Tag: coal-fired power plants

Votes are being counted in the closely watched Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) board election after a lightly attended annual meeting in Woodland Park over the weekend, but results reportedly won’t be available till the end of the week.

Despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary, including a 2007 United Nations report, former Republican state Sen. William Schroeder Jr. contends global temperatures are actually dropping.

The first thing former school principal Mike Galvin said he’ll do if elected to the board of Intermountain Rural Electric Association, the state’s largest energy co-op, is enact sweeping reform of the election process itself.

A tiered system of electrical rates that increase as residential consumers increase their use, especially during peak consumption periods, has ignited a power play between Colorado's electric co-ops. According to one rural co-op CEO, who helped draft a bill that makes such rates possible, the industry's future is moving greater use of renewable sources and energy conservation. Another co-op chief, heavily tied to coal-fired power, argues a voluntary alternative-energy system will sock residents in the pocketbook when they can least afford it.

A coup attempt by radical greenies or a long-overdue transition to a more environmentally balanced, 21st-century energy policy? Depending on who you talk to, that’s the way the debate is being framed as Colorado’s largest rural electric co-op, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA), faces one of the most critical — and contentious — board elections in recent memory.

Great Smoky Mountain National Park and the mountain range it protects were named for the natural fog that often enshrouds its peaks on the North Carolina-Tennessee border. But in recent years the nation’s most visited national park is called “Great Smoky” for another reason.