In Colorado we like to believe that we are at the front of the class in this big pivot of energy. Are we?

by Allen Best

With the Roaring Fork River below us chattering happily, Will Toor and I briefly exchanged memories in August. He was in Aspen to speak about Colorado’s milestones in its energy transition and discuss some of the next steps. I was there to listen.

Toor in many ways has a remarkable story. Mounting the podium a few minutes later, he did so with a limp. A couple of years ago, using ice axes, he and his wife had climbed up one of the permanent snowfields in Rocky Mountain National Park. When they reached the top, the cornice broke, sending them tumbling down the slope and into the hospital for extended stays.

It could easily have been worse. As is, he told me, the limp is likely permanent. It has not stopped him. That morning in Aspen he told me that he planned to meet with his children two days later to climb Mt. of the Holy Cross. It is, according to the latest survey, at 14,009 feet in elevation.

Toor and I also talked about Craig, in northwest Colorado. We had both been there more than 40 years before, when the trio of coal-fired power units were being built. Soon, they will be closed and then dismantled. It’s part of Colorado’s energy transition, what I call a Big Pivot.

For the first several months of 1979 I had been working in the Yampa Valley at a newspaper called the Hayden Valley Press. Like every other newspaper that I have worked for full time, it no longer exists. I think I remember receiving the princely salary of $170 a week.

Toor, if I have the chronology down, was in northwest Colorado a year later. He was a sheepherder west of Craig, near Dinosaur National Monument, for a few months. (I spent that winter shoveling snow at Amax’s Henderson molybdenum mill). I have never asked him what in his life’s journey caused him to shepherd the woolies on a lonely mountain.

Toor went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics but rather quickly got involved in public affairs. He was on the Boulder City Council and then became mayor before becoming a Boulder County commissioner.

For a few years after that he oversaw transportation for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project before being named director of the Colorado Energy Office by incoming Gov. Jared Polis in January 2019.

In that position, he is one of the key figures in Colorado’s energy transition. We have had bright, knowledgeable and even brilliant state legislators. We have probably thousands of people in state agencies, NGO advocacy groups and the private sector focused on how to engineer this pivot.

Toor operates in the highest circle. It may be only a small stretch of hyperbole to say, as somebody told me, that he doesn’t get a cup of coffee without consulting the governor. Polis seems to have an attentive eye on the details. For his part, Toor is a walking encyclopedia of facts and thoughts. I’d love to get inside their conversations.

Reflective of the broadened mission of the agency that Toor oversees is the staffing. The Colorado Energy Office had a staff of 35 under the prior governor, John Hickenlooper. Now, it has 86. It seems that I constantly see mentions on LinkedIn of new positions.

Toor is the public face, the individual called upon for speaking engagements. The forums in Aspen had been assembled by the Carbondale-based Clean Energy Economy for the Region. CLEER, a non-profit, has goals of ramping up renewables, decarbonizing transportation, and maximizing resource efficiency in the Roaring Fork Valley and downstream along the Colorado River to Rifle.

In going to Aspen, I already had been wondering how to understand Colorado’s place in the energy transition in a national or even international context. This pivot in Colorado is huge. But are we exceptional?

 

Bill Ritter: Colorado is going fast, but it must go even faster

Former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter spoke first, and in concert with Toor, made the case that Colorado should be seen as exceptional in this energy transition.

Colorado’s easiest story starts in 2004, when Ritter was still the Denver district attorney with an inkling that he wanted to become governor, which he did for four years beginning in 2007.

State legislators had repeatedly rejected efforts to enact a renewable portfolio standard. Frustrated boosters gathered enough signatures to get a ballot measure asking voters to require large utilities to achieve 10% of their generation from renewables by 2014. With large margins in favor in metropolitan Denver (and similarly wide margins in opposition in rural Colorado), Amendment 37 passed by a margin of 53.6% to 46.4%.

“No other state in the country had put a renewable portfolio standard on the ballot until Colorado. We were first,” said Ritter.

That “first” is a theme that has emerged in the two decades that have followed.

