producing areas.
I included this one because damn look at all that public land in grazing allotments! Also, the “no action” alternative would create far more solar-grazing overlap than the proposed plan that Lummis bashes. Source: BLM.
It’s worth noting that about 80 million acres of federal land are available for oil and gas development, of which 23 million acres are currently under active lease. About 12 million of those acres are producing oil and gas. (In 2008, 47 million acres were under lease to oil and gas companies, with 14 million acres producing.)
By contrast, the solar industry under this plan will be allowed to apply for rights-of-way on some 31 million acres. Under the BLM’s reasonable foreseeable development scenario, about 700,000 of those acres would actually see solar panels before 2045. That’s an enormous amount of land, and it’s probably all that’s needed to meet the region’s demand for solar power — but it’s only a small fraction of the available acreage.
The question then is this: If you only need less than 1 million acres, why open up all 31 million? It seems the answer is simply because that’s what the solar industry wanted, probably because it gives them more flexibility. The problem with that, as Clarke pointed out, is that you’re likely to get a sprawling hodgepodge of massive solar installations scattered across the desert rather than all concentrated in a few places.
The mission of the solar plan was to reduce conflicts by guiding development to the most appropriate areas. I’m sorry to say it hasn’t succeeded. By offering up so much land, the agency almost guarantees more conflict as conservation groups protest and sue over proposals in less-than-appropriate places.
The BLM would have been wiser to go with its Alternative 5, which would have limited development to previously disturbed areas within 10 miles of existing transmission lines (while still excluding development in critical habitat or other protected lands). Even that would have made 8.8 million acres available, giving developers plenty of flexibility for siting, while also giving them more clarity and reducing the chances their proposals will be tied up in litigation. Perhaps the agency could have offered this more restrictive approach to environmental groups in exchange for getting them on board to streamline permitting for these areas, thus further reducing conflict and uncertainty for industry.
Under the plan, proposed developments would continue to be subject to environmental reviews.
There’s still time to alter the plan. The BLM’s protest period is open until Sept. 29. You can weigh in here.
🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑
An odd one popped up on my solar energy news feed the other day, with the headline: “Doomsday-ready property north of Lake Tahoe to hit the market for $8 million.” Not cheap, I thought, but a bargain if it will help me get through doomsday. It was featured on the Mansion Global website, the very existence of which makes me vomit a little each time I see it.
It’s a massive home on 10 acres of forest, with a caretaker’s cottage that is nearly twice the size of my house. As for the Doomsday part, it has an artesian well, 72 solar panels, and four 1,000 gallon propane tanks (be careful with the matches y’all; that would be a doomsday fireball, indeed) — though, apparently no bunker or arsenal (though maybe they wouldn’t let on about it until you actually purchase the place).
It’s funny because right around the same time another story, this one in the New Yorker, popped up on my feed, entitled: “Real estate shopping for the apocalypse.” It’s a good read, both amusing and a little bit disturbing. But it led me to seek out some doomsday real estate of my own, perhaps in the less-than-$8-million price range. And where does a prepper go? SurvivalRealty.com, of course! There’s actually some cool properties on there, and even a few that aren’t ridiculously expensive. I was surprised, however, to find only one property in Utah: An old scheelite mine in Beaver County where “a couple thousand souls could hold out in a disaster scenario.” Price? $995,000 — or just $500 each for the couple thousand doomsday survivors!
Coal fired plant near Hayden with the Yampa River 2015. Photo credit: Ken Nuebecker
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
August 17, 2024
Will there be a water bonus as we close coal plants? In the short term, yes. It’s harder to say in the long term. Here’s why.
Use it or lose it. That’s a basic premise of Colorado water law. Those with water rights must put the water to beneficial use or risk losing the rights to somebody who can. It’s fundamentally anti-speculative. But Colorado legislators this year created a major exception for two electric utilities that draw water from the Yampa River for coal-burning power plants. They did so through Senate Bill 24-197, which Gov. Jared Polis signed into law in Steamboat Springs in late May.
The two utilities, Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, plan to retire the five coal-burning units — two at Hayden and three at Craig — they operate in the Yampa River Basin by late 2028. These units represent Colorado’s largest concentration of coal plants, 1,874 megawatts of generating capacity altogether. That’s 40% of Colorado’s total coal-fired electrical generation. Together, they use some 19,000 acre-feet of water each year.
What will become of those water rights when the turbines cease to spin? And what will replace that power? The short answer is that the utilities don’t know. That’s the point of the legislation. It gives the utilities until 2050 to figure out their future.
While the legislation is unique to the Yampa Valley, questions of future water use echo across Colorado as its coal plants — two units at Pueblo, one near Colorado Springs, one north of Fort Collins, and one at Brush — all will close or be converted to natural gas by the end of 2030.
This story was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Headwaters Magazine. Photo above of the Hayden Generating Station and the Yampa River was taken by Ken Neubecker in spring 2015. All other photos by Allen Best unless otherwise noted.
Both Xcel and Tri-State expect that at least 70% of the electricity they deliver in 2030 will come from wind and solar. The final stretch to 100%? That’s the hard question facing utilities across Colorado — and the nation and world.
Natural gas is expected to play a continued role as backup to the intermittency of renewables. Moving completely beyond fossil fuels? No one technology or even a suite of technologies has yet emerged as cost-effective. At least some of the technologies that Xcel and Tri-State are looking at involve water.
Fossil fuel plants use less than 1% of all of Colorado’s water. Yet in a state with virtually no raw water resources left to develop, even relatively small uses have gained attention. Colorado’s power future will have implications for its communities and their water, but how exactly that will look remains unknown.
Emissions Goals
The year 2019 was pivotal in Colorado’s energy transition. State lawmakers adopted legislation that specified a 50% economy-wide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100% by 2050. A decade before, that bill would have been laughed out of the Colorado Capitol. Even in 2019, some thought it unrealistic. But proponents had the votes, and a governor who had run on a platform of renewable energy.
Something approaching consensus had been achieved regarding the risks posed by climate change. Costs of renewables had plummeted during the prior decade, 70% for wind and 89% for solar, according to the 2019 report by Lazard, a financial analyst. Utilities had learned how to integrate high levels of renewables into their power supplies without imperiling reliability. Lithium-ion batteries that can store up to four hours of energy were also dropping in price.
Colorado lawmakers have adopted dozens of laws since 2019 intended to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Tied at the legislative hip to the targets adopted in 2019 were mandates to Colorado’s two investor-owned electric utilities, Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy. By 2030 they must reduce emissions by at least 80% compared to 2005 levels. Both aim to do even better.
Xcel, the largest electrical utility in Colorado, was already pivoting. In 2017, it received bids from wind and solar developers in response to an all-sources solicitation that caused jaws across the nation to drop. In December 2018 shortly after the election of Gov. Polis, Xcel officials gathered in Denver to boldly declare plans to reduce emissions by 80% by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, the provider for Fort Collins and three other cities in the northern Front Range, later that month adopted a highly conditioned 100% goal. In January 2020, Tri-State announced its plans to close coal plants and accelerate its shift to renewables — it plans to reduce emissions by 89% by 2030. In December 2021, Holy Cross Energy, the electrical cooperative serving the Vail and Aspen areas, adopted a 100% goal for 2030. It expects to get to 91% by 2025.
Colorado Springs Utilities burned the last coal at the Martin Drake power plant along Fountain Creek in August 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Colorado’s emissions-reduction goals are economy wide, not just for power production. In practice, this means replacing technologies in transportation, buildings and other sectors that produce greenhouse gas emissions with low- or no-emissions energy sources. As coal plants have closed, transportation has become the highest-emitting sector. Colorado had 126,000 registered electric vehicles and hybrids as of June but hopes to have 940,000 registered by 2030. Buildings pose a greater challenge because most of us don’t replace houses the way we do cars or cell phones. Solutions vary, but many involve increased use of electricity instead of natural gas.
A final twist that has some bearing on water is Colorado’s goal of a “just transition.” House Bill 19-1314 declared that coal-sector workers and communities were not to be cast aside. Efforts would be made to keep them economically and culturally whole.
Possible Water Dividends
The Cherokee Generating Station north of downtown Denver is now a natural gas-fired power plant.
Where does this leave water? That’s unclear and, as the 2024 legislation regarding the Yampa Valley spelled out, it is likely to remain unclear for some time. The law prohibits the Division 6 water judge — for the Yampa, White and North Platte river basins — from considering the decrease in use or nonuse of a water right owned by an electric utility in the Yampa Valley.
In other words, they can sit on these water rights through 2050 while they try to figure what technologies will emerge as cost competitive. Xcel Energy and Tri-State will not lose their water rights simply because they’re not using them during this time as would, at least theoretically, be the case with other water users in Colorado.
Conversion of the Cherokee power plant north of downtown Denver from coal to natural gas provides one case study of how energy shifts can affect water resources. Xcel converted the plant to natural gas between 2010 and 2015. Its capacity is now 928 megawatts.
Richard Belt, a water resources consultant for Xcel, says that when Cherokee still burned coal, it used 7,000 to 8,000 acre-feet of water per year; since 2017, when natural gas replaced coal, it uses 3,000 to 3,500 acre-feet per year.
Does that saved water now flow downstream to farmers in northeastern Colorado?
“If the wind is really blowing, there could be some water heading downstream on certain days,” Belt answered. In other words, there’s so much renewable energy in the grid that production from the gas plant at times is not needed. A more concrete way to look at this conversion, Belt says, is to step back and look at Xcel’s water use more broadly across its system. It also has the Rocky Mountain Energy Center, a 685-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant along Interstate 76 near Keenesburg that it bought in 2009 and began operating in 2012. With the plant came a water contract from Aurora Water.
Xcel has been renegotiating that contract, which it projects will be effective in early 2025. The new contract will allow Xcel to take water saved at Cherokee and instead use it at the Rocky Mountain Energy Center. That will allow it to use 2,000 acre-feet less of the water it has been leasing from Aurora each year. Belt says it will save Xcel customers around $1 million a year in water costs.
“Another way to look at this dividend is that we’re going to hand [Aurora] two-thirds of this contract volume, around 2,000 acre-feet a year, and they can use that water within their system,” Belt explains.
