Tag: renewable energy standard

In discussing whether renewables are, in fact, cheaper, lawmakers bitterly argued over tax subsidies. They saw in the data what they wanted to see.

Colorado’s solar industry has grown 20-fold in the last half decade. A coalition that includes 280 businesses and organizations is petitioning Gov. Hickenlooper to keep the momentum going.

“I’d be OK if there were never any more coal,” says retiring Xcel Energy CEO Dick Kelly, who invested more than $1 billion in Pueblo's coal-fired Comanche 3 power plant. Leslie Glustrom of Boulder-based Clean Energy Action puts the interview “in the vein of ‘I can't believe I ate the whole thing.’ Burritos are only $3 mistakes and the indigestion lasts for a day. Coal plants are $1 billion mistakes and the ‘indigestion’ lasts for decades.”

Four environmental groups hope a judge will allow them to intervene in a lawsuit filed by a Morrison businessman and the green-bashing American Tradition Partnership challenging Colorado’s aggressive renewable energy standard of 30 percent by 2020.

Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility and a key backer of Colorado’s aggressive renewable energy standard (RES), reacted with skepticism to Monday’s lawsuit seeking to overturn a state law mandating 30 percent of Xcel’s electricity be produced by renewable sources by 2020. “... We understand that [the complaint] was made by a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization,” Xcel spokesman Mark Stutz told the Colorado Independent. “We would be surprised if a federal court would overturn Colorado's legislatively approved Renewable Energy Standard.”

Renewable energy backers today were buoyed by the defeat of three bills floated by Colorado Republicans aimed at rolling back clean energy policies passed largely by Democrats last legislative session.

Despite the Gulf oil spill, a massive pipeline break in Michigan and broad concerns about global warming, ambitious climate-change and energy legislation is likely dead for the year. That poses a conundrum, going forward, for environmentalists: How to convince lawmakers of the need for legislation to sever the country’s decades-long ties to oil and to reform energy policy more generally?

Colorado Democratic Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet Tuesday signed onto a bipartisan bid to pass a national renewable energy standard (RES) modeled after...

Proponents of a renewable energy standard, which would require that a certain percentage of the country’s electricity be produced from sources like wind and...

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall Thursday reacted with “disappointment” to the decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to pull the plug on a comprehensive...