Tag: Wind Power

Not long after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was elected last November, she began gathering support for a “Green New Deal,” mobilizing young climate activists...

"Colorado is a national leader in growing a clean energy economy. It's starting with this rule at a real position of strength."

According to a National Journal poll, Americans overwhelmingly (71 percent) want a hike in the minimum wage. What do you think Congress will do? OK, you know what Congress will do -- nothing.

“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.”

In Boulder, there is little debate over the cause of climate change. Everyone knows wind and solar are good and coal is bad. You would think the carbon conscious residents and council members would hop all over Xcel’s recent proposal to deliver 70 percent wind power to the city by 2013 and 90 percent by 2020. Well, it’s not that simple. While carbon reduction is a goal, it’s not the only goal.

Two days after a conservative group filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Denver challenging Colorado’s renewable energy standard (RES), Colorado Sen. Mark Udall – who was instrumental in getting voter approval for that RES back in 2004 – introduced a bill with his cousin Tom Udall, D-N.M., to establish a national standard.

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?

BP in the coming months may have to look to its lucrative natural gas fields in southwestern Colorado to recoup the massive financial hit it’s taking in the wake of the worst oil spill in American history.

A spokesman for Xcel Energy told the Colorado Independent today that the company has not proposed a nuclear power plant for Colorado. Tom Henley, Senior Media Relations Representative for Xcel, said he was taken aback reading news that Colorado U.S. Sen. Mark Udall supported a plan Xcel was considering to build a nuclear plant in the state. "We have absolutely not proposed a nuclear power plant," Henley told the Colorado Independent Monday.

DENVER-- In a "state of the state" address at a Rotary Club polio benefit Thursday, Governor Ritter said natural gas and nuclear energy should be embraced as part of a clean energy portfolio, that he was "agnostic" on whether schools should be public or charter, and that he would ask voters to eliminate the budgetary constraints caused by the state's Taxpayer Bill of Rights should he be elected to a second term.