A big widening of this narrow electronic highway

Federal money will help two efforts in southeastern Colorado for electricity sharing with the eastern grid. Why does that matter?

by Allen Best

One of Colorado’s most important announcements about energy in 2026 was made at the Arapahoe County Fairgrounds yesterday. The site for the lectern where Gov. Jared Polis and others spoke was chosen because of its backdrop, Xcel Energy’s electrical substation called Harvest Mile, a mile or two away.

The substation was not incidental. It is a key portal for electricity flowing from the Great Plains to serve Xcel’s 1.6 million customers, most of them located at the foot of the Rockies.

That geographic footprint mostly ends at the Kansas border, where the Western electrical grid ends and the Eastern electrical grid begins. They’re on different time zones, of course, but moving electricity between the two grids is a greater challenge than just resetting your clock.

On Thursday morning the U.S. Department of Energy announced that Xcel, through the Colorado Energy Office, was getting a $250 million grant to widen the transmission highway between those two grids. This work will be in southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas. Think of it being like converting a narrow two-lane highway into a four-lane interstate with shoulders.

A second $250 million grant also involved a 300-mile direct-current transmission line planned for between Pueblo, Colo., and Guymon, Okla. That project is more akin to an express freeway, say E-470.

Event organizers for the announcement at the fairgrounds, which are located east of E-470, had worried a bit about rain. They probably had not thought about other intrusions from overhead.

Robert Kenney, the president of Xcel Energy’s Colorado Division, had spoken for several minutes, explaining that the new transmission investment being planned by his company at a cost of $1.2 billion would triple the connectivity between the Western and Eastern electrical grids.

Kenney then turned over the lectern to Will Toor, director of the Colorado Energy Office, who is seen speaking in the above photo.

“This is a project that has been on Xcel Energy’s 10-year transmission plan, but this grant will allow it to move forward on a much faster timescale and at lower cost to Colorado ratepayers,” said Toor.

As Toor started explaining why the two grants will help Colorado meet its clean energy goal by delivering access to renewables over a much larger footprint, a jet plane sliced across the sky, booming like a thunderclap after a lightning strike close at hand. Toor momentarily soldiered on with his remarks as heads pivoted skyward to see the cause of the commotion. Then a second jet and yet a third thundered overhead, apparently dispatched into the heavens from the Buckley Air Force Base.

As the clamor subsided, Polis moved to the microphone. “We arranged a flyover for you all to celebrate this quarter-billion dollar investment in Colorado energy,” he quipped, tongue in cheek.

“Apparently, it also has major national security benefits,” added Toor.

The two awards involving Colorado, with a combined value of $500 million, are among $1.9 million in grants U.S. Department of Energy has awarded through its SPARK initiative. SPARK stands for Speak to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and other Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades.

“Today’s announcement reinforces the Trump Administration’s commitment to common-sense energy addition policies that lower electricity prices and strengthen our grid,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright in the announcement yesterday morning.

“These investments will get more out of the infrastructure we already have, move more electricity across the grid, and help deliver affordable, reliable and secure power that will fuel American prosperity for decades to come.”

Absent was any mention of the Bipartisan Infrastructure and Investment Act, the law passed by Congress in 2021 and signed into law by then President Joe Biden. The law committed the funds now being announced.

Most amazing is that more than 25% of the $1.9 billion in federal funding for 31 projects involving 29 states will go to the two projects that involve Colorado among. The Colorado projects also involve Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Colorado lies entirely within the Western electrical grid. Kansas and Nebraska lie in the Eastern electrical grid. Texas, the Lone Star State, has its own electrical grid that covers about 75% of the state — but not in the Amarillo-Lubbock area in and near the state’s panhandle. Xcel has customers in that area.

Traveling from Colorado to Kansas, or vice versa, is not a big deal for travelers on our highways. You will not encounter border crossing guards to stop you and check your papers. You see only signs that trumpet the virtues of the states, Kansas sunshine and Colorado color.

But the electric grids of the two states speak different electrical languages, if you will. The eastern and western electric grids have just seven portals, called interties, six in the United States and one in Canada. These places have limited capacities, kind of like a very narrow shopping aisle at a corner grocery store. Or a very narrow country road.

Both Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association have transmission lines to and from substations at May Valley, north of Lamar. One of the towers for a new line was under construction when this photo was taken in July 2025. Photo/Allen Best

One of these east-west interties lies in Colorado, at the May Valley substation north of Lamar. This writer has visited the intertie twice. Honestly, it’s pretty boring to look at, although an electrical engineer might say otherwise. Another lies north of Colorado near Kimball, Neb.

The May Valley substation will be the starting point in Colorado for Xcel’s project. This new connecting line is to move power to and from a substation in southwest Kansas near Holcomb, site of a major coal plant and associated infrastructure. From there, power can move also into Texas.