Other coal-burning power plants have also closed in recent years, with water dividends of their own. One small coal plant in southwestern Colorado at Nucla, operated by Tri-State, was closed in 2019. In 2022, Xcel shut down one of its three coal units at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo.
Colorado Springs Utilities stopped burning coal at its Martin Drake coal-fired plant in 2021, which is located near the city’s center, and replaced it with natural gas. It used some 2,000 acre-feet of water per year in the early 2000s, and was down to only 14 acre-feet per year in 2023. Colorado Springs Utilities — a provider of both electricity and water — delivers 70,000 to 75,000 acre-feet of water annually to its customers. Whatever water savings were achieved in that transition will be folded into the broader operations. The city’s remaining coal plant, Ray Nixon, burns both coal and natural gas. The city delivers about 2,000 acre-feet per year to Nixon to augment groundwater use there.
The 280-megawatt Rawhide coal-fired power plant north of Fort Collins is to be shut down by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, which owns and operates the plant, had not yet chosen a replacement power source as of June 2024. Platte River delivers electricity to Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont and Loveland.
The Cherokee plant along the South Platte River north of downtown Denver uses significantly less water since tis conversion from coal to natural gas. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
That leaves just the 505-megawatt Pawnee among Colorado’s existing coal plants. The plant near Brush is to be retrofitted to burn natural gas by 2026. The water dividend? Xcel is trying to keep its options open.
The one commonality among all the possible power-generating technologies that Xcel may use to achieve its goal of emissions-free energy by 2050 is that, with the exception of some battery technologies, they all require water, says Belt. And that, he says, means it would be unwise to relinquish water without first making decisions about the future.
That’s why this year’s bill was needed. Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers, Xcel and Tri-State, both with coal plants retiring in the Yampa Valley, have questions unanswered.
The Future of Energy
Strontia Springs Dam and Reservoir, located on the South Platte River within Waterton Canyon. It is ranked #32 out of 45 hydroelectric power plants in Colorado in terms of total annual net electricity generation. Photo by Milehightraveler/iStock
What comes next? Obviously, lots more wind and solar. Lots. The graph of projected solar power in Colorado through this decade looks like the Great Plains rising up to Longs Peak. Construction of Xcel’s Colorado Power Pathway, a 450-mile transmission line looping around the Eastern Plains, will expedite renewables coming online. Tri-State is also constructing new transmission lines in eastern Colorado. The plains landscape, San Luis Valley, and other locations could look very different by the end of the decade.
Very little water is needed for renewables, at least once the towers and panels are put into place.
You may well point out that the sun goes down, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Storage is one holy grail in this energy transition. Lithium-ion batteries can store energy for four hours. That works very effectively until it doesn’t. Needed are new cost-effective technologies or far more application of known technologies.
One possible storage method, called iron-rust, will likely be tested at Pueblo in 2025 by a collaboration between Xcel and Form Energy, a company that proclaims it will transform the grid. It could provide 100 hours of storage. Tri-State’s electric resource plan identifies the same technology.
Granby Dam was retrofitted at a cost of $5.1 million to produce hydroelectricity effective May 2016. It produces enough electricity for about 570 homes. Photo/Northern Water
Other potential storage technologies involve water. Pumped-storage hydropower is an old and proven technology. It requires vertical differences in elevation, and Colorado has that. In practice, finding the right spots for the two reservoirs, higher and lower, is difficult.
Xcel Energy’s Cabin Creek project between Georgetown and Guanella Pass began electrical production in 1967. In this closed-loop system, water from the higher reservoir is released through a three-quarter-mile tunnel to the second reservoir 1,192 feet lower in elevation. This generates a maximum 324 megawatts to help meet peak demands or to provide power when it’s dark or the wind stops blowing. When electricity is more freely available, the water can be pumped back to the higher reservoir. Very little water is lost.
Near Leadville, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has a pumped-storage hydropower project at Twin Lakes, the Mt. Elbert Power Plant, with a more modest elevation difference. The plant can generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity.
Graphic credit: Joan Carstensen
A private developer with something similar in mind has reported reaching agreements with private landowners along the Yampa River between Hayden and Craig. With private landowners, the approval process would be far easier than if this were located on federal lands. Cost is estimated at $1.5 billion.
Belt points out that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has streamlined the permitting process for pumped-storage hydro but that technology remains expensive and projects will take probably 10 to 12 years to develop if everything goes well.
“During that 10 to 12 years, does something new come along? And if you’re committed to pumped storage, then you can’t pivot to this new thing without a financial impact,” he says, explaining a hesitancy around pumped storage.
Green hydrogen is another leading candidate in the Yampa Valley and elsewhere. It uses electrolysis to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water. Renewable energy can be used to fuel the electrolysis. That’s why it is called green hydrogen as distinct from blue hydrogen, which uses natural gas as a catalyst. A news story in 2023 called it a “distant proposition.” Costs remain high but are falling. Tax incentives seek to spur that innovation.
Gov. Polis’ administration remains optimistic about hydrogen. It participated in a proposal for federal funding that would have created underground hydrogen storage near Brush. That proposal was rejected, but Will Toor, the chief executive of the Colorado Energy Office, has made it clear that green hydrogen and other emerging technologies remain on the table. Xcel says the same thing. “It’s not something we are going to give up on quite yet,” says Belt. The water savings from the conversion of coal to natural gas could possibly play into those plans.
Gov. Jared Polis stopped by the Good Vibes River Gear in Craig in March 2020 prior to attending a just transition workshop. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Polis is bullish on geothermal, both kinds. The easier geothermal uses the relatively constant 55 degree temperatures found 8 to 10 feet below ground to heat and cool buildings. The Colorado Capitol has geothermal heating, but the most famous example is Colorado Mesa University, where geothermal heats and cools about 80% of the campus. This technology may come on strong in Colorado, especially in new construction.
Can heat found at greater depths, say 10,000 feet or from particularly hot spots near the surface, be mined to produce electricity? California generates 10.1% from enhanced geothermal, Nevada 5.1%, and Utah 1.5%. Colorado generates zero. At a June conference, Polis said he thought geothermal could produce 4% to even 8% of the state’s electricity by 2040. Geothermal for electric production would require modest water resources.
Nuclear? Those plants, like coal, require water. Many smart people believe it may be the only way that civilization can reduce emissions as rapidly as climate scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic repercussions. Others see it as a way to accomplish just transition as coal plants retire.
Costs of traditional nuclear remain daunting. Critics point to projects in other states. In Georgia, for example, a pair of reactors called Vogtle have been completed but seven years late and at a cost of $35 billion, more than double the project’s initially estimated $14 billion price tag. The two reactors have a combined generating capacity of 2,430 megawatts.
New reactor designs may lower costs. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023 certified design of a small-modular reactor by NuScale. It was heralded as a breakthrough, but NuScale cancelled a contract later that year for a plant in Idaho, citing escalating costs.
With a sodium fast reactor, integrated energy storage and flexible power production, the Natrium technology offers carbon-free energy at a competitive cost and is ready to integrate seamlessly into electric grids with high levels of renewables. Graphic credit: http://NatriumPower.com
Greater optimism has buoyed plans in Wyoming by the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower for a 345-megawatt nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. It has several innovations, including molten salt for energy storage and a design that allows more flexible generation, creating a better fit with renewables. Ground was broken in June for one building. An application for the design is pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Gates has invested $1 billion and expects to invest many billions more in what he estimates will be a $10 billion final cost. He also hopes to see about 100 similar plants and reduced costs. Other companies with still other designs and ideas say they can also reduce costs. All these lower-cost nuclear solutions exist in models, not on the ground. Uranium supply remains problematic, at least for now, but more difficult yet is the question of radioactive waste disposal.
Into The Future
The potential for nuclear is balled up in the issue of just transition. Legislators in 2019 said that coal communities would not be left on their own to figure out their futures. What this means in practice remains fuzzy.
Consider Pueblo. Xcel Energy on August 1 is scheduled to submit to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission what is being called the Pueblo Just Transition Electric Resource Plan. Through that plan, Xcel must determine to what extent it can, through new generating sources, leave Pueblo economically whole after it closes the coal plants. Existing jobs will be lost, although others in post-closure remediation of the site will be gained. What, then, constitutes a just transition for Pueblo?
What will Xcel propose in October for Pueblo as it makes plans for the retired of the last of the Comanche coal-burning units in 2030? Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
A task force assembled by Xcel Energy in January delivered its conclusions after nearly a year of study: “Of all of the technologies that we studied, only advanced nuclear generation will make Pueblo whole and also provide a path to prosperity,” concluded the task force. They advised that a natural gas plant with carbon capture would be a distinctly secondary choice.
What will happen with the water in Pueblo? Xcel Energy has a take-or-pay water contract with Pueblo Water for 12,783 acre-feet per year for the Comanche Generating Station. It must pay for the water even if it does not take it. Pueblo Water has a similar take-or-pay contract for 1,000 acre-feet annually for the 440-megawatt natural gas plant operated by Black Hills Energy near the Pueblo airport.
The draw of these water leases from the Arkansas River isn’t that notable, says Chris Woodka, president of the Pueblo Water board, even in what he describes as a “small year,” with low flows in the river. These water leases constitute some 5% or less of the river’s water, Woodka says. Xcel could tap that same lease for whatever it plans at Pueblo. And if it has no use? “We haven’t had many conversations around what we would do if that lease goes away, because it is so far out in the future.”
Xcel and Tri-State both own considerable water rights in the lower Arkansas Valley, near Las Animas and Lamar. Neither utility has shared plans for using the water, as the ideas of coal or nuclear power plants that initially inspired the water purchases never moved forward. Water in both cases has been leased since its acquisition to Arkansas Basin agricultural producers in order to maintain an ongoing beneficial use.
Yampa River. Photo credit: Yampa River Integrated Water Management Plan website
Why don’t Tri-State and Xcel lease their water in the Yampa River as they do in the Arkansas? Jackie Brown, the senior water and natural resources advisor for Tri-State, explains that there is no demand for additional agricultural water in the Yampa Basin. About 99% of all lands capable of supporting irrigated agriculture already get water. This is almost exclusively for animal forage. This is a valley of hay.
