Steve Pomerance

·          The Boulder City Council, at the request of some members, has made its draft letter to Xcel even stronger. Good for them! I hope the council passed it last night. ·          I agree that Xcel needs to pay financial penalties for unnecessary and/or overly long shutdowns, and compensate businesses that are financially damaged and customers who suffer negative impacts. ·          But the question remains: What leverage, besides bailing out of the franchise, does the city really have to get Xcel to bring its grid up to snuff, both in terms of surviving the windstorms and providing cleaner, cheaper electricity? Local efforts to provide resilience hubs — more neighborhood-level solar-plus-batteries, etc. — are good angles to pursue. But they all run up against the difficulties associated with a century-old...

We all have suffered, either directly or indirectly, from the failure of Xcel to provide us with a robust electric grid, one that can survive our windstorms, which are coming with increasing frequency and strength as our climate gets more extreme. And the Public Safety Power Shutoffs, which were conceived as emergency measures, are now apparently being viewed as standard procedure. The Boulder City Council is considering a letter to Xcel outlining the areas where it wants to see improvements. It accurately notes that Xcel has missed its 2022 and 2024 emissions milestones, made insufficient progress on fleet charging and other items, and, critically, keeps increasing our bills. Very significantly, the draft letter states, “we must address our community’s ongoing experience with electric reliability,” including the three Public Safety Power Shutoff events that had “inadequate coordination, unusable or overly broad outage maps, insufficient details to support emergency preparedness, and e...

Last week’s windstorms showed how inadequate Xcel’s work on fixing our electric grid has been. Unless things change drastically, Boulder’s inevitable windstorms will continue to create recurring mini-disasters. Although the direction Xcel got in June from the Public Utilities Commission covered some transmission line work, overall it appears to be inadequate to fix what’s broken. Interestingly, the PUC’s latest communication, which can be found at tinyurl.com/55h2jccn, states, “The PUC received extensive public input following the 2024 event, much of it focusing on lack of notice, inadequate communication during the event, poor mapping of impacted areas and insufficient planning to identify and protect critical infrastructure and facilities.”  From my and many others’ observations, last week’s power shutoff maps Xcel supplied online were inaccurate and lacked timeliness. And the notifications we got came multiple times, but did not contain timely updates. It appears that the PUC’s ...