Polis said capacity of the intertie near Lamar would expand from 210 megawatts to 700 megawatts — with a potential for expansion to 2,000 megawatts.

“This is a big deal for Colorado, and frankly, it’s a big deal for energy security for our country to make sure that we have the resilience and strength needed to prevent outages, to deliver lower rates as electricity use scales up, with more people using electric vehicles,” said Polis.

Polis said he recently helped start a bipartisan working group of six governors in western states to work on interstate transmission. “As we move towards a more renewable grid, we need a more reliable grid,” he said.

Four of the five segments in Xcel Energy’s 345-kV Colorado Power Pathway are either complete or nearing completion, but the fifth segment is being contested by Elbert County.

Tim Walsh, an undersecretary of energy in the Trump administration, said Denver has peak power demand during summer heat of 1.2 to 1.6 gigawatts. This project, he said, “is going to triple the amount of electricity that’ll be (available) to serve markets like Denver.”

A representative of The Denver Post asked whether this was about delivering power for data centers. Three of the speakers – Kenney, Polis and Toor all denied that it was driven by data center demand.

Toor was most convincing.

“We’ve known that we need to expand our transmission system for many years before the recent explosion in data center demand,” he said. “To maintain a reliable grid in the face of all sorts of growing demand, as the governor described, we’ve needed expanded transmission, and in particular, we’ve needed expanded interregional transmission linking the Colorado grid to the eastern grid.

Kenney said that a large-load tariff now before the state’s Public Utilities Commission would have hyperscale data centers pay their own way for infrastructure upgrades.

The usefulness for this project to help Colorado advance its clean-energy goals cannot be stressed too much. Chris Hansen, a former state legislator who is now the CEO of Durango-based La Plata Electric, has described the need to have an electrical grid bigger than one time zone or one weather system.

Colorado has been something of an island in one time zone with limited electrical transmission to other parts of the country. Much work is underway to improve our highways of electricity, if you will, to other areas. This will be part of that.

Might there be glitches –or worse? I posed the question about a directive from President Donald Trump that might limit the use of imported technology in the transmission upgrades in Colorado and adjoining states. I wondered whether it might stall the work.

Walsh, the undersecretary, stepped up to the plate, although not with a direct answer. “A lot of our grid infrastructure was built in an adversarial country, China,” he said. “Today, President Trump is meeting with President Xi to hopefully address some of those concerns. The last thing we need is (a country being able to) shut down our grid with a cyberattack.”

Walsh, the energy undersecretary and a former real estate developer along the Front Range ($2.5 billion in projects completed, he said) described improved electrical transmission against a backdrop of transportation projects that over the last 150 years have helped Colorado grow economically. First there was rail, then the first airport in the country, he said, and interstate highways.

“All those were keys to connecting Colorado with the rest of the country and now the globe. It’s what drove commerce, jobs, and prosperity in our state. And here, in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, that role as a crossroad has never been more important,” said Walsh.

“Colorado is the key link, as you heard, between eastern and western power grids. That puts Colorado at the center of an opportunity — an opportunity to strengthen the connection between two of America’s major power grid systems, to move more power across the grid than ever before, to strengthen reliability and resilience, and to make sure growing communities and businesses can get the electricity they need when they need it.”

All these projects have cost-sharing components. In the Xcel case, the Colorado Energy Office is the actual recipient of the $250 million. Xcel, though, must put up more than $1.2 billion.

The award for the second Colorado project, the Three Corners Connector, was actually awarded to the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services, a state agency. In that project, Grid United would have to pay $832 million. The endpoints for that high-capacity transmission line would be Pueblo and Guymon, Okla. Involved would be the Southwest Power Pool in Oklahoma and the Western Electricity Coordinating Council in Colorado.

The route of the proposed Three Corners transmission line.

Ashley Kang, from Grid United, said that when prices are high in one area and that area is experiencing peak demand and another area has surplus capacity, connecting them could be a good way to maximize the capabilities of the infrastructure.

Xcel Energy is by far Colorado’s largest electrical utility, but others contact by Big Pivots were generally of the same note: good for them. For example, Tri-Stage Generation and Transmission Association’s Mark Stutz offered this statement; “Generally speaking, improvements to any transmission system are always welcomed, and we look forward to working with Xcel Energy to conduct future studies on how this project can and will be reliably and safely incorporated into the regional grid.”

Of course, in transmission, as in most things, the devil is in the details. Big Pivots hopes to follow up with more details while asking the questions that maybe it should have asked at the announcement yesterday, such as what kind of approvals does Xcel Energy need from state authorities and possibly other federal agencies before it moves ahead with this project.