However, the Yampa River itself needs more water. The lower portion in recent years has routinely suffered from low flows during the rising heat of summer. Some summers, flows at Deerlodge, near the entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, have drooped to 20 cubic feet per second. Even in Steamboat, upstream from the power plants, fishing and other forms of recreation, such as tubing, have at times been restricted.
One question asked in drafting the legislation this year was whether to seek protection with a temporary instream flow right for some of the 45 cfs that Tri-State and Xcel together use at the plants at Craig and Hayden. The intent would have been to protect the delivery of some portion of that water to Dinosaur National Monument through 2050. That idea met resistance from stakeholders.
Instead, a do-nothing approach was adopted. Those framing the bill expect that most of the time, most of the water will flow downstream to Dinosaur anyway. In most years, no demands are placed on the river from November through the end of June. The challenge comes from July through October. The amount of water, used formerly by coal plants, that reaches Dinosaur will depend upon conditions at any particular time. Have the soils been drying out? Has the summer monsoon arrived?
The Yampa River at Deerlodge Park July 24, 2021 downstream from the confluence with the Little Snake River. There was a ditch running in Maybell above this location. Irrigated hay looked good. Dryland hay not so much.
“Even if you’re adding even half of that [45 cfs], it is a big deal,” says Brown. “If you can double the flow of a river when it’s in dire circumstances it’s a big deal.”
A study conducted by the Colorado River Water Conservation District several years ago examined how much water released from Elkhead Reservoir, located near Hayden, would reach Dinosaur. The result: 88% to 90% did.
Brown says river managers will be closely studying whether the extra water can assist with recovery of endangered fish species and other issues. “There’s a lot of learning to be done. My key takeaway is that that’s really going to contribute to the volume of knowledge that we have and the future management decisions that are made.”
A larger takeaway about this new law is that it gives Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers time. Xcel and Tri-State don’t know all the answers as we stretch to eradicate emissions from our energy by mid-century. Many balls are in the air, some interconnected, each representing a technology that may be useful or necessary to complement the enormous potential of wind and solar generation now being created. All of these new technologies will require water. Some water in the conversion from coal is being saved now, but it’s possible it will be needed in the future.
No wonder Xcel’s Belt says its “imprudent in a very water-constrained region to let go of a water asset that you may not get back, until you know how some of these balls are going to land.”
More than 350 prominent climate advocates on Tuesday endorsed Vice President Harris for president, a sign that environmental leaders believe hercampaign will energize like-mindedvoters in a way that President Biden could not. In a letter shared first with The Washington Post, big names in the environmental movement — including former U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D)— wrote that Harris has long prioritized climate action and would continue to do so as president.
“We know that protecting our planet for ourselves and future generations requires the kind of bold leadership that Kamala Harris has demonstrated her whole life,” they wrote. “We are proud to support her and be in the fight against climate change with her.”
Inslee, whose ambitious climate proposals during his 2020 presidential campaign influenced Biden’s climate policies, said Harris could help mobilize young voters, a crucial Democratic constituency. Polls show that climate change is a top concern for young people, who are more likely than older generations to face raging wildfires, rising seas and stronger storms in their lifetimes.
“Her candidacy instantly lit an electric spark under young people across the country,” Inslee said. “That’s going to bode well for our fortunes.”
Kerry, who left the Biden administration in March, said in an interview that Harris was a “terrific ally” on climate policy. He noted that she was an early advocate of the United States reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century, and she delivered a forceful speech at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai last fall.
Comanche Generating Station. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 26, 2024
In one sense, Adam Frisch was an anomaly on the agenda of an energy conference held in Pueblo last Friday. He’s a Democrat, making a second run for Congress after narrowly losing in 2022 to Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s Republican-leaning 3rd Congressional District. The district’s largest city, Pueblo, once was reliably Democratic but has become a political toss-up.
Republican legislators, both current and former, were present at the conference, but I didn’t notice any Democratic legislators, even from Pueblo. Why that is, it’s hard to say.
Credit Frisch with knowing how to play to his crowd. He tipped his hat to natural gas several times even as he talked about how geothermal would use much the same skills sets and machinery.
He talked extensively about domestic energy mining and energy production. “There’s no green energy without mining, just none,” he said. He suggested that even now, burning wood may produce more energy than solar – although he did acknowledge Colorado has far more solar capacity than the national average. He took swipes at the “Colorado Capitol,” a reference to the Democrats who have run the show since the 2018 election and who have passed dozens of bills with the intent of pushing and pulling Colorado into a giant pivot that will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
For the conference on the Pueblo campus of Colorado State University, Frisch dressed in a style that suggested allegiance to his party: blue jeans, blue shirt and blue sports jacket. But he has some tip-toeing to do in this Congressional district. He’s an Aspen resident, a member of the city council when that city’s municipal utility, Aspen Electric, succeeded in achieving 100% renewables. And Frisch by no means disavows climate change.
“Whether I’m in Durango or Boulder or up in Rangely, Colorado, I would say the same thing, that there is a climate crisis,” he said at the outset of his remarks in the conference’s opening session. “It’s hotter and drier. Everybody knows this. People are planting at different times, they’re harvesting at different times, they’re hunting at different times. But we need to figure out if we truly want to try to solve this problem.”
When running as an “outsider,” it’s useful to point to perceived hypocrisies among the elites. In Colorado, the prime candidate is Boulder.
“I need to poke fun a little bit at my former zip code, because in 2019 Boulder County, of the 3,147 counties in the country, (had) on a per-capita basis the most greenhouse gas emissions per person in the country.”
Congressional candidate Adam Frisch explains why generation will be important. Photo/Allen Best
True? Well, not really. It wasn’t Boulder County but one zip code within the county that spawned many stories in 2020. And it wasn’t total greenhouse gas emissions per capita, but only those provoked by buildings. For that matter, the University of Michigan researchers reported that were able to include only two-thirds of the nation’s counties in the study.
With those caveats in mind, they did find that the buildings in zip code 80510 produced 23,811 pounds of carbon dioxide per person. That zip code is in and around Allenspark, along the road between Boulder and Estes Park. It’s a place of knotty-pined cabins that burn a lot of propane gas as well as newer and some very large homes that likely use electricity.
The methodology of the researchers also examined the sources of electricity, and by that measure the heavy coal in the electrical mix bumped the figures higher. That area is served by a member cooperative of Tri-State Generation and Transmission or Xcel Energy, and in 2019 both were still very heavily invested in coal — including coal burned at Pueblo.
One other detail: that same study found that a zip code in San Francisco, the bastion of woke politics, actually had the nation’s lowest per-capita greenhouse gas emissions for buildings.
Details, details, details
That was par for the day. Just as important as who was at this energy summit and the information they shared was who was not there and what was not said.
The event was sponsored by Action Colorado, formerly known as Colorado 22, a reference to the counties of southwestern Colorado and the San Luis Valley that are included. Think of it as patterned after the much older Club 20.
The morning agenda had various speakers, but most notable was a defense of natural gas in buildings. The afternoon was almost entirely about the promise of nuclear energy.
Interspersed through the day were speakers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, or IBEW. They told about their lives and about their work. They spoke very well, very effectively. I spent eight years in Toastmasters trying to smooth my tongue of rusted iron into moments of silver. These guys were like professionals as they talked about growing up on ranches, about the dangers of working with electricity, about building better lives for themselves and their families.
The background question for the day’s conversation was what will happen when the last of Pueblo’s three coal-burning units becomes quiet. One of the three coal-burning units at Comanche Generating Station has closed, another will in 2025, and the third is to become silent no later than Jan. 1, 2031, as per the decision by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.
(In my message to Big Pivots subscribers of June 13, I vaguely and imprecisely referred to 2030. To add some confusion, Gov. Jared Polis last week said 2029.)
What will replace the tax base and jobs in Pueblo and Pueblo County?
President Joe Biden visited the CW Wind factory in Pueblo, the world’s largest manufacture of towers for wind turbines, in November 2023. Photo/Allen Best
Pueblo is a river town, bisected by the Arkansas River. It’s a transportation hub for both highways and rail. It is above all a place that makes things. I am sure it has Ph.D.s among its 111,000 residents, but it has blue-collar DNA. Work gloves could be the city’s logo.
The steel mill was first and maybe even now remains foremost, hulks of rust rising above I-25 even as a new mill is now taking shape. The mill began producing rail in 1882, and that’s still the primary product, if the lengths have been extended to quarter-mile sections. It was called CF&I when I was young, and although I have no personal memories, Pueblo was still a rich ethnic stew in the mid-20th century, a cauldron of immigrants who labored under a film of coal smoke. You don’t have to go far to find people whose fathers and grandfathers and perhaps great-grandfathers had walked to the mill, lunch buckets in hand, from their houses in the Bessemer and other close-by neighborhoods.
That includes the former mayor, Nick Gradisar, and the fellow I had lunch with at the conference, Joseph Griego. Gradisar, a former board chair for Action Colorado, the organization sponsoring this conference, had a vison of pivoting Pueblo to a green-energy economy. He was handily defeated in the election last year.
Some of that pivot, however, had already started before he even became mayor.
On Saturday morning, after the conference, I awoke in our motel room on Pueblo’s north side soon after daybreak and set out to get photographs. I drove south on I-25, pausing during shift change at the gates of the steel mill, which is now owned by EVRAZ North America. Based in London, majority ownership was held by Russian oligarchs, cronies of Putin, most notably Roman Abramovich, who alone owned between a quarter and a third of the company. Evraz said in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that it would sell its North American assets, but nothing has come of that. As best I can tell, Putin cronies still have a stake in Pueblo.
Continuing south out of the city, I turned off from I-25 at the Stem Beach turnoff, then headed northeast on Lime Creek Road, putting Greenhorn Mountain in the rearview mirror.
Greenhorn was originally Cuerno Verde, the name given by Spanish colonizers to two leaders, the father and son, of a band of Comanches. They were known for their distinctive headdress.
The younger Cuerno Verde was killed there in 1779 by the Spanish troops led by Juan Batiste de Anza and their Apache, Ute and Pueblo allies. And with the Comanche weakened, the Great Plains in Colorado with their plentiful bison became more available to some other immigrants, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe.
The alignments of what became Colorado were, in the 18th century, as convoluted as they are in the 21st century, but the conflicts for the time being now draw only figurative blood. By that measure, these disagreements about the energy transition are mild indeed even if one former legislator at the Pueblo conference described the politics he left behind at the Colorado Capitol as “toxic.”
