‘Both Sides of the Meter’ at Colorado Climate Summit

Colorado is a hotspot for energy innovation: The city of Fort Collins is pushing the envelope with a net-zero energy central district. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been generating schemes for energy efficiency and clean energy for 30 years. And the city of Boulder has more solar panels than some states. All of these were featured programs at the first-ever Colorado Climate Summit, held on the campus of the University of Colorado last weekend in the middle of – you guessed it – the unusual weather event of an early blizzard. But the mood wasn’t self-congratulatory — it was urgent. Hopeful, but urgent. Efficiency and solar panels on roofs aren’t enough, warned one clean energy expert. “We have to look at both sides of the meter,” said Leslie Glustrom, pointing at a chart of Boulder’s carbon emissions that, despite tremendous work and city effort to reduce carbon emissions, showed marginal gains. Glustrom pointed out that Boulder is still dependent on a coal plant. “If you took that offline it would be like taking 150,000 homes off the grid,” she said. “Utilities are standing in the way of the clean energy transition,” warned Glustrom, because the inertia is too strong — they must be pressed via local government into transitioning to renewables. Boulder itself is taking matters into its own hands, and since voter approval in 2011 has been developing its own publicly-owned utility. Colorado climate activists of all stripes came to the summit to talk about ‘both sides of the meter;’ it is unavoidable to think about supply in a state facing massive fracking development, as well as traditional oil and gas. Writer and publisher Robert Castellino founded the sponsoring organization Climate Colorado earlier this year after going through the Climate Reality Project’s international leadership program (which has now trained leaders in Brazil, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere.) The summit also included discussions on youth, growing environmental literacy, the climate’s impact on aging, diversifiying and internationalizing the climate movement and more. Rapid prototyping teams at the summit. Photo by Lee Buchsbaum. Rapid prototyping teams at the summit. You could feel an urgency about climate change in the room; Colorado is really the canary in the coal mine, already seeing more statistically unusual weather than the rest of the country. Massive wildfires consumed the forests of the Front Range around Fort Collins in 2012, and five-day floods killed eight people and destroyed 2,000 homes last September. Driving through these mountains, it is eerie: You see a landscape of orange-brown-black trees. Most of the presenters connected their passion directly to the destruction they had already seen — the disappearance of a salmon species, or fracking wastewater ponds in a place of great beauty. Many talked about their homes and several teared up. “In Colorado, climate change is happening. The effects are real,” Castellino said. Localizing the climate fight is working in Colorado, as several of the presenters told the assembled crowd at the Gettches Wilkinson Resource Center at the CU law school. Coloradans have been able to get municipalities to pressure utilities; grassroots advocates in Lafayette were able to use the city’s franchise renewal process to fight for a transition to clean energy. colorado climate summit logoThe anti-fracking movement in Colorado has also had success, mostly in the northern part of the state, passing local bans in Lafayette, Broomfield, Boulder, Boulder County and Fort Collins, according to Frack Free Colorado organizer Suzanne Spiegel. (Lafayette’s unique initiative declared that the community right to clean air and water is equal to mineral rights held by individuals.) So far, oil and gas developers are still able to head off statewide change. The summit will culminate in the Switch 2020 plan and several other collaborations put forward by Climate Colorado.

