Political theater at the Ray Nixon plant

Energy secretary and congressmen make the case that coal keeps the lights on and electricity affordable. To make that case they must be selective in their facts.

by Allen Best

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright was at a coal plant near Colorado Springs last Friday to talk about the virtues of coal. It’s what keeps the lights on, you know, and it’s not expensive, not like renewables.

To make those claims, as he did in not so many words, he had to stubbornly turn a blind eye to another coal plant not more than 30 miles away. Comanche 3, the state’s youngest and largest coal plant, went down on Aug. 12, 2025, and hasn’t produced electricity since then.

Wright is the front man for President Donald Trump’s alliance with fossil fuel companies. It would seem to be a comfortable fit for Wright. Until he joined Trump’s team, Wright was CEO of Liberty, an oil and gas field services company based in Denver that he founded. While there, Wright consistently argued that while human-caused climate change was real, it was a distant threat. Far more important, he said, was to elevate the world’s living standard.

After he joined Trump’s cabinet, Wright went about implementing Trump’s order that fossil fuel plants should not be retired. First in 2025 was a coal plant in Michigan. On Dec. 30, he issued another order, this one for Craig No. 1. The coal-burning unit began production in 1980 and was scheduled to formally be retired on New Year’s Eve 2025.

Wright’s order cited several reasons that added up to an emergency. Collectively they fell under the heading of worries about resource adequacy in the regional grid.

Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the operator and part owner, said it didn’t need the electricity. Ditto for another part owner, Fort Collins-based Platte River Power Authority. The plant has three other part owners, including Xcel Energy.

As for the emergency, how severe was it? Not so much. Sources tell Big Pivots that the plant has been operated about three weeks since January, most of that time during April. That was just after Southwest Power Pool launched its electricity-sharing regional market, the West Balancing Authority Area.

On Aug. 20, the day this photograph was taken (and a particularly hot day it was), only one of the three units at Craig Generating Station appeared to be in use. Photo/Allen Best

Resumed electrical production Craig No. 1 has been in response to SPP’s level 1 resource advisories, which do not suggest imminent threat to reliability.

Since that order from Wright last December, he has reissued the three-month emergency orders twice more, again in late March and late June.

The irony of Wright’s order for Craig last December was immediately noted by the team of Gov. Jared Polis. The 427-megawatt coal plant ordered to be available for the emergency had broken down about 10 days before.

Of course coal plants keep the lights on! Except when they don’t!

As for Comanche 3, the giant coal plant at Pueblo, it has literally been down for 25% of the time since operations began in July 2010. “It has been reliably unreliable,” says Danny Katz, the executive director of the Colorado Public Interest Research Group. CoPIRG and other groups are arguing that Xcel, the company, and not its customers should be saddled with the repair costs of Comanche 3 or the replacement costs for purchasing power. Those costs also included bringing an older coal unit, Comanche 2, out of retirement.

The Nixon plant that Wright toured along with two members of Congress from Colorado has no blatant problems comparable to those of Comanche 3. It was to have been closed in 2029, but Colorado legislators this past session agreed to give Colorado Springs Utilities, the owner, a pass. It is now scheduled to be closed by 2032. That would make it, according to current schedules, the last in Colorado.

So what exactly is the fuss about?

In statements issued after their tour, Wright and the two congressmen he had in tow — Rep. Jeff Crank and Rep. Gabe Evans — emphasized the reliability of coal and the cost of renewable energy.

“Coal has powered American prosperity for generations and continues to provide the reliable, around-the-clock electricity our grid needs,” said Wright in a statement. “The Trump administration is committed to adding reliable power to the grid, not prematurely shutting down generation that is already keeping the lights on.”

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, right, and U.S. Rep. Gave Evans answer questions after an event held in Thornton during June. Photo/Allen Best Top photo: Ray Nixon plant. Photo/Colorado Springs Utilities.

Evans, a former police officer in Arvada, calls Fort Lupton home. Early in his first term in Congress, he showed up at solar farms to get his photo taken. In at least three appearances with Wright so far this year, it has become evident that Evans has learned to talk the fossil fuels language more purely.

“Denver Democrats spent years attacking reliable coal generation, only to run headfirst into reality: you cannot shut down dependable baseload power without something ready to replace it,” said Evans in the statement issued after the tour.

“Keeping Ray Nixon online longer will protect grid reliability and save ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars. With electricity demand skyrocketing, Colorado needs more safe, affordable, reliable energy – not political mandates that take power off the grid and leave families paying the price.”

As for Crank, he played the party line in the Colorado Springs version. “Colorado’s burdensome energy mandates continue to cost our region, not only with higher utility bills but they also threaten our national security assets,” he said.

It’s all political theater, but exactly to what purpose?

The harder question is why Colorado Springs needed to keep Ray Nixon operating longer than planned. And also, whether keeping this coal plant operating is better than building a new gas plant, as Wright told reporters, according to a report in the Colorado Springs Gazette. And a new wild card of the last two years is what exactly data centers will need — and under what terms.

As for utility costs, they are indeed rising. But why? That’s a complicated story. What can be said is that renewable energy comes in cheapest, but transmission is a pickle, and we do have supply chain issues.

What also must be said is that Holy Cross Energy, the Glenwood Springs-based electrical cooperative, has consistently had among the state’s lowest electrical rates even as it stretches to decarbonize. Through July, it was at 87% renewable energy for the year.

Granted, it’s easier to pivot when you’re a smaller dancer. Holy Cross has 58,000 meters compared to the 264,000 of Colorado Springs Utilities or the 1.6 meters of Xcel Energy in Colorado. And in an ironic footnote, Holy Cross actually has an 8% ownership interest in Comanche 3.

Whether Wright’s emergency orders for Craig No. 1 were legal are yet to be resolved. Environmental groups and others argue that the orders issued by Wright go beyond what the federal law passed by Congress in 1935 (and amended twice since then) allowed. A federal judge heard the case involving the Michigan plant in May but has not issued a ruling. That ruling, whatever it is, almost certainly will have bearing on the orders for Craig.

To be clear, this pivot from fossil fuels to non-emitting sources of electricity is not an easy one. It might yet get expensive. Also be clear that the story told at the Ray Nixon plant was political theater, nothing more.