Tag: energy

Another day, another blow to conservation-minded energy consumers in the suburbs between Denver and Colorado Springs.

Some early returns are in for the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) board election, and it’s not good news for renewable-energy advocates trying to bust up what they say is a cabal of coal-loving incumbents.

Monday’s Colorado Supreme Court decision finding the state’s coal-bed methane gas wells must get well-water permits is yet one more arrow in the quiver of a natural-gas industry claiming increasing environmental and therefore economic persecution.

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.

Former Republican state Sen. Williams Schroeder says a current bill aimed at increasing the energy efficiency of the state’s largest rural electric association is a form of punishment for the co-op's past resistance to efficiency mandates. While the head of Colorado's most progressive co-op agrees that legislation isn't the way to make IREA go green.

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.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative under the Bush administration struck a secret deal with the European Union that could open up a door for foreign ownership of liquefied natural gas terminals and other dangerous chemical and energy facilities. The agreement could also create conditions in which federal, state and local regulations affecting those facilities could be challenged as barriers to international trade.

A Shell Oil official confirmed Friday that the “in situ” oil shale production the company is researching at its Mahogany facility near Rangely currently consumes about three barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced.

Six energy companies with plans for large-scale oil shale development on the Western Slope, led by ExxonMobil and Shell, have “cornered the market” on water in northwestern Colorado. The study by Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates concludes that the oil shale activity envisioned by energy companies and some state and federal lawmakers would consume as much water as the entire Denver metro area on an annual basis.