“The people who were part of that effort, if you said to them, ‘Oh, by the way, Xcel is going to reduce their emissions 85% by 2030,’ they would not have believed it. If you had said to them, ‘Tri-State (Generation and Transmission Association) is going to reduce its emissions 80% to 85% by 2030,’ they would have found that totally incredible and not really believable. I guess incredulous is the word – and yet, we are on that trajectory.”

Actually, Tri-State now says it expects to achieve 88% reduction.

Xcel Energy easily met that mandate and then elevated requirements.

Ritter confided that he did a bit of good-natured jousting with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was governor of California when he was governor of Colorado. Because the governors were seated in alphabetical order, they rubbed elbows. Schwarzenegger would say they had a big old RPS (renewable portfolio standard) for 2035. And Ritter would respond that it was outdated because Colorado had an earlier one in 2030.

After Ritter left office came the work of abating methane emissions from the oil-and-gas sector. Ritter said that his successor, John Hickenlooper, “probably doesn’t get enough credit for all of the coalitions that he built in trying to reduce methane pollution, a really serious greenhouse gas. He had a tough time because the Senate changed in 2014 and it became more difficult to pass clean energy legislation.”

That work of methane abatement continues even now, but it’s noteworthy that Colorado was the first state to crack down on emissions from pipelines and other infrastructure. That was in 2014. Colorado’s rules became a model for those adopted by the EPA.

Then came 2018, a remarkable year around the country. Democrats regained control of the Senate. Continuing their control of the House and with a governor, Polis, elected on a platform of renewable energy, the state was set for rapid change. Too, agreement about the risk of greenhouse gas emissions had solidified.

The legislative session was brilliant, Ritter said.

Chief among the bills passed that year in response to the risk of climate change was HB19-1261. Its most prominent provision specified economy wide greenhouse gas reduction goals for 2025, 2030, and 2050. A prime sponsor was KC Becker, who spoke later in the day. Those goals led to a roadmap for accomplishing the work.

This was prelude to Ritter’s most intriguing statements. He observed that Colorado is relatively small, with a population of just 6 million people. It ranks 21^st among the 50 states. He also noted Colorado’s interior location between the Atlantic and the California.

“We’re a beacon on a hill,” said Ritter.

Other states have done things, too. But among the 22 states in the U.S. Climate Alliance, the tracking conducted by Ritter’s Center for the New Energy Economy finds Colorado at or toward the front.

Federal tailwinds have helped Colorado move forward, Ritter acknowledged. He pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed in 2022 and is now being implemented in ways that “can make a meaningful difference.”

Beyond the climate impact of that law are the efforts to address marginalized communities much differently. He called it “maybe the most important piece of civil rights legislation since the Voting Rights Act” of 1965.

Ritter cited energy communities that fall under the heading of coal-dependent and environmental justice.

“The two may overlap, they may be different, but thinking about both of them and thinking about them in a policy lens has been something that I find actually remarkable.”

These policy frameworks give Ritter hope, he said. “We have a chance to be a different architect if we take optimal advantage of what’s in the Inflation Reduction Act, (and) the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and if we decide that we’re going to be part of that future where we design it ourselves.”

Ritter ended his formal remarks by saying that it’s “really important to say that we’re not going fast enough … We’re not moving quickly enough, not globally, not as a nation.” And although Colorado is on a better track than almost any other state, as a nation “we need to scale up, we need to become speedier in our activism around climate change and energy solutions.”

 

Fast and faster — but careful, too?

Ritter made those remarks in August. The November federal elections suggest sluggishness during the next four years in the energy transition. Colorado has great momentum irrespective of what happens in Washington.

That’s true to a somewhat lesser extent for the emissions reduction work across the country and world. That forward movement will continue. For all his bluster in 2016, Trump did not bring back coal jobs during his four years as president.

