The Colorado Gas Wars: Where Things Fall Apart, for There is No Center
Things stay mostly the same in Colorado, where climate change doesn’t exist in the minds of many politicians and some captains of industry. The marvels of fracking are a constant. Wells explode with regularity; each week thousands of barrels of toxic liquids from hydraulic fracturing are injected into the bowels of the earth for ‘safe keeping’; gasses, some of them threatening to all life, drift down from the oil patch in rural Weld County to create ozone and other air problems for the state’s urban population; frackers with massive drilling paraphernalia invade neighborhoods with impunity–and the political elite proclaim fracking safe and necessary to the economy.
One new thing did occur. Xcel, the corporate utility that provides most of the energy for urban users, sought bids for new power generation to replace two coal fired power plants. Pricing for wind and solar energy, including battery storage, came in much lower than for fossil fuel, including natural gas. This development ends for the moment the old charge that renewables can never compete with fossil fuels because storage is too expensive.
The industry will concoct new scare stories, for their existence depends on it. Still, before the ink dried on the Xcel bids, Jim Robo, CEO of NextEra Energy, a large southland utility, predicted that by the 2020s it will be cheaper to build new wind and solar plants with storage than to continue running old coal and nuclear plants. The executives at Xcel will undoubtedly contest this assertion since it is asking Coloradans for billions in stranded costs to retire old power plants.
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