A biochemist on a mission to fight climate change, one coal plant at a time

Leslie Glustrom recently turned 60, but she’s no where near finished working on her life’s mission to fight climate change. Throughout her career, Glustrom has been a science writer, teacher, and worked on public lands issues in Arizona in the 1990’s. Ten years ago, she left her job as a biochemistry researcher at Colorado University to devote herself full-time to educating her Boulder community about the dangers of coal-fired power plants – which accounts for approximately 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This Saturday, she will be speaking at the Colorado Climate Summit to help inspire people across the country to make a difference in their environment. “We need as citizens to understand our end of the meter,” says Glustrom. “We are going to talk about how people can work with their local governments to keep the pressure on the utilities to move beyond fossil fuels and move towards the solar era.” The long-time scientist explains her innate desire to preserve the environment developed around age 6 – after seeing a Monarch butterfly for the first time. She says as an older adult, she not only appreciates nature, she now worries about the negative impact humans are having on it. For example, she mentions the farmers in Bolivia who are forced to migrate from their barren land as climate change disrupts weather patterns there. “I will probably never know those farmers, or the victims of the typhoon in the Philippines…I might never see a polar bear in real life, but when I see those polar bears with no ice to be seen, and its 200 miles to the next ice flow, I’m going to feel it,” says Glustrom. “I have a moral obligation to do everything I can – even if I don’t have grandchildren.” When Colorado’s largest utility company decided to build a coal-fired power plant, Comanche 3 in Pueblo, CO, in 2005, her same sense of moral urgency is what led her, and two others, to form the nonprofit Clean Energy Action. “If you care about humans and species, and if you recognize that connection between suffering and our energy choices, then what you want to do is stop pumping the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane,” says Glustrom. “That’s a big task but somebody’s got to start.” She says around the same time, President Bush had sent a signal to the utility industry that it was okay to build coal plants, and there were more than 150 coal plants commissioned – each of which would last at least 60 years. “People like me said, ‘Excuse me!,” says Glustrom. “Our vision is we want clean energy, and we’re willing to act to bring about the clean energy future.” She says of all of those 150 proposed coal plants, 150 were stopped – thanks to the tireless work of Clean Energy Action and other environmental groups like The Sierra Club. “We won many, many battles. It’s an outstanding accomplishment,” says Glustrom, only saddened they couldn’t stop the plant in Colorado. She says she is also proud of a realization she had in 2008, when President Obama was running for his first election. “Obama said, ‘Coal is what makes this country great, we’ll just make coal clean’…the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund said, ‘We’ll just make coal clean,’ a lot of environmental groups were saying, ‘We’ll just make coal clean,’” remembers Glustrom. “‘Clean coal’ is a dirty lie…you can’t make coal clean.” The biochemist explains you can’t make carbon dioxide go away, and you can’t create or destroy matter. “We gathered the documentation, did conferences,” says Glustrom about how she and her team tried to educate the masses about the reality of coal plants. “I predicted a lot of things that are happening right now. It’s something I’m proud of having figured out, but it’s something I’m deeply concerned about. We have to get our country repowered.” The activist says that currently large utilities have a lot of financial power within the government, but not in the local level. She says the one place regular citizens can have an impact is working at the local level and educating local officials. “Have them accept responsibility and recognize the moral responsibility we have. In that way, we can make great progress,” says Glustrom. “Our team in Boulder – we know how to do this research, and we will help any community. Every community can do it, and I think every community has an obligation to do it.” What advice would she tell her younger self with the wisdom she now has? “Treasure your life. None of us are promised tomorrow. So be sure to enjoy every day,” she says. “Know that everyone has important contributions to make, and that is how we honor the miracle that is life…Know that life is complex. Work hard, do the best you can, but be gentle. Honor yourself, and honor the miracle that is life.”

Conservatives pro-solar claims Xcel wants to kill solar in Colorado

A new conservative pro-solar organization has raised in Colorado, US, with a very particular name "Tell Utilities Solar Won't be Killed", or simply TUSK. The promoters say this organization "has launched organizing, fundraising, and education campaigns in Colorado in response to government-regulated monopoly utility Xcel's attacks on rooftop solar. Xcel wants to damage the state's rooftop solar industry and deny Coloradans the right to generate their own electricity", Former US Congressman Barry Goldwater Jr. TUSK's Chairman, has said "this war on energy choice has been moving state to state as utilities try – and fail – to drive solar competitors out of business (...). Utilities like Xcel are launching these attacks in red and purple states because they think Republicans are so backwards they can't see the benefits of solar. They are wrong. Conservatives stand for competition, and it is high time these utility companies understand that." Contrary to what Gordon Gekko from the movie 'Wall Street' once said, greed is not good, and it's certainly not good for Xcel Energy's Colorado customers. Click here to watch our video. TUSK claims Colorado has become a heated battleground where monopolist utility Xcel is trying to end energy choice and competition by attacking rooftop solar. The organization argues utilities like Xcel have failed to stifle rooftop solar in Arizona, Oklahoma, Idaho, Utah and countless other states. The lobby group is currently active in states across the country and is now working to ensure utilities won't kill competition in Colorado. The organization believes Xcel wants to gut a policy called net metering. Net metering gives solar customers fair credit for the valuable surplus energy they provide to the grid. That surplus energy is send to the grid and Xcel sells it at the full retail rate. The organization claims Xcel is asking regulators to change the rules so that it can just confiscate the rooftop solar surplus and sell it for a profit. TUSK has released a short video where they say famous "Wall Street" character Gordon Gecko would applaud Xcel's scheme to rake in excess profits but people paying utility bills would feel otherwise.