But the election can’t help. And the nominee of President-elect Donald Trump for secretary of the Department of Energy is an oil and gas guy. Chris Wright, the nominee, grew up in Colorado and made his fortune here, most recently as a founder of Liberty Energy, which provides hydro-fracturing and other oil and gas field services in Colorado and many other places around the country and globe. Wright doesn’t deny that greenhouse gases will warm the climate but downplays the risks and emphasizes the costs of the energy transition. The energy transition does not yet exist, he argued in a Heritage Foundation forum in 2023.

Significant tensions exist within Colorado about the question of how quickly and what strategies should be used to ramp down oil and gas. So far, Colorado has trimmed at the edges but not had a head-on fight. That latter distresses some in the environmental community.

 

Colorado has doubled oil production since 2010, mostly a consequence of horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and many other technology improvements. It now ranks 4^th in the nation in annual production of oil.

In natural gas, it’s eighth in the nation. Production has doubled since 2000, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In Aspen last summer, I asked the first question in Ritter’s Q&A: Did he agree with Gov. Jared Polis in his stance about oil and gas? My question was provoked by simple curiosity. What are the arguments for and against?

Polis so far has chosen not to pick a fight with the oil-and-gas sector. Legislation to ramp down the amount of drilling in Colorado has not gone forward in the Legislature. In exchange, the oil and gas sector has agreed not to go to the ballot with measures of their own. Some in the environmental community have said Polis deserves the “climate cow-pie award.”

Ritter, in his response, sidestepped his own argument, about the effectiveness of Amendment 37 in getting Colorado moving in 2004. He sided with the truce that Polis has engineered. We don’t want to legislate in the blunt policy of ballot amendments, he said. He was alluding to dueling efforts in the last two election cycles for ballot initiatives that were withdrawn in what amounts to a truce.

So how does Colorado move faster? What are the right tactics, the correct strategies?

 

Will Toor: Colorado needs to take care to create a replicable model

Toor, during his time on stage, seized on Ritter’s description of Colorado as a beacon on the hill.

“I think it’s really true if you look at where we have headed over the last 20 years, but I think especially over the last six years,” he said.

Colorado, he added, has become “one of the handful of states that I think are really showing how you can move forward in a big way of climate action while making lives better for the people of the state.”

Toor also emphasized Colorado as an interior state. “It may be trending blue, but was red, is purplish — and a place where there’s a large oil and gas industry.”

(I find it hard to describe Colorado as a purplish state, but Toor is right if you look at November elections. Four of the eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Colorado will be Republicans.)

Toor described Colorado’s work on climate change as an “all-of-government approach.” It isn’t just two or three key offices; it’s all of the agencies.

And it’s not just about regulation, he went on to say.

“We need to transform the marketplace, and to do that we need to use regulation where it’s appropriate, public investment where it’s needed, incentives for the private sector and individual residences where that’s appropriate. This is a lens that Gov. Polis brings to really everything that we do in the state.”

Toor spoke to the need for actions that are politically durable over time. It seemed as if he was trying to answer my question to Ritter about the oil and gas sector. He was talking about replicating Colorado’s success in other places.

The actions must be “actions that folks will look at and say, ‘Okay, that’s something that I see as a winner. That’s something I want to do where I am,” he said.

“Sometimes we could push a little bit further, but the effect would be to create something that probably has a smaller impact, because no one else (among other states) is going to do it.”

Then he ticked off the milestones starting with the landmark legislation in 2019 that specified an economy-wide 90% reduction goal for 2050 (now updated by legislators to net-zero by 2050, with more benchmarks along the way).

Altogether, Colorado has had 128 different pieces of legislation in the realm of energy efficiency, electric vehicles, oil and gas reform, and reform of land use during the last six years.

Major policies have delivered broad authority to the Air Quality Control Commission to conduct regulatory work.

As did Ritter, Toor noted that utilities in 2004 worried about whether 10% renewables would crash the grid. Now, Colorado utilities altogether will achieve 84% to 87% reduction in emissions by 2030 as compared to 2005 levels. There are some worries here and there about the ability of the electricity grid to meet demands. Those concerns fall under the heading of resource adequacy. And there are some supply chain issues for renewables that are, at least in the short term, driving up costs.