The Lime Creek Road constitutes Pueblo’s industrial alley. First in this sequence is the former wind turbine factory formerly owned by the Danish company Vesta but purchased in 2021 by CS Wind, a South Korean company. The factory produces towers that are 90 meters tall and weigh 240 tons. President Joe Biden was there last November to give a pep talk about the clean energy agenda.
A little farther along is a turnoff to another set of gray industrial buildings rising up from the plains, the GCC cement plant and limestone quarry, one of two remaining cement plants in Colorado with the recent closure of a plant at Lyons.
The day before, a speaker at the conference – in the morning, non-nuclear session — representing a company called Carbon America, had spoken about the hopes to sequester carbon dioxide under cap rock in a geologic formation northeast of Pueblo. Two potential partners exist in the Pueblo area, this one and another near Florence. They manufacture cement from lime.
Carbon America sees carbon dioxide created in this process –none of it through combustion — as being one market for carbon sequestration along with the almost pure stream of carbon dioxide being emitted by corn ethanol plants. The company’s office is about a mile from my own in suburban Denver.
As I continued north, the three giant smokestacks of Comanche 3 rose higher. Before I got there, though, I first saw the low-rising rows of solar panels, a virtual sea of them amid the cacti.
The first solar farm, located directly east of the coal plant, was developed by Eric Blank, who has now become the chair of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. Then, in 2021, completion of a far larger array of solar panels was completed. This project, Bighorn, was on land owned by Evraz around Comanche Station. It can generate 300 megawatts of direct current or 240 megawatts of alternating current. Through the artifice of credits, the solar production allows the steel mill to proclaim it has solar-made steel. (It also matters that the plant works with recycled steel, which requires less heat).
Still heading toward Comanche, I drove under transmission lines. whether generated by solar or for by coal units. However electricity is generated, it must be transmitted to metro Denver and wherever else. Will a nuclear plant transmit electricity at Comanche sometime in the 2030s?
The Pueblo area has Colorado’s two remaining limestone quarries and cement kilns, including this one along Lime Creek Road. Photo/Allen Best
The tone for the conference was set by the panel that followed Adam Frisch.
The panel consisted of representatives of three of Colorado’s four privately-owned utilities that sell methane, the primary constituent in natural gas, to consumers for building heat and water cooling.
Curbing methane emissions from Colorado’s buildings may be Colorado’s most difficult nut to crack. We don’t swap out buildings the way we do cars or cell phones.
Ken Fogle is a marketing vice president for Atmos Energy, one of Colorado’s two regulated gas-only utilities, meaning that they don’t also sell electricity. Black Hills Energy does sell both electricity and gas, but not necessarily in the same place. It was represented by Tom Henley, the senior public affairs director. And there was Michael Sapp, the state public affairs director for Xcel Energy, with sells both gas and electricity, and in largely the same areas.
The Monday prior to the conference, the Colorado PUC commissioners had issued their formal 141-page decision about Xcel’s proposed clean heat plan. The PUC commissioners rejected a lot of Xcel’s ideas.
The plan was in response to legislation adopted in 2021 that said that the gas utilities needed to figure out how to start reducing emissions from the natural gas they delivered to their customers for heating of space and water. It’s one of maybe a half-dozen bills taking aim at methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that the Environmental Defense Fund says is responsible for about 30% of today’s global warming driven by human action.
“For those of you don’t know, natural gas has been kind of under the microscope, shall we say, for a number of years now down at the state capitol,” said Black Hills’ Henley.
The panelists in Pueblo said they thought the clean-heat legislation adopted in 2021 required too much, too soon. A major grievance is that the legislation required a 4% reduction in emissions by 2025 compared to a 2015 baseline – but ignoring the role of population growth. In effect, said several panelists, this means a 20% reduction.
Nobody argued whether climate change is real or the role of greenhouse gas emissions in causing climate change. That debate has, at least formally, passed. The argument is whether the reduction goals are realistic.
It’s a legitimate question. But this was not a panel created to further the dialogue. Instead, aided by softball questions, the remarks drifted toward preserving the status quo. These are companies who don’t want to change their business models in light of the evidence of climate change.
“How do we support legislators who favor an all-of-the-above energy mix,” they were asked.
“We’ve got to talk to people that are electing their officials to make sure they know what their officials are doing in Denver,” said Fogle, the Atmos representative. “I don’t think a lot of folks would agree with what’s happening in Denver when you go to these places like the Western Slope or Southeastern Colorado. I don’t think they’d agree with what’s happening in Denver. So you got to get the people involved and activate the base.”
Then another question. “Dems control the House, Senate and governor’s office, how do you navigate policies that are aimed at mandated, forced beneficial electrification, and what strategies do you try to deploy to work with that agenda?”
The key strategy that emerged in the remarks of panelists is to emphasize cost of adopting other technologies that will end the need for natural gas in buildings. Going electric is expensive, and natural gas is affordable. And there’s truth to that. Staying the course is the cheapest alternative. Cost can matter.
Ironically, along the way in this discussion about natural gas, there was a plug for nuclear. But when the agenda moved to nuclear that afternoon that cost almost entirely disappeared from the conversation.
That seems to be a pattern.
Former PUC commissioner Frances Koncilja explains the task force perspective as to what Pueblo needs after all the units in the Comanche Generating Station close. Photo/Allen Best
While some reading this might conclude otherwise, I am actually neutral about nuclear as a long-term solution. As I’ve written before, one of the leading climate change scientists, James Hansen, has embraced the need for nuclear. I know people in Boulder County – yes, in that place that many want to see as a hotbed of cross-breeding of privilege and wokeism — who believe it is necessary.
It would certainly solve a lot of problems. Even now, 20% of U.S. power comes from nuclear power plants.
Then there’s the matter of Colorado’s declared intention of not leaving behind coal communities in this transition. Frances Koncilja, a former PUC commissioner, in 2023 co-chaired a task force created by Xcel Energy that produced a report in January. The Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee Report heartily recommended a nuclear power plant to replace Comanche.
Pueblo County has done its part to reduce emissions, she said. Pueblo County will be responsible for a 36% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by Xcel Energy and 20% statewide from the electric sector.
She emphasized the obligation of Colorado. “Just transition means that coal communities should not only be no worse off with the closure of coal facilities but also replace the coal generation with high-paying and highly-skilled jobs and lost tax base so that coal communities have an opportunity to prosper, grow and reimagine their local economies.”
Koncilja did not specifically cite the 2019 law, which in my read is a little more fuzzy than how she summarized it. Colorado does not owe Pueblo a one-for-one replacement.
The law says the “effects of coal plant closures on works and communities have the potential to be significant if not managed correctly.” It also mentions the state’s intention to “assist workers and communities impacted by changes in Colorado’s coal economy.” It also mentions a “moral commitment.”
The Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee she co-chaired recommended nuclear because of the 300 jobs with a salary range of $60,000 to $200,000 and annual tax payments of $95 million. In 2021, Xcel and its two co-owners of Comanche 3, one of the coal-burning units, collectively paid $31 million.
She also pointed to strong comparisons in wealth to other counties in Colorado, specifically Aspen/Pitkin County, Vail/Eagle County, Boulder County and Denver.
Exploitation of fossil fuels has left Pueblo far, far behind these other locations.
One unit of Comanche Generating Station has ceased operation and the other two will before 2031 gets underway. Photo/Allen Best
The afternoon was rich with speakers with a wealth of information about different types of nuclear technology that are in some stage of development. There were many details, but almost entirely absent were those most useful for relevancy in Pueblo and Colorado altogether. That begins with cost.
One speaker said his company’s technology will be able to deliver electricity for 3 cents a kilowatt-hour – making it competitive with renewables. But, of course, it has not been deployed yet.
When the representative from nuclear powerhouse Westinghouse concluded, she took several questions. The first was: What is the cause of the most significant pushback you get?” Cost, she replied.
Cost infamously rose to $35 billion, more than double original projections, on the two Vogtle units that have come on line recently in Georgia.
But what about the advanced nuclear designs? True enough, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in early 2023 approved the design of small modular reactors. But NuScale, the company that had sought the approval for deployment at Idaho Falls, just a few months later cancelled the order. The problem? Escalating costs.
Can Bill Gates disprove us naysayers? He was in Wyoming on Monday to help break ceremonial ground for a nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. The company has a pending application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the plant design. Gates and company hope for completion in 2030, a brisk pace.
Gates has put in $1 billion into TerraPower and the U.S. Department of Energy has $2 billion promised for the project. Gates, in an interview on Face the Nation on Sunday morning (see transcript), said he expects to invest several billion more. He estimated completion price at $10 billion. He also said he hopes to 100 projects using the same nuclear technology “to really make an impact.”
A sea of solar panels exists around Comanche Generation Station along with many transmission lines that export the power to Xcel Energy’s customers. Photo/Allen Best
In a seminar several weeks before, Duane Highley, chief executive of Tri-State Generation and Transmission, said he thought the price will not be bent down until about 2035 or beyond to a point where it can be justified for his members in places like the San Luis Valley and the corn-and-millet and wheat-and-ranch country of eastern Colorado.
To be fair, Highley said the cost of geothermal for electrical production is no better at this point. The comparison may not be the most useful. The technologies compete in two different cost arenas. Simply put, nuclear is a bigger gamble, the entry bid at a higher level.
But the larger point is that we have a whole host of technologies competing to be the final answer to 100% emissions-free energy — and nuclear is just one.
So why the bandwagon for nuclear? Will Colorado really throw cost considerations out the window and became the test lab for advanced nuclear technologies?
Highley, in his interview,(which you can read elsewhere in this issue), said he wished the federal government would bankroll the next-generation nuclear technology, such as for use on military bases. That would get us over this gigantic hump of price.
It would still leave us with puddles of radioactive waste hither and thither with that huge issue unresolved. Our past recklessness in places such as Rocky Flats, between Arvada and Boulder, leaves many uncomfortable.
And finally, there is this question: Why do nuclear advocates in Colorado think they can continue to make their case without addressing these hard questions.
