Xcel just got a $112 million increase in July, a settlement of its 2008 rate case in which the utility originally sought $159.3 million. Negotiations with PUC and staff and parties such at the Office of Consumer Counsel resulted in a $47 million reduction, but the average residential bill still went up $2.94 a month.

According to the Denver Post, the latest increase, scheduled to go into effect at the beginning of next year if it’s approved, would jack up rates another $4.92 a month, or about a 7.6 percent increase.

The biggest ticket item Xcel’s hoping to recoup costs on in its latest rate case? The utility wants another $110 million to offset its investment in the new Comanche 3 coal-fired power plant near Pueblo – scheduled to go online later this year.

Part of the last rate increase went toward Comanche 3 – the state-of-the-art third phase of the power plant, which is already being challenged in court by environmental groups for its mercury emissions plan. And rural electric co-ops such as the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA), which is the state’s largest, and Holy Cross Energy have chipped in on Comanche 3 to the tune of $366 million and $100 million respectively.

But environmentalists and renewable energy advocates say the cost of coal will undoubtedly skyrocket in coming years because of looming shortages and the likelihood of climate-change legislation that would hit coal the hardest since it emits the most carbon dioxide. The Denver Post cites Leslie Glustrom, a private citizen challenging the latest rate case.

Glustrom is a former biochemist with Boulder-based Clean Energy Action who says supplies of coal in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin will likely start to run out in the next 20 years, making coal-fired power plants a poor long-term gamble.

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Photo: Colorado College

Key Republicans like Arizona’s John McCain, whose state is also a hotbed of uranium mining, and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham are big backers of a nuclear-energy revival suddenly popular in some circles for its promise of nearly carbon-free power. Their votes may be needed to give Democratic co-sponsors Barbara Boxer of California and John Kerry of Massachusetts 60 filibuster-proof votes.

As the Senate this week commences three critical committee hearings on the Boxer-Kerry bill, Colorado’s Mark Udall has repeatedly made it clear nuclear needs to be a bigger part of the nation’s electrical-power mix, although he acknowledges uranium mining needs to be done much more safely than it was in the state’s not-too-distant past.

“You can’t consider expanding nuclear power without uranium mining, but that does not mean supporting irresponsible mining,” Udall told The Colorado Independent in an earlier statement. “It’s important that the state — which is the delegated agency for permitting authority for uranium mining — ensures that uranium mining is done safely, responsibly and with the full input of the affected communities.”

The Montrose County commissioners late last month approved a controversial uranium mill proposal for the far western end of the county, and the state will now take up to a year to issue its own permits. Some residents of the area that produced yellowcake for the first atomic bombs view a nuclear energy revival as the likely salvation of the local economy; others see it as another looming environmental disaster. Yellowcake is used to produce nuclear fuel rods.

Frank Filas, environmental manager for a U.S. subsidiary of Ontario-based Energy Fuels Inc., which proposed the Montrose County mill, said he understands the public trepidation given the industry’s checkered past.

“If you go back to the ’40s and ’50s and you look at our industry, well, we were doing a lot of things that weren’t necessarily best for our people, but we didn’t know any better — very similar to all the other industries at that time,” Filas said. “And when you had scares like Three Mile Island, and obviously Chernobyl was a horrible disaster, people see that and basically they wanted a safe supply.”

Those nuclear reactor meltdowns and explosions in the 1970s and 1980s put a halt to the expansion of the industry in the United States, basically leveling off nuclear power’s share of the nation’s electricity base load at about 20 percent.

According to The Associated Press, 104 reactors in 31 states currently provide that 20 percent of the nation’s electricity — amounting to about 70 percent of the nearly carbon-free power that doesn’t contribute to global warming. The goal of climate change legislation is to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by the year 2050, which would require, according to an EPA report, 180 new reactors.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing applications for only 30 new reactors, but 85 percent of the uranium used for nuclear power production in the United States is currently imported from abroad, according to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration.

That agency recently reported that so far in 2009 coal-fired plants contributed 44.7 percent of the nation’s electrical power; natural gas-fired power plants 22.3 percent; nuclear 20.6 percent; hydroelectric 7.4 percent; other renewables combined (biomass, wind, solar, geothermal) 3.7 percent; and petroleum-fired power plants 1.1 percent.

