Following are three glimpses from the travels of Big Pivots during 2025 and some thoughts about 2026.
Highways of electricity
Kiowa and a disputed route
In early December, residents of Elbert County testified for three to four hours before the three Colorado PUC commissioners about why Xcel Energy should not be allowed to build its 345-kV transmission line along the route it proposes.
Kiowa, the county seat, is an hour or more southeast of downtown Denver and about 1,000 feet higher. Some residents undoubtedly commute to jobs in Parker or other parts of the metropolitan area, but the county has a distinctly rural nature to it. What may also matter, at least a bit, is that this county is so deeply Republican that it hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1932.
The first 8 to 10 men who spoke wore ball caps. Even the two state legislators who attended wore blue jeans. “Rural Lives Matter,” said the red T-shirt of one woman, her face heavily creased from seven or eight decades of life, who testified. If most comments were polite, there was a distinct tone. The PUC commissioners were from “Denver” and — well, people in Elbert County were being put upon by the big electrical utility.
At such times, human angst can come out hard. One woman named Leah explained that her husband had suffered a stroke immediately amid the arrival of the transmission plans. She believed the stroke — and then his death. — were the result.
“Have you ever been to the Bijou Basin?” she asked, referring to the contested route (seen, we believe, in the above photograph). It is a very pretty area of rolling hills, vividly green deep into summer. Although lacking the familiar mountain skylines, it may be as good as Colorado gets.
Eric Blank, the chair of the PUC, replied that he could understand. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “I lost my wife to cancer some years ago.”
This is the fifth and final segment of the 550-mile Colorado Power Pathway that Xcel needs to deliver renewable energy from eastern Colorado to its 1.6 million customers, most of them in the metropolitan area. The company estimates the cost at $1.7 to $2 billion.
If those testifying at Kiowa were correct, Elbert County’s strongly preferred route takes a somewhat longer path to the eastern end of the county, close to Limon, then follows I-70 back to Aurora. Speakers said it would cost the company a few tens of millions of dollars more.
“The only problems they’ve really had to speak of through this whole process (of the Colorado Power Pathway) has been El Paso and Elbert County, and that’s because of the way they are trying to bump up against population,” said Sen. Rod Pelton, in whose district this segment of the power line is located. “Looks to me like the big dog trying to stomp the little guy, and that’s not the way America should thrive.”
Three hours into the session, State Rep. Chris Richardson, a former planning commission member in Elbert County and then county commissioner, told the PUC commissioners about the journey of this proposal through the county’s 1041 review. He, too, described Xcel as a bully contemptuous of local processes.
“If you, the PUC, turn that behavior into a winning strategy, you will confirm the worst fear of those of us in rural Colorado, and that is that local processes are just to check the box before a real decision is made in Denver,” he said.
Local residents “deserve to be worked with, not around,” he went on to say. “The people of this county will work with those who will work with them.”
Pelton invited the PUC commissioners to stick around the county and get to know it a bit. But the PUC members had another agenda item after their hearing wrapped up at 10 p.m. At 9 the next morning they were scheduled to be in their chairs in Denver for their weekly meeting.
The PUC commissioners will soon hear testimony from El Paso County about this same segment of the Colorado Power Pathway before making a decision in April.
Transmission is a big part of how Colorado moves forward to meet its decarbonization goals. Some of that story is transmission entirely within Colorado, as is in this case. Other elements involve how Colorado may become less of an electrical island in the nation’s interior with new transmission connecting it to other places. All of this is on the agenda for Big Pivots during 2026.
Wonders of geothermal
Going underground in Palisade
In early October, while in Grand Junction, we took the opportunity to say hello to Gene Byrne and visit him and his wife, Maggie, and their geothermal system amid the peach orchards overlooking the Colorado River near Palisade.
We have known Gene since the 1990s when he was in Glenwood Springs and helping assemble plans to reintroduce the Canada lynx into Colorado. That project has been a huge success.
Retiring to Palisade, Gene decided he wanted to do his part in shedding the need for fossil fuels. Solar has been part of that journey. More recent has been addition of an electric induction stove and now an electric car, too. Gas is still part of the infrastructure at the Byrne home, such as for grilling and the hot-water heat, but its use is much diminished.
Mostly the couple heat with geothermal, and because this is Palisade and it gets hot, they use the coolness of the ground for cooling, too. “Instead of taking the heat out of the ground and bringing it into the house, it takes the heat out of the house and puts it back into the ground,” Gene explained after our dinner. “That’s what makes it work.”
Geothermal was installed the same time the house was built in 2004. Although the location is served by Xcel, the Delta-Montrose Electric Association then had a program to help homeowners who wanted to adopt geothermal.