The best I can figure is that nuclear has become a stand-in for coal and a political statement that borders on religion. Because Aspen, Boulder and Denver likes renewables, we need to be for nuclear. That’s why I found the talking points of the congressional candidate from Aspen so interesting. (And, to be honest, speaking to a Pueblo crowd and leading with the fact that you’re from Boulder likely would not be the wisest way to introduce yourself).
But what was Xcel Energy up to in creating this task force? What did it truly hope to accomplish? A mere distraction, a way to gain leverage against the Democratic majority at the Colorado Capitol?
I’m still scratching my head. I probably will be still until Xcel submits its proposal to the PUC in five weeks.
For a second straight year the Colorado Department of Agriculture is looking to distribute grants up to $500,000 for projects that demonstrate and research the use of solar generation on agriculture land. The grants are part of the state’s Agrivoltaics Research and Demonstration program which came into existence through legislation sponsored by state Sen. Cleave Simpson of Alamosa.
The grant program is particularly relevant to the San Luis Valley, where the reduction in groundwater irrigation has led to thousands of farming acres retired. Generating more renewable solar is part of the Valley’s strategy to find alternative uses for a growing number of retired fields that now dot the landscape.
“The first year of these grants was a tremendous success. Awardees have explored groundbreaking methods to effectively develop energy on the same land that is used to grow food and fiber,” said Cindy Lair, Deputy Director of the Conservation Services Division. “We can’t wait to see the new, innovative proposals that will be submitted for this next round of funding.”
Up to $500,000 is available for projects that study the potential, benefits, and tradeoffs of agrivoltaics in Colorado.
Applicants can find the Grant Guidelines as well as instructions for submitting an application on the ADCRO website, at ag.colorado.gov/adcro. The maximum grant award is $249,000 for a single project application. Eligible project types include construction or expansion of agrivoltaics systems and demonstration projects, outreach and communication efforts focused on agrivoltaics benefits or obstacles, and research projects that focus on understanding the benefits, incremental costs, and tradeoffs of agrivoltaics systems.
Applications should be submitted via email to Rosalie.Skovron@state.co.us by July 21, 2024.
ADCRO staff will host a webinar on the application process on June 18. Anyone interested in applying for the grant can participate. A recording will be available on the CDA YouTube channel.
In the Fiscal Year 2023-24, seven different projects received grant funding to showcase diverse ways of generating electricity from solar arrays on Colorado farms and ranches. One of the projects, completed by Longboard Power, included installing solar wind breaks on a farm and monitoring soil benefits and energy output. Another, through the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust, is creating template conservation easement language that would allow for solar power generation while maintaining ag production and applying conservation values.
The other five projects were by Namaste Solar, Colorado State University, American Farmland Trust, Sandbox Solar, and Summit Cellars.
Webinar Information
Date and Time: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 from 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. MDT
Description: This grant encourages innovative projects, including demonstrations of agrivoltaics, research projects, and outreach campaigns to further agrivoltaics and Colorado’s agricultural economy. CDA staff will explain the application process for the grant and answer questions.
Colorado acepta solicitudes para la subvención de Investigación y Demostración de Agrivoltaicos
Por segundo año consecutivo, el Departamento de Agricultura de Colorado busca distribuir subvenciones de hasta $500,000 para proyectos que demuestren e investiguen el uso de generación solar en tierras agrícolas. Las subvenciones son parte del programa estatal de Investigación y Demostración de Agrivoltaicos, que se creó a través de una legislación patrocinada por el senador estatal Cleave Simpson de Alamosa.
El programa de subvenciones es particularmente relevante para el Valle de San Luis, donde la reducción del riego con agua subterránea ha llevado a retirar miles de acres de tierras de cultivo. Generar más energía solar renovable es parte de la estrategia del Valle para encontrar usos alternativos para un número creciente de campos retirados que ahora salpican el paisaje.
“El primer año de estas subvenciones fue un éxito tremendo. Los beneficiarios exploraron métodos innovadores para desarrollar eficazmente la energía en la misma tierra que se utiliza para cultivar alimentos y fibras,” declaró Cindy Lair, Subdirectora de la División de Servicios de Conservación. “Tenemos muchas esperanzas de ver propuestas nuevas e innovadoras que se puedan presentar en esta próxima ronda de financiamiento.”
Se dispone de hasta $500,000 para proyectos que estudien el potencial, los beneficios y las soluciones intermedias y compensatorias de la agrovoltaica en Colorado.
Los solicitantes pueden encontrar las directrices para la concesión de subvenciones, y las instrucciones para postularse, en la página de internet de ADCRO ag.colorado.gov/adcro. El máximo de subvención para una solicitud es $249,000 para un solo proyecto. Los proyectos elegibles incluyen la construcción o ampliación de sistemas agrovoltaicos; proyectos de demostración; esfuerzos de divulgación y comunicación centrados en los beneficios u obstáculos de la agrovoltaica, y proyectos de investigación centrados en comprender los beneficios, costos incrementales y las soluciones intermedias y compensatorias de los sistemas agrovoltaicos.
Las solicitudes deben enviarse al correo electrónico Rosalie.Skovron@state.co.us antes del 21 de julio de 2024.
ADCRO organizará una junta virtual para ver el proceso y los detalles de solicitud el 18 de junio. Cualquier persona interesada en postularse para la subvención puede participar. La grabación quedará disponible en el canal de YouTube de CDA.
En el ejercicio fiscal 2023-24, siete proyectos diferentes recibieron subvenciones para mostrar diversas formas de generar electricidad a partir de paneles solares en granjas y ranchos de Colorado. Uno de los proyectos, realizado por Longboard Power, incluía instalar un cortavientos solar en una granja y monitorear los beneficios para el suelo y la producción de energía. Otro, a través del Fondo de Tierras Agrícolas de los Ganaderos de Colorado, está creando un modelo de servidumbre de conservación que permitiría generar energía solar mientras siga la producción agrícola y aplicando los valores de conservación.
Los otros cinco proyectos son de Namaste Solar, Colorado State University, American Farmland Trust, Sandbox Solar y Summit Cellars.
Información sobre el webinario
Fecha y hora: martes, 18 de junio de 2024 de 1:00 a 2:00 p. m. (zona horaria MDT)
Enlace de inscripción: regístrese para la reunión del 18 de junio o visite ag.colorado.gov/ADCRODescripción: esta subvención fomenta proyectos innovadores como demostraciones de agrovoltaica, proyectos de investigación y campañas de divulgación para impulsar la agrovoltaica y la economía agrícola de Colorado. CDA explicará el proceso de solicitud de la subvención y responderá preguntas en esta junta virtual.
A sign in Norwood opposing a proposed solar installation nearby. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
June 12, 2024
Does it make sense to kill 3,500 Joshua trees to clear the way to power 180,000 homes with carbon-free energy from the sun? That’s a question I’ve been pondering as I peruse the public comments on the Biden administration’s Western Solar Plan and in the wake of a debate that’s erupted over the social-media-waves regarding this very question.
The kerfuffle was sparked late last month after the Los Angeles Times’ Melody Petersen reported that renewable energy developer Avantus had begun clearing thousands of the iconic desert trees to make way for the 530-megawatt Aratina solar-plus-storage project on a swath of the Mojave Desert in southern California. Even worse: They were apparently shredding the trees onsite or using other measures to hide the apparent act of agave-cide (Joshua trees aren’t trees at all, but members of the agave family). This stirred up a lot of anger and concern, naturally.
But the real brouhaha broke out after another LA Times journalist, Sammy Roth, wrote a column about hard clean energy choices developers and regulators must make to tackle the climate crisis, concluding: “Hence the need to accept killing some Joshua trees in the name of saving more Joshua trees.”
Joshua tree in the Mojave Desert. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Now, I think Roth is one of the best Western energy journalists out there, and I admire his ability to embrace the complexity of the energy transition. He rightly points out that human-caused climate warming poses an existential threat to Joshua trees and other species, and to fight climate change we’ll need to displace fossil fuel generation with cleaner energy sources, such as solar and wind. Roth is right on when he argues this will require utility-scale energy development, and when he dismisses the simplistic solution of merely putting solar panels on residential rooftops. And critics accusing him of being a pawn of corporate energy developers (or a member of the “climate cult religion”) are way off.
But bulldozing pristine public land and killing thousands of Joshua trees (or desert tortoises or sage grouse or pronghorn) to make way for a solar development that will purportedly save Joshua trees from going extinct? Okay, sure, if the choice were really that stark — if it was a desert-flora version of the trolley problem: where a bystander must decide whether to direct a runaway streetcar onto a track where it would kill several people, or onto another where it would kill just one person — then maybe that argument would fly. That’s not quite the situation here, however. In the trolley problem, there are only two choices, both horrible; in the Joshua tree-solar problem there are myriad options, some better than others.
I first caught wind of the proposed Arantina project many months ago, when I stumbled across a news piece about opposition from nearby residents, who were worried about dust kicked up during construction and potential impacts to views and property values. I frequently encounter these sorts of stories with another one of my gigs compiling an energy newsletter for the Energy News Network. Nearly every utility-scale solar proposal out there runs into opposition from someone, especially those planned for relatively undisturbed public lands.
But this one stuck out because of where it’s located. First off, it’s not being built on public land, but rather 2,300 acres of private land in eastern Kern County amid a county landfill, a major highway, and a rail line. The residents worried about dust and views live in the communities of Boron and Desert Lake (a more accurate monicker would be Desert Dry Lake, but hey). To its credit, Avantus responded to the concerns by setting the project further back from the towns, where they would be less visible. Of course, this also put them a bit deeper into the desert, possibly endangering more Joshua Trees in the process and bringing up additional concerns among locals, most notably that stirring up the desert may also disperse the fungus that causes valley fever.
The towns, recently featured in the LA Times for their cheap real estate, would be within a half-mile of the solar facility, so their concerns are understandable. And yet, less than a mile in the other direction looms Rio Tinto’s massive, open-pit Borax Mine, which spans more than 13 square miles, where house-sized machinery extracts some one million tonnes of refined borates and consumes more than 300 million gallons of water annually — in a friggin’ desert! Not only that, but right next to the mine is the Southwest’s largest liquefied-natural-gas processing plant, a potentially explosive situation, if you know what I mean.
And they’re worried about a photovoltaic installation’s dust and harm to views and property values?
