Tag: coal-fired power plants

Colorado ranks a surprising fourth on the list of states hosting wet coal-ash dumping ponds. An Environmental Protection Agency list obtained through a Freedom...

Former Democratic Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth last week told Bloomberg News the cap-and-trade aspects of the House-approved climate change bill are spread too broadly...

Efforts to capture carbon king (but global warming believer) Jim Rogers of Duke Energy -- the nation’s third largest power producer based in Charlotte,...

The wave of green advocacy sweeping Colorado’s rural electric associations (REAs), especially in more progressive mountain resort areas like Aspen, Vail and Telluride, didn’t quite make it to Steamboat Springs.

Adam Palmer, the environmental policy planner for Eagle County and a former environmental director for Vail Resorts, narrowly won a seat on the hotly...

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.

Ron Lehr was chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) in the early 1990s when the Montrose-based Colorado Ute Electric Association went bankrupt because of what he deemed “a colossal blunder that put them out of business.”