The oil-and-gas industry is required to reduce emissions 60%. Going back to 2014 under Hickenlooper, rulemaking after rulemaking has pushed the industry to dramatically reduce emissions. “We now think that the actual reductions will be closer to 70% than 60% by the end of the decade.”

The industrial sector poses a greater challenge because, said Toor, the technology and economics don’t align as well for deep reductions. Colorado has a requirement of a 20% reduction by 2030, although Toor said the state thinks we’re on path to a 40% reduction because of regulatory requirements and well as significant incentives. He cited the example of heat pumps for two Fort Collins plants, that of Avago, a company in Fort Collins that specializes in developing and manufacturing semiconductor products, and the Anheuser-Busch brewery. In the case of the brewery, “the projections are for an 87% reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions from that one change.”

Moving onto buildings, Toor noted that Colorado was the first state to create a clean-heat plan requirement of natural gas utilities.

“It requires our gas utilities to reduce emissions largely by helping their customers reduce energy use,” he said. “The very first clean heat plan was just approved by our Public Utilities Commission.”

In that plan, Xcel Energy during the next three years will invest $440 million to help its customers switch from gas appliances to electric heat pumps.

In transportation, 22.1% of all new vehicle sales in Colorado were for EVs. “We were about 2.1%, so it’s gone up by a factor of 10 over the last six years, and we’re really on the trajectory that we need to be for very deep electrification and transportation.”

Toor also talked about the intersection of land use, transportation, and a clean-energy economy. Two new laws adopted this year increase state government transit investments by a factor of about 10.

Another bill reduces how much parking that developers must provide for apartment buildings. If they devote less land and cost to parking of cars, the rents of those living there can be reduced hundreds of dollars a month. This, in turn, means planning with transit in mind.

Modeling commissioned by Toor’s office and completed in early 2024 found that Colorado can achieve 95% to 97% of its electrical load from renewables with the remainder from natural gas – all while saving money.

The big push will be on renewables: tripling wind and quadrupling solar capacity. And if that is a lot of land, it’s only 1-20th the amount of land that will be devoted to exurban sprawl by 2040.

“We need to get it right, but we also need to keep it in the context that we are not talking about transforming the landscapes of Colorado with renewable energy,” he said.

 

Clay Stranger: We’re about a fifth of the way through this marathon

Comments of Clay Stranger, the managing director of RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute), also stood out, but he spoke with a global perspective, describing the energy transition as being a marathon toward a climate-safe finish line. We’re about a fifth of the way there.

That puts us at 5-mile marker, a long ways from the ribbon at 26.2 miles. About a fifth of global energy now comes from renewable sources and about 20% of all vehicles sold globally have no tailpipes. China skews that number higher, and on a smaller scale, so does Norway.

The next segment, from 20% to 50%, Stranger called the political chapter.

“We know what to do. It’s reasonably cost-effective, but we have to leverage the political will, the social will to sort of bring to bear what we know how to do and overcome a lot of the opposition and resistance.”

Beyond that, the segment from 50% to 80% of the way, will be more difficult. “We roughly know what needs to happen, but it’s not cost-effective yet,” he said. “So we need to compress the cost for that section of the race.”

The final leg, from 80% to 100%? Think of it as the innovation leg. “We don’t really know exactly what do,” he said. “There’s still a lot of discovery, imagination and innovation that needs to happen.”

Then Stranger shared a sobering statistic, new from a Cambridge University study: every degree Celsius of warming will displace a billion people.

(For reference, the combined populations of Mexico, Central America and Venezuela total 341 million).

The study authors also concluded that in 2023, for the first time in history, climate displaced more people than conflict.

No doubt, Stranger could have talked for hours. He kept his remarks to two components. One is the challenge of providing cooling in the face of extreme heat that will be arriving.

This year, two billion people were exposed to extreme heat, he said.

One ray of hope is that very targeted design innovations are occurring in urban green spaces. Think town centers in small places as well as the megacities. Pilot projects are underway to reduce the urban heat-island effects by 40%.