I’m not saying the presence of the mine or the apparent lack of concern about it invalidates townspeople’s concerns about the solar installation, nor does it justify the solar project’s harm to Joshua trees. I just find this apparent contradiction — one that I’m seeing more and more often in relation to renewable energy — curious.
Another interesting note in all of this is that in 2022 Avantus, the solar installation’s developer, purchased grazing rights on 215,000 acres of public land elsewhere in Kern County and retired them as part of the Onyx Conservation Project. The project is sort of a prelude to the BLM’s public lands rule, which opens the door to conservation leases on public lands that can be used by energy developers to mitigate, or make up for, impacts they wreak elsewhere. In theory, at least, the Onyx project will protect thousands of Joshua trees — along with a variety of other wildlife — which would then “offset” the killing of all those other Joshua trees near Boron.
It’s great that Avantus retired grazing in — and eliminated a lot of impacts on — a huge piece of the Mojave Desert. And it certainly earns the company some social capital. But I’m not sure it mitigates the harm done to the Joshua grove near Boron. Can you really “offset” a shredded plant by simply not cutting down another one that may have continued living unharmed for another century or more? Wouldn’t it be easier to put the solar installation in a place where there aren’t so many Joshua Trees?
A utility-scale solar installation when it was under construction near Red Mesa on the Navajo Nation. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
A few years ago, if a story showed up in the media about opposition to a utility-scale solar project, the pushback likely was inspired by the harm these projects — and scraping the desert bare of flora, fauna, and topsoil — do to relatively undisturbed public lands, wildlife, and ecosystems. In the past year or so, however, opposition to “clean” energy like wind and solar has not only grown, but also changed in nature and motivation.
Now it seems like almost every utility-scale solar and wind installation proposal garners pushback from somewhere, whether it’s on private or public land, previously disturbed or not. In Arizona, Idaho, and Colorado, livestock operators and state lawmakers are rising up against solar because it may impede upon public land grazing allotments. Others don’t like public land solar because it wrecks their view or gets in the way of OHV-riding or other recreational pursuits.
Last year, a company called OneEnergy proposed building a 100-megawatt utility-scale solar array on about 640 acres of private and state-owned land southwest of Norwood, Colorado, in green-leaning San Miguel County. The developers said it would create some 300 construction-phase jobs and generate millions in tax and lease revenue and clean power for thousands of homes. They also planned to make it an agrivoltaic project, meaning livestock grazing would continue underneath the solar panels. Local opposition was vociferous, however. Most critics said they supported renewable energy, just not there — or anywhere else in their immediate vicinity. The county responded by imposing a moratorium on large-scale utility development in unincorporated areas to allow it time to develop regulations for such projects. The six-month moratorium has been extended twice, so far, and is set to end in November.
This sentiment is becoming more widespread, making for a tough row for utility-scale clean energy developers to hoe. Residents of La Plata County pushed back on a proposed commercial photovoltaic installation on private land last year. That project is also in limbo. In 2022, Delta County rejected a proposed solar array on private land because it would take the parcel out of agricultural use. It later approved the plan after the developers rejiggered the project to allow for sheep grazing among the panels. Soon thereafter, though, the county enacted its own moratorium on large-scale solar. Similar moratoria are popping up in rural, conservative counties from Washington to Idaho to Arizona — where Mohave County banned solar installations while clearing the way for a natural gas plant expansion next to a retirement community.
Sometimes there are legitimate environmental concerns driving the opposition, even when the projects lie entirely on private land. But other times the reasoning isn’t so solid. Many lament the potential “loss of agricultural land,” even if the parcels in question haven’t been farmed due to economics or water scarcity or just poor soil health, and their owners’ only way of remaining in agriculture is to earn some money by leasing land to solar developers. Others bring up the age-old “property value” argument — which sounds absurd coming from just about any corner of the West, where property values could use a bit of de-inflation. Besides, if proximity to radioactive waste and Superfund sites hasn’t devalued properties (e.g. Moab or Silverton), how can a bunch of solar panels do so?
An official of another Colorado town told me plans were scrapped to install solar panels on a piece of town land after the local pickleball mob protested, saying they needed the land for their courts. And up in Ophir — where avalanches and extreme weather can not only shut off access, but also take out the only utility lines serving the place — residents voted to nix a solar-powered microgrid with battery backup that would have enabled them to weather extended outages. This is the same town that voted in 2018 to work toward transitioning to 100% greenhouse gas-free electricity. And now they’ve turned down a project with state and federal funding that would have helped them meet that goal, while also giving them independence from a tenuous power grid, because it would have meant putting up some solar panels in their open space.
This is when I understand Roth’s frustration: No matter how hard the solar and wind developers try to site their projects responsibly, someone comes up with some reason — legitimate or otherwise — to try to kill it, thereby delaying the very necessary clean energy transition. Sometimes this means the facility just doesn’t get built; other times it can actually push the development from a reasonably suitable location to one that may be farther away from people, but where there’s more potential for environmental harm.
It’s not just the opposition that’s frustrating. The industry plays a part in it, too. Quite often developers don’t try to compromise or site their projects responsibly. In fact, they’re more likely to behave a bit like the oil and gas industry: As if they’re entitled to put their installations wherever suits them because they are producing something we all need, consequences be damned. That’s because solar and wind companies, like most businesses, are generally in it to make money — we live in a capitalist system, after all. And it’s often cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to site these things on public lands in the desert than to try to piece together a puzzle of private land parcels or brownfields.
The best way to prod a developer to site responsibly is through strong, clear regulations that guide development toward previously disturbed areas with lower conflict potential and away from culturally or ecologically significant lands at the outset. The Obama administration tried that in 2012 with its Western solar plan; now Biden’s Bureau of Land Management is working to update and improve the plan. The agency’s preferred alternative would leave 22 million acres of BLM lands open to development, while putting more than 200 million acres off-limits. Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University, isn’t so impressed, summing it up like this in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece:
“The Bureau of Land Management’s Western Solar Plan update inverts the original intent of the planning process from one that sought to avoid wildlife and cultural resource conflict to one that prioritizes transmission developer and utility interests on these publicly owned landscapes.“
Nevertheless, industry is pushing to make it even less restrictive, urging the agency to remove slope restrictions (which prohibit development on slopes over a certain steepness), to allow clean energy development in areas of critical environmental concern (I think not!), and to further streamline permitting. They invariably say the 2012 plan, which is currently in place, is too prohibitive, even though dozens of massive solar installations have been permitted and built on public lands in the 12 years since it was implemented.
No matter how the plan turns out, however, it won’t have much bearing on projects like Aratina, since it’s on private land (which is where public lands advocates generally would like to see these installations — Joshua trees notwithstanding.)
***
Even in Boron, the developer could have gone in a different, less-destructive direction while still bringing clean energy to the grid. The Borax mine is surrounded by waste piles, old reclaimed mining zones, and other disturbed areas that offer up plenty of solar-appropriate land. It might have been slightly more complicated to work out deals with the mining company and to level some of the piles, but building there would have sparked far less conflict and killed little if any vegetation. They could have shared dust-control duty with the mine. And I think the viewshed would be just fine.
In northwestern New Mexico, developers are building the San Juan solar project on private land near the shuttered San Juan Generating Station coal-fired plant. It’s massive, and has impacts of its own, but is far better for everyone than the pollution-spewing power plant was.
On another project altogether, the developers of the SunZia transmission line that will carry wind power from New Mexico to the Phoenix area could have routed the line along I-10 rather than up the ecologically and culturally significant San Pedro River Valley. Yes, it may have cost a bit more, and may have spurred its own opposition (from motorists worried about their freeway viewshed?), but the bigger-picture costs would have been far less. The BLM, however, failed in its mission to site such projects where they do the least harm, and now SunZia is getting battered with legal challenges (albeit so far unsuccessful ones).
Avantus, the same company behind Aratina, is proposing the 2,000-megawatt solar plus 2,000-megawatt battery storage Buttonbush installation on private farmland in the Central Valley. That’s a massive amount of energy — one of the largest such installations in the world if and when it’s completed. Somebody will probably protest it, since it will represent a loss of farmland in a major agricultural zone. Yet it’s also a place wracked by drought and climate change, where groundwater pumping has depleted aquifers and water shortages are the norm. While a solar facility still uses water for dust-control and cleaning, it generally uses far less than most crops. And besides, the landowners wouldn’t sell or lease their fields to solar folks if they felt they were most viable as farmland.
This is where the value choice is made: Is it better to lose some farmland that would be fallowed anyway? Or 3,500 to 4,200 Joshua trees?
Blanketing every home rooftop in Los Angeles with solar panels is an admirable goal, but also logistically near-impossible. Either you’d have to convince millions of homeowners to fork out the cash for their own panels — which is now less financially rewarding since state regulators slashed net metering incentives — or a developer or utility would have to lease rooftop space from millions of individuals. It ain’t gonna happen.
But covering every warehouse and big box store rooftop and parking lot with solar panels? That’s an entirely different story. Parking lots and commercial structures span some serious acreage, and just as Avantus is piecing together 132 private parcels in the Central Valley for its Buttonpush project, so could a developer work with hundreds of industrial or commercial urban landowners to cover rooftops and parking lots with installations. Yes, I’m suggesting utility-scale, front-of-the-meter developments spread across the built landscape. Of course, behind-the-meter developments, where each landowner installs their own array, works, too, but it doesn’t play as well into the vertically integrated utility, centralized power model that currently dominates.
The federal, state, and local governments need to fashion strong regulations and incentives to help guide developers to make the right choices. And the environmental groups that push back on utility-scale development on public lands must also present — and fight for — more suitable, and realistic, siting options. This means urging regulators to compensate rooftop and community solar at retail rates or higher, but it also means rejecting knee-jerk opposition to utility-scale solar based on frivolous or ideological concerns.
I like to think I’m an optimist in these matters, and it is heartening to see places like Silverton and Rico continue to work on establishing solar-powered microgrids (Silverton may put their solar panels on a mill tailings disposal pile), to see community solar taking off in New Mexico, and to see solar installations directly replacing coal facilities, as is also happening in New Mexico. But then I read about Wyoming and Utah lawmakers interfering in markets to keep coal plants running, and about the huge strain data centers’ and AI’s electricity demands are going to put on the grid, and I get discouraged. We can build all the solar and wind we want, but until we can slow capitalism’s never-ending hunger, its incessant need to continue to grow and to consume, we won’t solve the crises we face.