“While we were not in their service area, they wanted to install 200 systems as a demonstration to show how well geothermal works,” Gene explained as we toured his home’s mechanical room after dinner.
Paul Bony, who ran the program for Delta-Montrose Electric, most recently has been an apostle of geothermal in the Yampa Valley in the employ of the Western Resilience Center, formerly the Yampa Valley Sustainability Council.
In many places, geothermal uses vertical wells. That would be necessary on a city lot. Gene and Maggie have 14 acres. The six polyethylene pipes were laid in trenches in a field 100 yards long and 20 yards wide. The pipes are four to five feet below ground where the year-round temperature varies between 52 and 57 degrees. Peach trees have been planted on top. Water augmented by 15% glycol solution to prevent freezing is circulated through the 3,600 feet of piping.
Electric-powered compressors allow the heat, or coolness, to be delivered at desired temperatures, much the same way that an electric freezer uses a condenser, in that case to create coldness. This takes energy, but Delta-Montrose estimated that this system would deliver $4 of energy for every $1 of cost. It cost them $23,000 to install.
“We are incredibly happy with the system,” said Gene.
In 2012, the couple also invested in a solar system. Installed by Atlasta Solar of Grand Junction, the cost of $29,785 was defrayed by an $8,085 rebate from Xcel, a federal tax credit of $6,510, and further savings when Xcel purchases excess electricity for its use. In this, Gene estimates he and Maggie have accrued a gross profit of almost $14,000. It provides 91% of their electricity.
Most recently, the couple purchased a Chevrolet Equinox and an EV charger. About 95% of the charging is done at home. For these 11,400 miles of home-charged driving, the total cost was $362.
All of this sounds almost too good to be true, Gene says. Much of it was based on tax credits. But even without tax credits, it is better than the old ways. And if you’re building a home to use for 30 years, going all-electric with at least some of these systems needs to be part of the equation.
“You know, if everybody did a little bit of this it would make a huge difference,” he said.
As for those peach orchards of the Talbott Farms outside their door, they will soon become probably Colorado’s most spectacular display of the marriage of agriculture and PV panels. It is, of course, called agrivoltaics.
As for geothermal, we have been gathering notes since 2022. We had a couple of big stories in 2025 about geothermal and schools. During 2026, it’s time to get a lot more of these stories over the finish line and shared with our media partners across Colorado.
Sustainable groundwater mining?
Joes in September, Yuma in October
Fans of the late novelist Kent Haruf likely know that his fictional Colorado town of Holt was based, at least in part, upon Yuma. The town lies two or three hours east of Denver and entirely on the Ogallala Aquifer as does nearly all the Republican River Basin.
The water was mostly deposited over the last two million years. But, since the mid-20th century, with the arrival of high-capacity pumps, the groundwater has been rapidly depleted, mostly to grow forage crops for livestock and corn for an ethanol plant at Yuma.
Because the Ogallala contributes to flows in the Republican River, which is governed by an interstate compact with Nebraska and Kansas, Colorado must cut back pumping. It is succeeding in this very narrow ambition but is also using the artifice of delivering water at the Nebraska border by means of water pumped from several wells at enormous cost. As for sustainable pumping, it is nowhere close. There may be no such thing as sustainable pumping.
Strong parallels exist between what is happening in this very rural part of northeastern Colorado and what is happening on the Colorado River Basin. Both places are struggling to come to terms with sustainability. And, while most focus on the Colorado River has been on the river itself, there is also a huge groundwater component.
In September we traveled to Joes and in October to Yuma to hear directors of the Republican River Water Conservation District make their case for options — and ultimately, if less robustly, for changes.
We will likely return to Yuma again as we follow this conversation. Maybe in 2026 we’ll get to another Yuma, the one in Arizona along the Colorado River, downstream from the groundwater story there. We call it the story of two Yumas.
- Colorado tops 6 million - January 28, 2026
- Difficult decisions on Colorado’s eastern plains - January 26, 2026
- Xcel can fix downed coal unit at Pueblo but at what cost? - January 22, 2026
I’m impressed by Gene and Maggie’s commitment to de-carbonizing their impact on the world and curious to look into geothermal for our home.
My husband and I also have been early adopters of solar energy in our community solar and purchased a Chevy Bolt EV in 2021. We also switched to an induction stove a few years ago. I’m surprised that people are so resistant to these changes, as they are truly upgrades over dinosaur technology of gas- or diesel-powered cars and gas stoves, heating etc. We have saved so.much.money. with these changes. And P.S. hybrid vehicles are ridiculous and have all of the impacts of an EV as well as all of the impacts of a gas-powered vehicle. We need to buy our cars for how we use them most of the time, not the once-a-year trip across the country. That’s what a rental car is for.