A specific building technology also is relevant. It can be found at the RMI building in Basalt. That building has no central heating or cooling system, a feat achieved through many techniques, including super-insulation and orientation for passive design, enabling the winter sun to be part of the heating system.

Passive daytime radiative cooling materials, or PDRCs can help with heat. He described them as tiny, microscopic rods that can not only reflect light but also radiate 100 watts of energy per square meter back into deep space with nothing but paint.

“Imagine a 100-degree Fahrenheit day outside,” he said. “These paints have been proven to keep the indoor air temperature in a modestly insulated building at 82 degrees.”

This technology has global applicability.

Then Stranger asked an absorbing question. It pivoted on transportation but has applicability across other realms: how to work backward. Instead of thinking about the early adopters and moving ahead, why not start thinking first of those who are usually the last adopters but who would have the most to benefit from low-cost, clean transportation?

RMI, he said, has partnerships with municipal governments in Phoenix, Atlanta, and Portland, Ore., in a quest to figure out how to enable low-cost, zero-carbon mobility. The work has yielded four lessons.

• Prioritize community needs and community engagement.
• Foster affordability for charging infrastructure. “How can we think about local incentives for panel upgrades, for charging at a multi-unit dwelling,” he said.
• Explore shared ownership and pay-per-use models. “How can we think about folks who aren’t ready to own a car or don’t have the means? How can we think about new business models to get low-cost and low-carbon miles accessible?”
• Climate goals really should be seen as a secondary or at least a co-benefit when working with decision-makers and communities to implement new energy technology to reduce emissions.

“That’s true for the work I do in India. It’s also true for the work we’re doing with low-income communities in the U.S. as we think about what drives decision-making,” said Stranger.

“Think about the affordability and the accessibility of these solutions as primary and climate as a really important co-benefit.”

 

What does this all say for our rural resort regions?

What will be the outcome of this conference?

CLEER last held a major conference in 2017. It was in Carbondale, and the most notable speaker was Ed Mazria, the architect from Santa Fe (who played basketball well enough to be drafted by the New York Knickerbockers, as they were then called, in 1962). For the last couple decades he tried to encourage more thoughtful, energy-wise architecture through a project called Architecture 2030, the effort to reform how we do buildings.

Coming out of that conference was the impetus for the work at Basalt Vista, the 27-house complex designed for teachers and others in the Roaring Fork Valley. It employs air-source heat pumps — and no gas. It became a must-see for this early stage of Colorado’s efforts to reform buildings.

Instructive was the title for this conference: “Energizing Climate Solutions: Rural, Resort and Energy Transition Communities.” That’s a sweep of the landscape – and it also happens to describe the valley from Aspen to the oil and gas fields of Rifle and beyond. That’s the area where CLEER focuses.

Alice Laird, the executive director of CLEER, had hoped to deliver a message in this conference that the playing field for rural areas of Colorado needs to be leveled to provide more uniform access to grants and other assistance in cost-effective heating and cooling for residential housing. Currently, members of Holy Cross Energy have access to high levels of support. Other areas? Maybe not so much.

Looking across all of Colorado, she hopes to see that same level of support for all households, no matter where they are.

Evidence is abundant across the nation that rural areas don’t have the same access to energy efficiency measures. Colorado is better than most places, she said, but not as good as it should be.

Francesca Santos, program officer with the Rural Climate Partnership, made that point at the conference. Only 2% of funding goes to rural communities, which lack the resources to access what is available. She said 36% of emissions come from rural America, but rural American lacks the workforce and other means to ratchet down emissions.

In resort valleys of the Western Slope, where I lived for many years, there always was – and it appears to me still is – a certain schism between the wealthier resort towns and their down-valley siblings. They don’t see the world the same way. Can they work in greater concert?

I mentioned other speakers were on the agenda. One of them was Emily Gedeon, who represented Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resilience. Denver voters in 2020 approved a small sliver of a sales tax that yields $40 million annually for climate and energy work. Might something similar be done in other locations, say Eagle County or Summit County?