I’ll leave you on a slightly brighter note with some numbers I gathered a while back for a dataviz piece in High Country News. And after that, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section about all of these issues!
44,800 megawatts: Potential generating capacity if solar canopies covered Los Angeles County’s 18.6 million parking spaces.
15,400 megawatts:Potential generating capacity if solar panels covered all 3,495 miles of California’s aqueducts and canals.
21,363: Number of big-box stores in the Western U.S.
31,035,098 megawatt-hours: Estimated total annual energy output if solar arrays were installed to cover all those stores’ rooftops, enough to power 3 million homes.
1,155 megawatts: Estimated generating capacity if solar panels covered all 370 miles of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, as LA officials propose.
37,500 Gigawatthours per year: Energyoutput of solar canopies if all of Phoenix, Arizona’s 12.2 million parking spots were covered.
139: Number of desert tortoises relocated to make way for the Yellow Pine Solar Project in southern Nevada in 2021. Within a few weeks, 30 of them were killed, possibly by badgers.
4,200: Estimated number of Joshua trees that will be destroyed or moved when solar industry giant Avantus develops its Aratina project near Boron, California.
215,000 acres: Grazing leases bought and retired in the Mojave Desert in California by Avantus to protect wildlife habitat and Joshua trees. The Onyx Conservation project is a partnership with federal and state land management agencies to “offset” the impacts of the company’s developments elsewhere in the region.
1.3 million: Estimated number of Joshua trees destroyed by the 2020 Dome Fire, thought to be exacerbated by climate change, in the Mojave National Preserve in California.
14,905,215 megawatt-hours: Estimated total annual energy output if solar arrays were installed on all of California’s 10,260 big-box store rooftops.
16,477,306 megwatt-hours: Total energy output of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in 2020.
2,602 megawatts: Potential generating capacity if solar panels covered every rooftop on Arizona’s 2,288 big-box stores.
The world’s biggest solar plant has come online in China, capable of powering a small country with its annual capacity of more than 6 billion kilowatt hours. The facility in a desert region of the north-west province of Xinjiang covers 200,000 acres – roughly the same area as New York City. The 5GW complex, which was connected to China’s grid on Monday, is powerful enough to meet the electricity demands of a country the size of Luxembourg or Papua New Guinea.
China has led the world in solar power adoption, boosting its capacity in 2023 by more than 50 per cent. The new solar farm overtakes the Ningxia Teneggeli and Golmud Wutumeiren solar projects, which are both also in China, to become the largest in the world. A recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) described China’s drive towards renewables as “extraordinary”, with the country commissioning as much solar capacity last year as the entire world did in 2022.
Transmission lines and red rock. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
April 30, 2024
Audubon is hiring. The conservation organization wants to bring the science for which it is noted among conservation organizations to the selection of electrical transmission in Colorado and other intermountain states of the West.
“We don’t want to be an organization that stops something, because climate change is literally the existential threat to birds. And the renewable energy and storage that is needed require more transmission lines. So how do we work together to make this happen?” says Alice Madden, a former state legislator from Louisville who joined the National Audubon Society in March as senior director of climate strategy.Loui
Audubon already has a person working with developers on five proposed transmission lines in the Midwest. There an organized market called a regional transmission organization, or RTO, exists.
Western states remain fragmented in integration of electricity into an organized market. Colorado is akin to an island. The person that Madden hires will be responsible for working with developers to put new lines along highways, railroads, and other areas of disrupted habitat. If that is impossible, then the goal will be to route the transmission in the ways that cause least impact to birds.
“Routing is important, and Audubon has incredible mapping tools … so we can provide a wealth of information,” she says.
The organization already has had success in the West, though. Madden cites the organization’s work with developers of SunZia, a 550-mile high-voltage direct-current transmission line between central New Mexico and south-central Arizona.
Like most transmission lines, this one had a long history. It was proposed in 2006 and had a 17-year journey to final permitting. Audubon credits Pattern Energy, which joined the project in 2018 and partnered with Audubon to initiate early and active engagement with project developers.
“We literally guided them to best practices for routing, best practices for tower design, ways to avoid interruption of flight patterns,” says Madden.
Plus, the company committed to using an ultraviolet light-based system that was developed at Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary. At the sanctuary, located along the Platte River in Nebraska, the technology has dramatically reduced mortality among sandhill cranes because of collisions. The technology makes the transmission lines that birds collide with most frequently more visible to them.
A 2023 Audubon report, “Birds and Transmission: Building the Grid Birds Need,” cites the work in New Mexico and Arizona as an approach that is “essential to optimize mitigation for birds, ensure the best data and science are used, and make projects into long-term successes worth of Audubon’s support.”
In the report’s preface, Marshall Johnson, the chief conservation officer for Audubon, speaks to the urgency of replacing fossil fuel generation with renewables. “The window to slow the rate of global temperature rise is narrowing, but the window still exists. If we are to make the most of this waning opportunity, we need to act quickly.”
Johnson goes on to lay out the need to develop renewable generation and then transmit it to population centers. Experts say the United States needs to add effectively double or triple transmission capacity. “How and where new transmission is constructed will have a tremendous impact on birds and our communities,” he wrote.
Audubon also issued the 2019 report, “Survival by Degrees: 389 Species on the Brink,” which warned that two-thirds of bird species in North America were vulnerable to extinction unless emissions are lowered.
That same report examined Colorado with greater granularity: 125 out of 241 species are climate vulnerable in summer if temperatures rise 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F). If temperature rise can be kept to 1.5 degrees C — which appears unlikely — the number of vulnerable species declines to 84.
Colorado in recent years has adopted two laws. One requires the state’s electrical utilities to join a regional transmission organization so that they can better share low-cost renewables over a broad hunk of real estate and in more than one time zone. Another law created the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority, or CETA, which heard the latest report from Audubon representatives in January. The organization has broad powers to build transmission that will help Colorado deeply decarbonize its electricity sources even as electricity expands into sectors now dominated by combustion of fossil fuels.
State Sen. Chris Hansen, a Democrat from Denver, the author of these and many other key pieces of energy transition legislation, says he believes Colorado and other states need to accelerate development of transmission.
Some have argued that the National Environmental Policy Act needs to be tweaked. Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis, in their 2022 book, “The Big Fix,” make the case for revisions.
“In the book, we call for carefully thought-out reform, not just in NEPA,” said Gillis, a former reporter for the New York Times, in an interview with Big Pivots. “There’s a whole suite of land-use policies where, if we just leave them as is, it will take us 30 to 40 years to do that which really needs to be done over the next 10 years.”
Former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, in a meeting with Pitkin County commissioners on April 9, mentioned the difficulty of transmission when crossing federal lands and the perceived need for streamlining regulation. Idaho is about 66% federal lands, Nevada is 85% federal lands, Colorado is 35%. NEPA, he said, is part of a broader conversation about whether regulatory review can be streamlined without losing the environmental scrutiny that is needed.
That conversation, Ritter added, is not just a Colorado one, but a national one.
“I just had a conversation with U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, and I think there’s ambition inside the United States Senate to try and streamline the reform and try and not lose anything in the process. It’s a federal statute that would have to be passed in order to modify NEPA and they’re trying to understand how to do that with bipartisan support as we speak.”
Madden is wary about reform of NEPA. Those things that motivated the creation of NEPA in 1969 remain. “But there are many, many ways it can be done faster,” she said. “This administration in particular has been trying to do that by employing more people to review these projects.”
“There are a lot of red-herrings about why this takes so long. I think the worst problem is not the permitting. It is the interconnection queue.”
She says 12,000 renewable energy projects across the United States are waiting to be connected to the grid. She identifies utilities as being the challenge.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently reported nearly 2,600 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity are actively seeking grid interconnections. That is an eight-fold increase since 2014.
The U.S. Department of Energy recently released the Transmission Interconnection Roadmap that offers possible solutions to speeding up the interconnection of clean energy.
In her new position at Audubon, Madden has responsibility for implementing the organization’s climate strategy at the state and local levels. She previously was policy and political director for Greenpeace USA. She had also directed the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy & the Environmental at the University of Colorado School of Law.
Along the way she had also worked at the Department of Energy, was a climate change advisor to Ritter during the last two years of his term, and before that had been a member of the Colorado House of Representatives.
Look for solar panels to blossom atop low-income homes in Indian Country over the next five years. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced $500 million for tribes as part of $7 billion in grants for residential solar energy. Some $5.5 billion will go to states, and $1 billion to multi-state awards.
The $7 billion will benefit 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities, said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan in a prepared statement. “The selectees will advance solar energy initiatives across the country, creating hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs, saving $8 billion in energy costs for families, delivering cleaner air, and combating climate change.”
“Solar is the cheapest form of electricity—and one of the best ways to lower energy costs for American families,” stated John Podesta, Senior Advisor to the President for International Climate Policy. “Today’s announcement of EPA’s Solar for All awards will mean that low-income communities, and not just well-off communities, will feel the cost-saving benefits of solar thanks to this investment.”
“Residential solar electricity leads to reduced monthly utility bills, reduced levels of air pollution in neighborhoods, and ultimately healthier communities, but too often low-income and disadvantaged communities have been left out,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Acting Secretary Adrianne Todman said in the statement.
“Sunlight is powering millions of homes across the nation, and we’re working hard to ensure Americans everywhere can benefit from this affordable clean energy resource,” stated U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm.
EPA awarded $62 million to a nonprofit Native-led organization that brings solar energy to underserved communities, the National Tribal Program of GRID Alternatives.
GRID, in a prepared statement, said “the National Tribal Program, in coalition with The Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, Native CDFI Network, and Native Renewables, is poised to revolutionize solar energy access within Native American communities nationwide.”
Co-Executive Director of the National Tribal Program Talia Martin, a citizen of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes, said in a statement, “This funding will enable us to make significant strides in bridging the clean energy gap in Native American communities, supporting their capacity to harness the abundant potential of solar power while fostering tribal economic development and self-sufficiency.”
