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...

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 ...

The news in the last few weeks makes me wonder if we are on the edge of some new paradigm, with appearances almost totally divorced from reality. Internationally, much has been made about the “successful” bailout for Greece and the “haircut” that bond-holders were taking. But on March 10, the New York Times analyzed the total debt owed by the Greek government. As it turns out, there was only a minimal reduction. Although privately held bonds lost nearly two thirds of their value, total Greek government debt was reduced by less than 25 percent. Success is apparently now measured by just having put off the inevitable. Nationally, the Federal Reserve has bought massive amounts of government debt and mortgage backed securities. This was allegedly to keep interest rates low so that businesses and consumers can borrow cheaply to kick-start the economy. Of course, it also forces ordinary citizens to accept very low returns on their savings. But according to a story in the Times on March...

“This is a mandatory program” and “Your response is required” is what Xcel Energy states in the two fliers that it sent to 5,000 “smart meter” Boulder homeowners whom it selected to participate in the current phase of its SmartGridCity “pricing pilot.” But the Colorado Public Utilities Commission doesn`t seem to agree. The PUC was straightforward on this matter in its April 27, 2010 decision. In paragraphs 79-82, the PUC stated, “The Commission appreciates the perspectives of the settling parties and Staff regarding whether randomly selected program participants should be allowed to ‘opt out.` On one hand, we want to minimize the potential of self-selection bias and thereby enhance the expected usefulness of the pilot results. On the other hand, we do not want to antagonize randomly selected customers who do not want to be bothered with making an affirmative selection of pilot rates out of concern that such actions could compromise the overall effectiveness of the pricing pilot or ...

The Camera`s story on Nov. 13 “Judge OKs SmartGrid fees” documented Xcel`s efforts to recover $44-plus million in costs on SmartGridCity. The administrative law judge awarded Xcel a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity, which may allow Xcel to keep the millions that they are already collecting from Colorado ratepayers. But as this Thursday`s Camera pointed out, the decision will be reviewed by the Public Utilities Commission. And it may go to court after that. A CPCN is generally required before a project is started. That way we ratepayers are hopefully assured that, at the time of its planning and implementation, the decision is “prudent, in the public interest, and justified by the benefits of the project.” And we are protected from having costs triple, as happened with SGC. The testimony before the judge was pretty damning. The Office of Consumer Counsel pointed out that Xcel was focused on preserving the Boulder franchise: “In deciding to go forward with the origin...

In the last weeks, many of us received robo-calls from Xcel promoting their “Pricing Challenge,” a by-product of the SmartGridCity. This two-phase program is an attempt by Xcel to determine the effects of higher pricing during times of peak electricity use. It will cost $1.5 to $2 million, and be paid for by Xcel customers. It is being promoted through an expensive mailer, whose beautiful design is unfortunately missing important pieces of information. This is not the first time that Xcel has studied time-of-use (TOU) rates, and such rates have been used by other utilities for decades. Unfortunately, it is not clear exactly what new information Xcel expects to gather. I was curious whether people who have photo-voltaic systems could participate in this Challenge, so I asked my friend Ken Regelson, a sustainable energy consultant. Regelson had already called Xcel. “After about 20 phone menus and talking to two people, I did talk to an informed phone rep. According to her, customer...

We are closing in on the end game. Xcel`s grand experiment of SmartGridCity is dying of its own financial and technical weight without ever having fulfilled many of the myriad of claims that Xcel made when they proposed it. The story is both depressing and illuminating. Around six years ago, the City of Boulder started to look at the idea of taking over from Xcel the business of supplying electric power within the city limits. The process is called “municipalization,” and is well defined in state law. (For example, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, and Longmont are all munis.) Then, a few years into this study, in March of 2008, Xcel announced that Boulder was going to be its grand experiment in implementing a “smart grid.” The project was called SmartGridCity, and was supposed to provide customers with real time data on their electric use, allow Xcel to manage demand in order to make more efficient use of its generating facilities, support better integration of intermittent renewabl...