Colorado must require Xcel to invest in electrification now

To those of us who choose to live in Colorado, our lush forests, sparkling streams and crisp, clean air are the defining icons of our collective home. But we are watching it slip away — to year-round wildfire seasons, early snowmelt and drought.

The real tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be this way. We have all the solutions we need to avert this disaster — but fossil fuel interests are holding these solutions back to preserve their profits. Many areas of the Western Slope and northern Colorado are being left out of the conversation by the utilities that are supposed to serve us.

One of the biggest opportunities to reduce emissions from fossil fuels is being decided by gas utility regulators at the Public Utilities Commission in Xcel Energy’s Clean Heat Plan hearing. Senate Bill 264, which was passed in 2021, requires regulated gas utilities to reduce their climate-warming emissions 22% below 2015 levels by 2030. Xcel has proposed a variety of measures that underinvest in clean electric technology while increasing investment in its gas business. Xcel’s analysis overstated the costs of electrification in contrast with gas and ignored a cheaper, cleaner portfolio suggested by a broad coalition of energy experts.

Here in Longmont, we are served only by Xcel’s gas business (our electricity comes from Platte River Power Authority), so Xcel is less motivated to support the electrification of our homes and businesses. Xcel has gone out of its way to cast doubt on the viability of heat pumps — a mainstay of building electrification that state law intended to be central to utility Clean Heat Plans. Cold-climate electric heat pumps, stoves and water heaters are demonstrated to work here. In fact, many Coloradans already use them, not just because they reduce climatewarming emissions, as the electric grid gets cleaner, but because they don’t release combustion pollutants into our homes and businesses. Put simply, this technology works. Heat pumps are toasty in the winter and also provide cooling — something many of us in the high country are starting to need now because of climate change. But investment is needed for them to be accessible to everyone.

In Xcel’s proposal, gas-only customers are left out of any assistance, incentives or support for electrification. Xcel does, however, charge customers in Longmont and across the state in order to provide those benefits to the customers whose efforts to electrify will drive up Xcel’s profits on the electric side. With this decade being the pivotal time to reduce emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the need for rapid electrification is too crucial to leave investment up to gas utilities with an interest in preventing just that.

Xcel’s purely profit-driven argument that it can’t invest in electrifying its gas-only customers is a perfect reason for its regulator, the Public Utilities Commission, to step in and require that “beneficial electrification” is a clean heat resource that Xcel must emphasize. Xcel has tried to demonstrate that achieving its mandatory goals through efficiency and electrification is financially infeasible. This is the same strategy it used to fight Colorado’s requirement for renewable energy generation.

Fortunately, Coloradans knew better and, through the ballot box in 2004, forced Xcel to transition from coal to wind and cleaner fuels. Here we are again where “Responsible by Nature” Xcel is putting its own profits ahead of its responsibility to its customers and to the climate efforts across the state. Coloradans corrected Xcel’s course once. We now look to the Public Utilities Commission to do that again. Electrification is a realistic solution to our desperate climate crisis. The Public Utilities Commission must require Xcel to invest boldly in electrification now, for everyone.