Steve Pomerance

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...

In a recent presentation, the City of Boulder’s planning director identified sustainability and resilience as two concepts critical for defining Boulder’s future. But is there a real commitment to take the necessary actions? I suspect that the full implications of these concepts will be ignored, and that our future will be business as usual — more and more growth and development without any requirement to maintain the qualities that make Boulder great. The Brundtland Commission of the United Nations defined sustainability well: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It’s obvious that “meeting the needs of the present” cannot mean continually allowing conditions to deteriorate. But that is just what we are doing. For example, continuing to allow more residential development without adequate funding to provide libraries, parks, recreation centers, and schools is not...