Opinion: The critical focus for 2026: fixing our electric grid

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 extended outages impacting critical facilities, businesses, and residents. These events resulted in widespread disruption, heightened public anxiety, and real risks to health, safety, and economic activity.”

Based on my experience over 40-plus years involved in energy policy at the local and state levels, fixing our electric grid is going to take a huge effort to overcome the inertia inherent in our regulated monopoly situation. It will involve getting the Legislature and governor to pass the bills necessary to force the appropriate actions and inspiring the PUC to use its substantial leverage on Xcel. In my view, bringing this necessary political pressure will require creating a coalition of affected communities and counties to work together. Boulder can’t do it alone.

The reasons for this need for a broad effort are compound: Our transmission and distribution system does not stop at the city’s borders; it’s a regional structure. Restructuring how Xcel gets paid to do work, or setting up a third-party entity to take it on, will also be multijurisdictional. And the legislators we will need to support this are from many places, not just Boulder.

Additionally, the grid we end up with will likely not look at all like our current one, both in layout and function. Our current grid is somewhat chaotic and does not align particularly well with the city as it was built out. The unit size is too large to allow microgrids to work successfully, with neighbors sharing locally generated solar electricity and locally owned batteries and bi-directional electric vehicle charging (all of this together is what is called “virtual power plants”).

We will also want to create “resilience hubs,” as places where people can get power, etc., when all else fails. But, again, these will have to be integrated into the overall scheme, both physically and financially.

All of this will cost money, so lots of design optimization will be necessary, as well as debates over financial tradeoffs. To do these things in a way that ends up with the community feeling positive about the choices made will require a high level of in-depth citizen involvement, which the current city council has not been particularly good at.

This will require a major political effort to involve people from across all windy counties, including in Boulder, JeffCo, Larimer, etc., and include representation for both cities and unincorporated areas, since more or less dense areas may have different designs. But one nice thing — most people faced similar problems and so there is likely to be substantial alignment on solutions. Plus, most approaches are synergistic in their ability to integrate renewables, so we’re not pitting money against clean energy.

A good way to get started might be to have a series of community and regional meetings to lay out the scope of the issues, possible approaches and the entities that need be involved. There are local individuals and groups that have very significant expertise and political savvy around energy issues. Some of their members should be in any working group that helps design this. Plus, I suspect that many of our council members, commissioners, state reps,and senators would be happy to participate.

To get this off the dime, a few city council and community members could start by meeting to try to outline this effort, and Boulder’s really excellent energy staff should be included. In my opinion, the key is to get moving and not just sit around and debate the fine points going in. Better to roughly outline the whole process, the various possible outcomes, and the potential roles of the various entities. Then bring in more and more folks until there is a critical mass.