Here Comes the Sun: America’s Solar Boom

Last week, an energy analyst at Deutsche Bank came to a startling conclusion: By 2016, solar power will be as cheap or cheaper than electricity from the conventional grid in every state except three. That’s without any changes to existing policy. In other words, we’re only a few years away from the point where, in most of the United States, there will be no economic reason not to go solar. If you care about slowing climate change or just moving toward cleaner energy, that is a huge deal. And solar energy is already going gangbusters. In the past decade, the amount of solar power produced in the United States has leaped 139,000 percent. A number of factors are behind the boom: Cheaper panels and a raft of local and state incentives, plus a federal tax credit that shaves 30 percent off the cost of upgrading. Still, solar is a bit player, providing less than half of 1 percent of the energy produced in the United States. But its potential is massive — it could power the entire country 100 times over. So what’s the holdup? A few obstacles: pushback from old-energy diehards, competition with other efficient energy sources, and the challenges of power storage and transmission. But with solar in the Southwest already at “grid parity” — meaning it costs the same or less as electricity from conventional sources — Wall Street is starting to see solar as a sound bet. As a recent Citigroup investment report put it, “Our viewpoint is that solar is here to stay.”

Colorado Knows How to Maximize 300 Days of Sunshine

Denver residents are taking advantage of the city’s sunny days and mild temperatures — and turning the sunshine into solar energy. At the end of 2013, the Mile High City had a total installed capacity of 25 megawatts (MW) of clean energy from the sun, ranking it the 10th best city in America in terms of solar energy. The cities were evaluated by Environment Colorado and released in the 2014 report, “Shining Cities: At the Forefront of America’s Solar Energy Revolution.” The Mile High City’s cumulative capacity of 25 MW of solar breaks down to 40 watts per person, or enough solar to power the needs of 7,500 homes, the report reveals. “The sky’s the limit on solar energy,” Margaret McCall, energy associate with Environment Colorado, said in a statement. “Denver is a shining example of solar leadership. But we’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential to capture this pollution-free energy source.” Driving Solar Growth by Installations on Public Buildings Denver and Portland were the two U.S cities commended for their leadership role in driving solar growth by installing solar panels on public buildings. “Cities can lead and catalyze local markets by installing solar power on city buildings and setting ambitious but achievable targets for solar energy,” the report stated. “Denver has installed 9.4 MW of solar power on city and county buildings, and the city has partnered with the Denver Public Schools to install solar power on 28 school buildings.” A Successful Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) One reason that the Mile High City is a top city for solar is because of its Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) and consequently, Xcel Energy’s solar rebates. The first state in the nation to adopt an RPS mandate, Colorado requires investor-owned utilities (IOUs) to derive 30 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Because of the RPS requirement, IOUs like Xcel need customers to switch to renewable energy to meet the state mandate — and entice them by offering cash payments called solar Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). Throughout Colorado, only two power companies issue performance payments for every kilowatt hour of generated solar: Xcel Energy and Black Hills. As these utilities reach their RPS requirements, they begin paying less (and then nothing) for renewable energy production. Although REC payments from smaller customer-owned systems (up to 25 kilowatts) have already fallen to$.03 per kWh, customers in Xcel Energy’s service territory can still obtain higher REC payments through community solar. Community Solar RECs When the Colorado Community Solar Gardens Act was passed in 2010 authorizing community solar projects, Xcel Energy developed its Solar*Rewards program—offering 10 solar rewards programs in Colorado each year. Through the program, community-owned solar developer Clean Energy Collective (CEC) has built nine shared solar facilities in which customers can buy panels and receive cash performance payments from Xcel. Another three Solar*Rewards projects are under development in Arapahoe, Lake and Boulder counties. Although the REC payments for personal solar systems decrease over time, the RECs issued in conjunction with Solar*Rewards projects are locked in at a rate negotiated between CEC and Xcel. Therefore, customers who purchase panels in these community-owned solar projects will receive quarterly REC payments between $.08 and $.11 per kWh (gross) throughout the array’s 20-year life expectancy — compared to the 10-year REC payments issued for smaller rooftop systems. “Solar power is booming across the country and cities are at the forefront,” McCall said. “As the number 10 city in the country, Denver is a case in point — but we still have work to do to make the most of our 300 days of sun.”

Residential solar energy options in Mesa County, CO

The price of solar panels has been dropping. In the last five years the cost has decreased 60-70 percent. That’s why one of the best home builders in Mesa County is making solar power a standard part of a home. When buyers move into homes built by Synergy Builders, there are already solar panels on the roof. Synergy Builder's says only 450,000 rooftops in America have solar panels. Yet they expect that number to grow quickly as consumer demand increases. Synergy Builder's believes there is a lot of opportunity to do solar because more than 900,000 new homes are built in the United States every year. Synergy Builder's is one of only a handful of builders in the country who are offering solar panels as a standard feature of a home.