And then we have the Denver Regional Council of Governments, which is getting $200 million from the Inflation Reduction Act for building reform. It’s still early, in the set-up and hire stage. Actual results are months away. Will this provide valuable lessons?

 

How exceptional is Colorado in this big pivot underway?

As to the shining beacon on the hill that Bill Ritter talked about, is this sort of a Lake Woebegone boosterism, where all our children are above average? Is Colorado really all that great in what we’re doing here?

Colorado has distinct advantages and attributes. In per capita income it ranks eighth among the 50 states. In educational attainment, it ranks second. (The District of Columbia actually ranks above all states in both categories). It has several major universities (Colorado, Colorado State and School of Mines) plus the National Renewable Energy Laboratory all congregated within a roughly 65-mile corridor along the northern Front Range. Amidst them in Boulder is RMI, which was spawned in the Roaring Fork Valley by Amory and Hunter Lovins as the Rocky Mountain Institute  but now has become a significant national and even international voice.

Colorado also has strong wind (fifth in nation during August) and good solar, too, to complement older hydroelectric product. And since 2018 in particular, we’ve had progressive leadership.

All around are people engaged in this massive effort to tackle climate change.

But if we were in Sacramento or Boston or even Austin would we have a sense of parochial pride?

How should Colorado’s work in this energy transition be understood in a national context?

I am reminded frequently in my interviews of many of Colorado’s nation-leading efforts, the methane detection and reduction work, its commitments to decarbonization, its ranking at No. 2 or No. 3 in the nation in sales of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

I have also heard about Colorado’s efforts to deliver a just transition, to not leave fossil fuel communities behind, victims of this giant technological transformation. In this, its intent stands out. The execution remains to be determined.

And then this year came the landmark legislation, the effort to push ahead distribution planning and virtual power plants in SB24-218, Modernize Energy Distribution Systems.

California typically has been seen as the nation’s front-runner on climate action, and it remains in the front tier in most reviews. But at least two of my interviews suggested Colorado is surpassing it.

I first asked Jigar Shah this question about how Colorado should be seen in the national context. That interview was during October 2023.

Shah is a sort of serial entrepreneur. He founded SunEdison in 2003. In 2009, Xcel chose SunEdison to create what was then a very large solar project, 8 megawatts, north of Alamosa. He went on to help found several other organizations. During the last few years, he has directed the Department of Energy’s loan program.

“I think in general Colorado has made fairly bold commitments” to decarbonization. He cited the work with Xcel but also singled out the work to deploy smart appliances and virtual power plants.

I pressed for more.

“I think Colorado is ahead of the curve on some of these issues and certainly behind on some of the other issues. It has the potential to lead on all of them,” he said.

But he also warned about too much button-popping pride. Illinois, he pointed out, has more emission-free energy than Colorado, owing to its nuclear plants.

“Right now we need to get on with the task of deploying at gigawatt scale. Not only does Colorado have the ability to deploy at gigawatt scale, Colorado could start exporting energy to other states. I think it’s critical for the state to start realizing that this is one of the largest economic development opportunities in front of it today.”

In ways, though, Colorado falls short. Despite the very high percentage of single-family homes in Colorado and the high percentage of sunshine days, total production ranks down the list, he said.

In August 2024, total solar production in Colorado was 10^th – behind, yes, Georgia, Virginia, and New York.

Colorado needs a diversity of energy technology to achieve its emission targets. He spoke of hydrogen, carbon sequestration, and storage plus nuclear.

“I think it’s important to recognize that each technology brings with it a certain level of value, which in a diversified way helps protect you from weather events like six days without sufficient wind power or seven days in a row of cloudy weather.”

Mark Dyson, the managing director for RMI’s carbon-free electricity program, disputed that Colorado necessarily has an advantage of its renewable resources as compared to many other states. “It’s really sunny in Georgia,” he said dryly.

