Tag: Renewable Energy

At least one Colorado rural electric co-ops is leaning greener this week after a pro-renewable candidate, former Telluride Mountain Village Mayor Rube Felicelli, beat out incumbent Tony Forrest for a board seat on the San Miguel Power Association.

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.

The Governor’s Energy Office has an ambitious goal of expediting the addition of another 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy generation to Colorado’s electricity grid in the next few years, but the single biggest hurdle may be adding the necessary transmission lines. Representatives of companies building utility-scale renewable projects like the 8-megawatt SunEdison solar plant in Colorado’s San Luis Valley say sun and wind generation facilities can be permitted and built in under two years, but transmission lines can take more than a decade to become reality.

Obama-era economic policy so far has not prominently featured the nation's farm country. That's changing. Policy being weighed now in Washington concerning ethanol will have a major impact in states like Colorado, home to Yuma County, one of the most efficient corn-growing regions in the country and a major producer of the biofuel. As debate over ethanol heats up, the path the Obama Administration is steering looks to be exactly the kind of middle-way, practical political tack that chagrins progressives, in this case energy analysts and environmentalists who want to see the country take bold steps and begin to lead the world in green technology and climate change.

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.

An innovative system designed to use heat generated from wastewater treatment to melt snow and heat several town facilities, including a recreation center pool, is back on track after the mountain town of Avon struck a deal with the local water district last week.

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.”

Even as some House Democrats moved closer last week to installing first-of-a-kind limits on the carbon emissions blamed for global warming, others are in a full-court press to kill a separate White House effort to curb those same greenhouse gasses.