‘Half truths’ about municipalization
Just like the Donald Trump presidency and campaign is based on lies, the Boulder municipalization effort is propped up by half truths. As a retired scientist who worked for more than 18 years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in support of the U.S. Department of Energy Wind Program on wind projects throughout the United States and in more than 25 foreign countries, I would like to comment.
Leslie Glustrom, who writes in support of the muni in the Daily Camera, was banned from public comment at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) because of the time that she wasted there. She contested this in the Colorado Supreme Court and lost. In the publicly available court records of Leslie W. Glustrom v. Colorado Public Utilities Commission, the court stated: “Yet Glustrom presented no such expert qualifications to the PUC.” Yet City Council trusted this inexpert amateur.
Once a muni supporter from Empower Our Future provided me with the group’s “study” of wind energy in Boulder County, which, given that my expertise at NREL was wind resource assessment, was dead wrong. It placed possible wind farms in locations with little wind while the good wind is near the Continental Divide in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area, where wind farms will never be built.
Once another muni supporter suggested building a concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in Boulder County, ignorant of the fact that CSP has to be within 35 degrees of the equator and Baseline
Road gets its name from being at 40 degrees. Amarillo, Texas is at 35 degrees north latitude, 350 miles south of Boulder.
Heather Bailey, who directed the muni effort for years, planned to include more than 11,000 county residents in the muni until the PUC told her that it was illegal under Colorado law. She tried again two years later with a county-substations-tometers separation plan that the PUC again ruled was illegal. Yet the City Council trusted this incompetent manager.
Lili Francklyn wrote in the Daily Camera on how Xcel has opposed renewables. From my 18 years at NREL, this is false. When Bill Clinton was president, our team at NREL did a wind resource assessment in the Buffalo Ridge area of Minnesota that caught Xcel’s attention. NREL and Xcel collaborated on wind energy research that benefited NREL, Xcel, and renewable energy in the United
States including:
• Interstate transmission and grid integration studies for putting more wind energy on the grid. Xcel headed the Utility Wind Integration Group, which included investor-owned and non-investorowned utilities. Xcel has broken records in Colorado and Minnesota for the percentage of wind on its system.
• Wind forecasting studies for predicting the amount of wind available so that Xcel can better ramp down its fossil fuel use when the wind is ramping up. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder was involved in this project.
• My favorite study involved instrumenting all of the wind turbines at a 100megawatt (MW) wind farm in Minnesota and a 300-MW wind farm in Colorado, and instrumenting 100-meter-high towers to measure the variations in the wind flow and the energy produced.
Xcel is the number three utility in the United States for installed renewables and the number one utility for installed wind energy with plans for more than 11,000 MW of wind energy. The America Wind Energy Association has recognized Xcel as the national leader in wind energy for more than 15 years. Xcel’s Colorado plans include more than 1,000 MW of new wind and solar.
In March 2010, when Gov. Bill Ritter signed legislation for Colorado’s Renewable Energy Standard for 30 percent renewables at NREL, I was sitting about 30 feet away. Xcel has exceeded this standard. In the time that Boulder has pursued the muni, Xcel has added more than 2,200 MW of wind energy to Colorado, including the latest 600-megawatt Rush Creek and 500-megawatt Cheyenne Ridge wind farms.
The muni was supposed to be operational in 2017. For more than 10 years, Boulder has wasted more than $35 million, including lost undergrounding from Xcel and has lost more than a dozen legal and regulatory decisions at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, PUC, and Boulder District Court, while producing less renewables than a single modern Xcel wind turbine.
Are Boulder’s renewable energy goals better off today after 10 years of the muni? If like me, you say “no,” then please join me in voting “yes” on Ballot Measure 2C to begin a new collaborative franchise agreement with Xcel.