What sets Colorado apart, he said when I spoke to him at the Colorado Rural Electric Association conference in October, has been its leadership. He credited Xcel, the state’s largest utility, but also political leadership. He mentioned the human benefits of action that has produced tax base and some jobs in rural parts of Colorado but also the effort to ease the transition in fossil fuel communities. Those testaments of Colorado’s leadership “inspire me and make me happy to live here versus another state,” he said.

Leah Rubin Shen, a manager director for Advanced Energy United who keeps tabs on the 16 western states, ranked Colorado in the company of California and Washington and possibly Oregon. She spoke about the “creativity and ambition that we’ve seen in policies that the state has passed particularly in the last two years” in which she has been following Colorado.

Of particular note was SB24-218, the distribution planning reform authored by that brain trust of Sen. Steve Fenberg and Sen. Chris Hansen. It has been described by many in the energy sector to be the singularly most impressive law passed in the last legislative session.

“Not all states even have a distribution system planning, but Colorado already had one and then they improved it to make sure that everybody is thinking about what are the grid needs going to be in the future, especially as we electrify vehicle and buildings,” said Rubin Shen.

In this work on distributed energy resources, Colorado may be surpassing California. And in California, affordability of electricity has become an issue. (Although it might yet in Colorado. See an upcoming story in Big Pivots).

Mike Kruger, who directs Colorado Solar and Storage, also sees Colorado surging. “California has sort of relinquished their mantle on some of this,” he said. He called California’s NEM 3.0 (net metering) “an unequivocal disaster, no matter how you grade it.” California’s large scale interconnection process is extremely hard, complicated, and expensive. And then you’ve got several different regulatory bodies out there that are giving oscillating and sometimes even contradictory requirements.

Kruger said he found Illinois “really interesting,” rattling off work in distributed generation and other aspects of its transformation.

“Is it perfect? No. Are we perfect? No, but they are a leader. They’re showing how you just do it. You know, political winds be damned. And I think New York’s similar.”

Texas, too, he said. “They don’t care about political wins or really even policy. They’re just like, you want to make money, make some money, and it’s working.”

 

In recent months I have interviewed two key Colorado legislators in depth about their work in this energy transition. Both interviews will be published in coming weeks by Big Pivots.

First was Sen. Steve Fenberg in September. I asked him whether Colorado’s role as a national or even international influencer drove him a little bit.

“Oh yeah, I think it’s the only way to rationalize what we’re doing,” he said.

“Influencing regional, national and maybe international practices – you can’t always connect those dots very cleanly, but I think it is a driving motivation for a lot of us.”

In late November, I interviewed Sen. Chris Hansen. As a state representative and then state senator from 2017 through 2024, he was a sponsor of 41 energy bills that were passed and became law during his legislative career. We had been talking about one of them, which created the Colorado Energy Transmission Authority.

“Colorado is a danged good place to be whether you are participating in the energy transition or chronicling it. But as for being a shiny beacon on the hill – perhaps, although others may see us less-than-shiny and having some company on that hill.”

Hansen resisted proclaiming Colorado as the nation’s leader.

Top five? Absolutely,” he replied.

“I would list Oregon, Washington, and California. Illinois has done some great work. I think Massachusetts and New York have some really interesting pieces that we’ve looked at,” he explained.

“I think we’ve brought some very innovative ideas to this party, this 50-state experiment in democracy and this republic that we have, as Ben Franklin said, if we can keep it and you know, I think we have been national leaders, and in some cases, global leaders in energy and environmental policy. And you know, I am really proud of being a part of that.”

Hansen tends to agree with Will Toor that Colorado’s work can become a model for other states, including Kansas, where he grew up. He mentioned his legislation in 2021 that created the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority. “I’m aware of three different states that are looking at doing a transmission authority in 2025. What better tribute than or what better flattery than being copied? That gives me deep satisfaction.”

Beauty contests that some of us grew up with always ended up with a queen. In fact, all the entrants were beautiful, but there had to be a queen.

In this matter of national leadership in the energy transition, it’s probably impossible to have a singular shining beacon atop the hill, to go back to the image presented by Bill Ritter in Aspen during August. But clearly, Colorado is among the several shining beacons.

Now, can it continue to shine as brightly?