Coal belches by far the most carbon of all of those sources, and some say the duration of the nation’s coal supply is rapidly waning. Udall is also big backer of upping incentives for the natural gas industry in the Boxer-Kerry bill given Colorado’s abundance of gas, and that’s a sentiment Gov. Bill Ritter shares.

But Ritter also told The Denver Post he backs nuclear power and expanding uranium mining and milling, as long as modern technology ensures safe production: “Today’s standards for a new mill … are far, far more protective of health and the environment. We believe it is possible to construct a mill today that fully protects workers as well as the air and water.”

Energy Fuels’ Filas said nuclear wouldn’t even be on the radar right now if not for the global climate change debate.

“Let’s face it, if we weren’t worried about carbon dioxide right now and the burning of fossil fuels [nuclear wouldn’t be expanding],” he said. “Fossil fuels, whether it’s coal or natural gas or oil, are all very inexpensive forms of power. They’re a little less expensive than nuclear and obviously less expensive than renewables, so from a supply and demand point of view, those types of power sources made more sense over the last 30 years.”

But the potential public health risks of uranium mining are still far too high for some critics of the industry, including Keith Hay, energy advocate for Denver-based Environment Colorado. Hay disputes the notion that nuclear should be grouped in with other forms of clean energy: “Anyone who has seen the front end of uranium mining for nuclear knows that it is in no way clean.”

Travis Stills, managing attorney for the Durango-based Energy Minerals Law Center, says the environmental legacy at Uravan — a toxic ghost town cleaned up at taxpayer’s expense — mandates any new milling operation in the area must be required to post an enormous bond in the event the company goes out of business but leaves behind a radioactive mess.

“The starting point for any launch should be the amount of cleanup that was actually spent at Uravan. That should be the absolute floor [for a bond], and then we should start talking about what to do from there,” Stills said, adding the county commissioners seemed to have their minds made up long before the approval process began.

“[County commission chairman] David White attempted to run the best process that he could, but they fell way short of providing anything fair and balanced – maybe they did provide fair and balanced the way that means now – but they certainly didn’t provide anyone with the hours of PowerPoint presentation opportunity that they provided to Energy Fuels. [The mill] was a done deal when they met privately March 25, 2008, and it sort of remained that way all the way through.”

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U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Creative Commons photo by Mr T in DC via Flickr)

Earlier this month, heavy hitters like Apple, Exelon, Levi Strauss and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. outright quit the nation’s leading business organization. Nike resigned from the Chamber’s board but maintained its membership, and companies like Duke Energy, General Electric, Alcoa and Johnson & Johnson have disavowed the chamber’s positions on global warming.

“It’s our professional opinion that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is out of step with the leading edge of economic recovery,” said Paul Sheldon, senior consultant with Longmont-based Natural Capitalism Solutions, which has provided corporate sustainability consulting to companies representing 3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, including Goldman Sachs.

“We have tracked 13 different studies which document that those companies that come into clean sources of energy, sustainability and responsible corporate behavior are outperforming their competitors before, during and after an economic downturn,” he added.

A Scopes monkey trial

In addition to opposing the Waxman-Markey climate change bill that narrowly passed the House in June, the Chamber took heat in August for statements by Vice President William Kovacs that the organization wanted to see a “Scopes monkey trial” on the effects of global warming on public health, referring to the famous creationism versus evolution case in 1925.

“In the past, [Chamber officials have] said such things as, ‘Global warming would benefit Americans because the reduction in wintertime deaths because of cold weather would be several times larger than the increase in summertime heat-stressed-related deaths,’” said Micah Parkin, Colorado organizer of the grass-roots climate change activism group 1Sky. Parkin added that 117 Colorado businesses signed a letter supporting the Senate version of Waxman-Markey.

“That brings home the point of just how many Colorado businesses do not concur with the U.S. Chamber’s position on climate denying, and just how many businesses here actually spoke out,” she said. The letter was addressed to U.S. Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado. The Senate is currently debating its version, the Boxer-Kerry bill.

Parkin said her group is working to give a voice to businesses and regional Chambers that feel disenfranchised by the position of the U.S. Chamber, which she said spent $26 million lobbying Congress in the first half of 2009 — twice the amount of the next biggest spender, Exxon Mobil.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Chamber President Tom Donohue has backpedaled on Kovacs’ comments, saying the chamber is not interested in arguing the science behind global warming and is essentially being targeted by an “orchestrated pressure campaign” by environmentalists.