”This initiative serves as a vital step towards alleviating poverty, combating climate change, and fostering the creation of sustainable, well-paying green jobs for thousands of tribal members,” said Cheri Smith, Mi’kmaq tribal descendant, president & CEO, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, in a statement. The money for tribes will support their self-determined efforts to deploy clean energy on tribal lands she said.
“We believe that everyone deserves access to affordable, and reliable energy solutions,” said Suzanne Singer, Co-Founder and executive director of Native Renewables and a citizen of the Navajo Nation, in a statement. “Through collaborative efforts like the National Tribal Program, we can support Indigenous communities in their transition to a renewable energy future.”
In addition to GRID, the EPA announced three other tribal recipients:
Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association Inc., Tribal Consortium $62,330,000
“The Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, Inc. and coalition partners GRID Alternatives, the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, and the Native Community Development Financial Institute (CDFI) Network will deploy Tribally-owned residential solar, along with storage and necessary upgrades, for the benefit of the 35 Tribes located in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The coalition, headquartered in Wisconsin, will leverage the deep expertise and experience of its members to build a program that empowers Tribes and Tribal energy champions, provides project-deployment technical assistance necessary to plan and build residentially benefiting solar projects on Tribal Lands in the Midwest, and includes workforce development to enhance tribal self-determination and self-sufficiency,” reads the statement.
“The Tribal nonprofit Oweesta Corporation will address adoption barriers to Native residential and community solar deployment by acting as the intermediary between professional services partners, developers, Tribal governments and Tribal organizations. Oweesta’s program will support an equitable spread of solar deployment across all Tribal census tracts nationwide. It will employ a systems-building approach to centralize regulatory compliance information, technical deployment, commercial solar standards, and Tribal housing expertise all within the framework of experienced Tribal Community Development Financial Institutions. Based in Colorado, Oweesta Corporation’s program will operate in Tribal lands across the nation.”
“Alaska Tribal Solar For All is a partnership between three organizations to provide comprehensive access to the benefits of Tribal residents of Alaska. Tanana Chiefs Conference, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, and Alaska Housing Finance Corporation each have developed programs that will provide Tribal residents throughout Alaska the opportunity to benefit from solar. Alaska maintains over 40% of the nation’s federally recognized Tribes and is the state with the highest proportion of Alaska Native and American Indian residents (19.6%) in the nation. Whether a Tribal member owns a house with sufficient capacity to manage distributed generation, or a Tribal member lives in a community that operates a tiny isolated microgrid where rooftop solar isn’t feasible—all Tribal residents of Alaska will have the opportunity to benefit from this project,” reads the statement.
Now this is what I’m talking about: Last week, the Biden administration forked out $7 billion to states, tribal nations, and non-profits to carry out its Solar for All program aimed at expanding rooftop and residential solar and energy storage access to low-income folks and other underserved communities. About $1.7 billion of that cash will go to the West (see breakdown below). This is what I call a win-win-win-win situation:
Win 1 = It will add more solar power to the nation’s energy mix, hopefully displacing some fossil fuel generation, which will result in cleaner air and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Win 2 = This added solar will be on rooftops or vacant lots in or near towns or cities, reducing the need to blanket the desert with photovoltaics, which can be hugely destructive to ecosystems and wildlife habitat.
Win 3 = Rooftop and community-level solar installations will increase residents’ self-sufficiency and reduce dependency on the grid, which is becoming less and less reliable as more frequent and severe extreme weather events damage infrastructure and utilities are forced to shut off power to reduce wildfire hazard. Plus, many homes that lack access to electricity, especially on tribal lands, will now have power.
Win 4 = This program has the potential to radically transform the residential solar landscape, redistributing this exclusive amenity now reserved to homeowners who can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars upfront on a solar system, to, well, all of us, including renters.
Recipients include:
Colorado Energy Office: $156 million for single-family and multifamily rooftop solar statewide.
New Mexico Energy, Minerals, & Natural Resources Department: $156 million to “help overcome existing barriers to widespread adoption of distributed solar generation” by expanding access to shared solar beyond the new community solar program.
Utah Office of Energy Development: $62 million to launch a new program to “strengthen the market for deploying residential-serving solar … for disadvantaged and low-income homes”
Montana and Wyoming and Idaho, Bonneville Environmental Foundation: $131 million to “expand economic and environmental benefits of solar to low-income, tribal, and disadvantaged communities.”
Colorado-based Oweesta Corporation: $156 million to “address adoption barriers to Native residential and community solar deployment” in tribal lands across the nation.
Executive Office of the State of Arizona: $156 million to “bring the benefits of the state’s abundant solar resources to the state’s low-income and disadvantaged communities.”
California Infrastructure Economic Development Bank: $250 million to reach “the homes and businesses statewide that are most in need of affordable, reliable clean energy.”
Nevada Clean Energy Fund: $156 million
Hopi Utilities Corporation: $25 million to deploy residential solar and storage systems on the Hopi Reservation, where 35% of households do not have electricity and those that do experience frequent and extended outages.
GRID Alternatives (Western Indigenous Network Solar for All) $62 million. Provides grants and incentives and technical assistance to deploy tribal residential solar, prioritizing communities in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.
Alaska Energy Authority, $62 million, to partner with Alaska Housing Finance Corporation to deploy solar photovoltaic infrastructure statewide.
Oregon Department of Energy, $87 million
Washington State Department of Commerce, $156 million
Alaska, Tanana Chiefs Conference $62 million to provide tribal residents with residential and community solar.
***
And the good news keeps a coming: Wind, solar, hydropower, and geothermal generation supplied more than 100% of California’s energy demand on 39 of 47 days this spring. It wasn’t all day, by any means, but anywhere from about 15 minutes on some days to just over nine hours on April 20.
That is to say that a state of 39 million people, with one of the world’s largest economies, ran on non-fossil-fuel energy sources for more than nine hours. That’s a big deal.
Sure, it was on a Saturday in spring, when power demand tends to be lower, and on 4/20, when I guess a lot of people might have been outside smoking dope, which may or may not have affected electricity use. And a small percentage of that power came from large hydropower dams, which have their own problems and which California does not apply toward its renewable portfolio standards. Still, it’s a milestone that wasn’t imaginable a couple of decades ago, when coal generation dominated the power grid and utility-scale solar and wind power barely registered.
Most of the power came from utility-scale solar installations (California grid operators don’t track rooftop solar output, but it contributed by reducing overall demand). In fact, the state’s collective solar systems not only met demand, but exceeded it enough to charge grid-scale batteries and still have enough left over to export to other states. On some days there was so much solar they had to curtail generation — or basically throw it away.
Here’s what it looked like:
Graphic credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
The green line represents electricity demand for the day. Part of the reason it dips during the middle of the afternoon is because that’s when rooftop solar output is at its peak, and rooftop solar reduces grid demand since folks are using power from their own panels rather than taking it from the grid. Source: CAISO.
And then there’s the dreaded solar duck curve to deal with. This refers to the shape of the electricity net-demand graph on sunny days (net-demand is determined by subtracting solar and wind supply from demand since they aren’t “dispatchable” power sources). On a number of days this spring, solar output was so high that it pushed the net-demand curve down into negative territory in the middle of the day. The real problem’s start when the sun sets and solar output suddenly diminishes. The net-demand curve shoots back up, forcing grid operators to fire up natural gas generation to “follow the load,” or meet demand.
But even that dynamic is changing as an ever-increasing amount of that late afternoon load spike is being met with power from grid-scale batteries that had been charging all day. On the evening of April 16, for example, another milestone was reached when battery storage discharge became the largest energy source on California’s grid, contributing nearly as much power as natural gas and nuclear generation combined for about an hour. Just this week, California announced it had surpassed 10,000 megawatts of battery storage capacity — a 1,250% increase from just five years ago.
Batteries alone, however, won’t get California or the West to 100% clean energy. The region will also need more of what’s known as “geographic smoothing,” or moving power around the region to fill gaps left when wind and solar generation drop off. This might include sending Wyoming wind power to California when the sun stops shining, or shipping California solar to Colorado during the middle of the day. Achieving this will require better regional integration of the grid and power markets. Just yesterday the Biden administration announced a plan to spend $331 million to help build out transmission lines, an important step in realizing this goal.
A pronghorn hangs out among Wyoming wind turbines. Better integration of the Western grid would allow California and Arizona to draw on Wyoming wind to back up solar when the sun goes down. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
NEWS: Another proposed pumped hydropower storage project on the Navajo Nation bites the dust.
CONTEXT: One way to store energy is in batteries. Another way is with pumped hydropower facilities, usually consisting of two reservoirs, one above the other. Surplus power from the grid, usually generated by solar or wind during the day, is used to pump water from the lower to the upper reservoir. When the power is needed, such as when the sun sets and solar drops off, water is released from the upper reservoir and gravity propels it through a turbine that feeds electricity into the grid before emptying into the lower reservoir to begin the cycle anew.
It’s smart technology, capable of providing massive amounts of energy just when it’s needed. The problem is, these things require water, dams, reservoirs, pumping plants, and pipelines, all of which can have an impact. That means properly siting these facilities — and working with stakeholders before finalizing plans or applying for permits — is important. And, well, so far, a lot of developers haven’t done a great job with that, and now it’s biting them in the butt.
Confluence of the Little Colorado River and Colorado River; Credit: EcoFlight
A few months ago the Land Desk reported on federal regulators’ rejection of seven proposed pumped hydropower storage projects on the Navajo Nation, while also establishing a policy of denying any project on tribal land if the tribe opposes it. The regulators deferred a decision on one additional proposal — the massive, three-reservoir Big Canyon project that would be on Navajo Nation land along a tributary of the Little Colorado River. The Navajo Nation initially had expressed concerns about the proposal without explicitly opposing it. After the new policy was put in place, the tribe clarified its opposition. This week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission followed its new policy and rejected the permit.
It’s a bummer to see so many clean energy proposals go down in flames. Had they been built, the projects would have contributed mightily to the Western energy transition. Their failure, however, is not on the tribal nation or advocates who opposed the projects. The developers are to blame for faulty siting decisions and for failing to adequately consult with stakeholders at the very beginning of the process. That would save everyone a lot of headaches, and it might even result in some good projects getting built in the right places.
For more on the proposals and their problems, check out this excellent piece — complete with great maps — by the Grand Canyon Trust’s Daryn Akei Melvyn.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Ute Mountain in the spring. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
