Lamborn wants to force Salazar’s hand on oil shale with PIONEER Act

Republican Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn recently introduced a bill that would reinstate the Bush administration’s midnight oil shale leasing regulations that were quickly reversed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in the first month’s of the Obama administration.

Besides winning the award for the most convoluted legislative acronym, Lamborn’s Protecting Investment in Oil shale the Next generation of Environment, Energy, and Resource security (PIONEER) Act, H.R. 2540, comes at a time when Colorado officials are skeptically asking for more accountability from current oil shale leases.

Udall pulls amendment to boost federal Renewable Electricity Standard

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall Thursday first introduced than pulled back an amendment that would have strengthened a proposed national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) of 15-percent renewable electricity for all utilities by the year 2021.

Yampa Valley electric co-op sees same renewable versus conventional power struggle

Yet one more rural electric association (REA) is seeing the same sort of board election upheaval going on at REAs across the state, where renewable energy advocates are battling status-quo incumbents bent on keeping electric rates low through conventional energy loads.

Wind, solar group prodding Xcel to address transmission “bottleneck”

The Governor’s Energy Office has an ambitious goal of expediting the addition of another 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy generation to Colorado’s electricity grid in the next few years, but the single biggest hurdle may be adding the necessary transmission lines.

Representatives of companies building utility-scale renewable projects like the 8-megawatt SunEdison solar plant in Colorado’s San Luis Valley say sun and wind generation facilities can be permitted and built in under two years, but transmission lines can take more than a decade to become reality.

Colorado’s recession-minded D.C. reps embrace ethanol

Obama-era economic policy so far has not prominently featured the nation’s farm country. That’s changing. Policy being weighed now in Washington concerning ethanol will have a major impact in states like Colorado, home to Yuma County, one of the most efficient corn-growing regions in the country and a major producer of the biofuel.

As debate over ethanol heats up, the path the Obama Administration is steering looks to be exactly the kind of middle-way, practical political tack that chagrins progressives, in this case energy analysts and environmentalists who want to see the country take bold steps and begin to lead the world in green technology and climate change.

Electric co-ops legally need to disclose investment risks of coal-fired power

Rural electric co-ops that gamble on low-cost coal while largely keeping their member-owners in the dark about future financial risks may be playing with federal regulatory fire in the form of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, according to an attorney for the renewable-energy sector.

Ron Lehr, attorney for Interwest Energy Alliance and former chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC), said board members of rural electric co-ops need to go to great lengths to divulge to their members the potential risks of investing in coal-fired power plants with a possible federal carbon tax or cap-and-trade policy looming.

Clean-energy advocates challenge status quo electric co-op election

Despite significant strides in the renewable energy arena, Holy Cross Energy on Colorado’s Western Slope is not immune to the wave of environmental activism sweeping rural electric co-ops across the state.

Green groups challenge industry lawsuit against new drilling regs

After two years of at-times heated debated over new, more environmentally-friendly oil and gas drilling regulations, ratification by the State Legislature and a signature by Gov. Bill Ritter, it looked like the warring parties would finally lay down their arms when the regs went into effect April 1.

Wrong. A few weeks into the new regs, which require closer state scrutiny of drilling practices that might impact air and water quality and wildlife habitat, the Colorado Oil & Gas Association filed a lawsuit against the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which drafted the new rules.

IREA would be exempt from proposed state oversight of electric co-ops

One of the ironies of the controversy over proposed Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) oversight of the state’s second largest utility, Tri-State, is that the rural electric co-op arguably most in need of increased state supervision, the IREA, would be unaffected.

Eighteen of the state’s 22 rural electric co-ops (REAs) would be impacted by PUC approval of Tri-State’s integrated resource plans — annual documents that detail the utility’s energy loads — but the IREA (Intermountain Rural Electric Association) and three other co-ops don’t get their power from Tri-State.

DeGette, Salazar split on proposed natural gas drilling regs

Four years after Vice President Dick Cheney spearheaded a massive energy bill that exempted natural gas drilling from federal clean water laws, Congress is having second thoughts about the environmental dangers posed by the burgeoning industry.

With growing evidence that the drilling can damage water supplies, Democratic leaders in Congress are circulating legislation that would repeal the extraordinary exemption and for the first time require companies to disclose all chemicals used in the key drilling process, called hydraulic fracturing.