Announcing his agenda for the legislative session that gets under way Wednesday, Gov. Bill Ritter Tuesday revealed a plan to increase Colorado’s renewable energy standard (RES) by another 10 percent by 2020.
In a press release Tuesday, Ritter set this…
As lawmakers once again try to put the heat on the state’s largest rural electric co-op this legislative session, at least one state senator will be in the Intermountain Rural Electric Association’s corner, even though he may have to…
Efforts to reform the recalcitrant Intermountain Rural Electric Association, the state’s largest energy cooperative, will be more subtle this legislative session. Instead of seeking, for example, to mandate energy efficiency, a Boulder lawmaker and new energy advocates are looking to change the way co-op board members are elected.
A Boulder lawmaker says she’ll introduce a bill next session aimed at cleaning up questionable campaign practices in rural electric association (REA) board elections.Claire Levy, D-Boulder, told the Colorado Independent Tuesday she is still working on a draft of the bill she’ll introduce in the upcoming legislative session in January, but she outlined the basics.
IREA Voices, a citizen activist group formed to combat the climate change policies of the state’s largest rural electric co-op, is pointing its members to a new study conducted by a former biochemist in Colorado who says the nation’s coal…
The director of sustainability for one of the state’s largest ski companies says there is a quiet revolution going at the state’s rural electric co-ops, where previously ignored and under-publicized board elections are seeing some real upheaval.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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