UTILITIES
West Slope Miners Protest Coal Bill
“You might wonder why I got all the applause,” he said speaking to a crowd of hundreds. “It’s (because) I’m just one of the coal miners here. I’m one of the ones … afraid this bill is going to do away with my job.” Winey was one of several coal miners who spoke to members of the Colorado PUC yesterday in Grand Junction during a public input session on the fallout of the Clean Air, Clean Jobs Act.
31Aug2010 | admin | 1 comment | Continued
Xcel Lays Out Plan for Natural Gas Conversion of Metro Denver Power Plants
The proposal from the state’s largest utility, which still faces months of public input at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, would phase out coal-fired generators in Denver and Boulder — like the contentious Valmont facility pictured — and retool most units to run on cleaner natural gas.
17Aug2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
Lack of Climate Bill Hinders Carbon Storage,
Fed Agencies Say
While the U.S. Department of Energy is funding 15 projects with the aim of safely and economically storing CO2 in geological formations, the lack of a climate bill is hindering any larger scale carbon storage, federal agencies said this week.
13Aug2010 | admin | 1 comment | Continued
GEO’s 2010 Utilities Report for Colorado
an Eye-Opener
The report provides an in-depth description of the state’s sprawling utility marketplace, including individual profiles of all 65 utilities, with a breakdown of their generation fuel mix, incentives for energy efficiency and renewable energy, governance structure, customer split and more.
6Aug2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
Regional Perspective —
A Tale of Two Coal-Fired Plants
The close links between mining and energy production are hardly limited to Illinois. Big coal has a big interest in seeing a new Sunflower plant built in Kansas. Colorado’s Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association has promised to purchase electricity from Kansas and numbers Sunflower among its members.
14Jul2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
Clean Coal, Natural Gas Really Clean?
Environmentalists this week reacted with skepticism to recent support for clean coal and natural gas by Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter and gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper, in part, prompted by two Colorado firms winning $14 million in clean coal grants from the DOE.
9Jul2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
New Study Presents Positive Outlook for Integrating
Renewables Into the Grid
“This is further validation of what we’ve been saying - that obtaining 20% or more of America’s electricity from wind turbines is an achievable and desirable goal for our economy, environment, and energy security. Now the only question is whether Congress and the Administration will step up and enact the policies that will allow us to get there.”
24May2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
Productive Routt County Mine Struggles With Safety Issues
A Colorado coal mine responsible for more than a quarter of all the coal produced in the state is also one of its most dangerous mines, accounting for nearly a third of Colorado’s coal mining injuries last year and incurring more than $600,000 in fines for safety violations since January 2007.
8May2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
Xcel Energy to Buy Colorado Power Plants from Calpine
The Public Service Company of Colorado (PSCo) unit will purchase the 621-megawatt Rocky Mountain Energy Center near Hudson (picture on the right), and the 310-megawatt Blue Spruce Energy Center in Aurora for $739 million. Both are gas-fired facilities.
5Apr2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
Colorado Coal Fight Could See Repeat at Nation’s Capital
A fight in the state legislature over a bill that could require the state’s largest utility to switch from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas may be a precursor to a bigger battle in Washington over climate legislation.
25Mar2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
Governor Urges Lawmakers to Back
Coal Plant Measure
Momentum for House Bill 1365 continued this week as the House Transportation and Energy Committee voted 10-1 to endorse the measure, after Gov. Ritter encouraged members to back a framework for retiring or retrofitting coal-fired power plants along the Front Range, which is called for in the proposed legislation.
22Mar2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
Developers Forging Ahead with Wyoming-Colorado
Transmission Line
Despite slow going, a power transmission project line linking the wind fields of southeast Wyoming and Colorado’s Front Range is still being pushed by developers.
15Mar2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
State Task Force to Target Carbon Capture
and Sequestration
The move is intended to help address the cmplex legal, regulatory and policy issues surrounding CO2 capture and sequestration if Colorado’s coal industry is going to succeed in a carbon-constrained economy, said a state official.
11Mar2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
State PUC Approves Xcel’s Two-Tier
Rate Structure
The plan essentially means the more electricity consumers use, the more they would pay. From June through September, Xcel’s 1.1 million residential customers will be charged a lower rate for the first 500 kilowatt-hours per month and a higher rate for all electricity above that amount.
4Mar2010 | admin | 6 comments | Continued
Arch Coal’s Colorado Mine Garners Awards
The company announced that Mountain Coal Company’s West Elk mine employees were honored with a Colorado state safety award and two state environmental awards at the National Western Mining Conference in Denver.
12Feb2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
PUC Orders More Transparency for Boulder Smart Grid
The smart grid already allows Xcel to read meters in Boulder remotely, route power around bottle-necked lines and detect power outages without relying on people calling in. But the utility now says it believes the total bill will reach $42.1 million, not including O&M costs.
8Feb2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued-
Why is Dirty Energy Still So Cheap?
The clean tech sector has experienced remarkable success in the past few years, yet there still remains one huge roadblock from mass implementation – cheap fossil fuels. Some may think this is simply a matter of free-market capitalism at work. The real truth is that petroleum and coal industries continue to receive massive subsidies from governments around the world, while renewable energy firms receive only a small fraction of that amount.
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shannon,
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