On Monday, the chamber was punked by an activist group called the Yes Men, which staged a fake press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., announcing the Chamber was supporting Boxer-Kerry. Some media organizations, including FOX News, ran with the announcement before the real chamber corrected the hoax.

Chamber defections

Notable among the recent Chamber defections was PNM Resources Inc., a New Mexico utility, and Chicago-based Exelon, the nation’s largest power company. Representatives of Colorado renewable energy companies say those forward-looking power companies understand the profits to be realized and the jobs to be created by backing clean energy.

“Those utilities recognize that they are energy companies and not necessarily tied to any specific energy technology, and those companies that embrace renewable energy going forward are going to be the ones that are going to lead the U.S. economy in the future,” said Christopher Koch, owner of Boulder-based Pele Power, which installs geothermal heat pumps.

Among Colorado utilities there are varying levels of support for renewable energy and disbelief in climate-change science. Investor-owned Xcel Energy has been more supportive of funding conservation initiatives and renewable projects than the member-owned utility Tri-State, which supplies power to rural electric co-ops around the state that also diverge widely in terms of backing clean energy.

For instance, the state’s largest co-op, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, tends to debunk global warming and resist putting too much money into renewable sources. The IREA is heavily invested in a new coal-fired power plant near Pueblo, and defends the expenditure based on the lower price of coal-fired electricity despite the possibility it will increase if climate change legislation is passed.

Increasingly, oil and gas companies are battling with the coal industry over carbon caps and emission permits that may be a part of the final Senate bill, with natural gas proponents in particular touting their product for being 50 percent cleaner burning than coal.

“There was an inherent flaw when Congress set off down the road of favoring one fuel source over another,” American Petroleum Institute chairman J. Larry Nichols recently told the New York Times. “You knew there had to be a feeding frenzy among various competing fuels trying to protect themselves.”

Udall and Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter have both advocated adding more incentives for natural gas — a plentiful resource in the state — as part of any final climate change bill.

“I believe [Waxman-Markey] gives short shrift to natural gas,” Ritter said in July. “There’s one mention of natural gas if my memory serves me, and it is about a research project for conversion to natural gas [transportation] fleets. There should be far more done with natural gas and incentivizing the production of natural gas because it’s such a cleaner burning carbon fuel.”

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Following introduction of the legislation Wednesday, a diverse group of environmentalists—including representatives from a veteran’s organization, Aspen Skiing Company and sportsman and water conservations groups—held a media call  in support of the bill.

The group ran through a number of solid reasons to support the bill:  economic (according to a Center for American Progress study, Colorado could gain $2.6 billion in investment and 28,000 jobs from the bill), national security: (we need to stop sending billions of dollars to hostile foreign regimes), global warming (which, according to a report put out earlier this year by 13 federal agencies, has already raised average temperatures in the Southwest by 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit), water (global warming could melt the Colorado snowpack up to 60 days earlier each season) and impacts on hunting and fishing (which contribute 1.8 billon dollars a year to Colorado’s economy).

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall also released a statement, citing three predictable-but-solid reasons for clean energy legislation: making America less dependent on foreign oil, creating jobs in the recession and leaving the planet in better shape for our children. (Sorry folks, the best reasons aren’t always the most exciting ones.)

Meanwhile, conservative Colorado Springs blogger Michelle Malkin railed against “expensive eco-hysterics,” with scintillating, but dramatically less compelling reasons: 1) the bill still has “placeholders” where details are being worked out, and 2) raising efficiency standards for plane engines will force private and military institutions to buy them from G.E. (because no other manufacturer can make more efficient engines?)

The complaint follows a Malkin post from last week titled “Beware the Climate Change Republicans,” in which Malkin lists the vulnerable Republicans most likely to be wooed to the dark side of energy reform.

As they prepare for their bill introduction, Boxer and Kerry are most likely looking for help from Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who currently is in the thick of the health care debate. Down the line, the Democrats are also hopeful they can satisfy other longtime climate advocates, including Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Richard Lugar of Indiana.

Colorado State Senator Scott Renfroe, a Republican representing the 13^th District, didn’t wait for the new climate bill to come out:  Days earlier, he signed a letter written by Grover Norquist, president of anti-tax lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform. The letter urged Senators Boxer and Kerry not to introduce their “energy tax.” Citing no studies or sources, Norquist insisted the legislation would raise the cost of energy “thousands of dollars each year on every American family” and thus “crush the economy.”

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