Our coalition has been among Colorado’s many energy stakeholders that have voiced serious concerns about pending new federal air standards and their likely, sweeping impact on power consumers. We have not been shy in stating our deep misgivings, and we have pointed to ripple effects soaring power bills can have on all ratepayers—from large commercial operations to poor and elderly residents on fixed incomes.
Yet, the odds against substantially reworking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s mandate at the federal level—notably, making it more responsive to consumer interests—are at this point pretty steep. Whatever potential remains for challenging the EPA’s Clean Power Plan through Congress or the courts, Coloradans cannot afford to bury their heads in the sand. Meaning, it is prudent for our own state’s policy makers to be proactive and try to cushion our state from the impending blow.
That is why the top priority for Colorado’s electricity consumers at the moment should be to establish a process by which we can assure the fullest and broadest possible input from the state’s diverse power consumers as the federal rules are implemented. Colorado’s citizens must be able to hold the new policy accountable to the extent possible and to ensure its implementation is as attuned as it can be to their concerns in hopes of reining in runaway power rates. To do this, Colorado consumers are best advised to call upon their own state’s most accountable and knowledgeable public institutions to provide the kinds of checks and balances over implementation that are warranted and, in fact, urgently needed for so momentous a new policy.
Legislation now pending in Colorado’s General Assembly affords our consumers that opportunity. Senate Bill 258 would go a long way toward assuring our state’s rank-and-file ratepayers a much-needed voice—a voice they don’t now have—in shaping the specific plan Colorado eventually will submit to federal authorities for ushering in the new EPA rules. While the federal rules are rigid and, as we’ve noted before, impose troubling expectations on states, Colorado at least has the chance to craft a specific implementation plan that attempts to address its consumers’ wide-ranging concerns.
Let’s be clear: The pending mandate will affect every type of consumer—residential, small-business, agricultural and industrial—statewide. That applies to all ratepayers—those served by public utilities, municipal providers and rural cooperatives alike. Colorado consumers are too economically and regionally diverse to be lumped under a single plan without significant stakeholder input.
Senate Bill 258 maps out a process that would account for that broad array of interests. The proposal, introduced in by Sens. John Cooke, of Greeley, and Jerry Sonnenberg, of Sterling, builds in a fundamental priority—transparency—currently missing from the implementation process, and it gives consumers as well as producers of electricity in Colorado a role in that process.
Specifically, the bill instructs the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, by way of its Air Quality Control Commission, to develop the first draft of the state’s implementation plan. The bill then allows our state’s foremost authority on rates and reliability of electricity, the Public Utilities Commission, to review the draft plan and assess its impacts. Finally, it allows the General Assembly to review, amend and vote to approve the plan. Which is to say it gives a pivotal vote to the one statewide public institution that is closest to the people and most answerable to them.
Right now, that level of expertise as well as the that kind of accountability are missing from the process, which essentially vests the state health department with sole authority to script Colorado’s implementation plan—and then send it to the EPA for its OK.
As expected, the health department is moving to reassure power stakeholders that it will take their input even though it is not currently required to do so. A department official testifying at the bill’s debut in a legislative committee promised the department would “work with” stakeholders. That is a tall order indeed for one non-cabinet-level state agency, especially considering the dizzying array of stakeholders here—from large regulated-monopoly utilities like Xcel Energy to rural electric cooperatives; from mom-and-pop businesses to large employers to farmers and ranchers to suburban homeowners and renters to those of extremely limited means. The list goes on.
Too much is simply at stake. Changes to Colorado’s statewide power generation contemplated by the EPA’s mandates may ultimately cost many billions of dollars. Previous mandates implemented by the state on electricity consumers lacked transparency and statewide input. Colorado’s economy and consumers cannot afford more shadowy deals that hurt energy consumers.
We presume the state health department has the best of intentions, of course, but consumers need far greater oversight over the process—and more leverage—than the health department could possibly deliver.
President Reagan once famously advised, “Trust, but verify,” when negotiating a strategic arms treaty; that same common sense drives Senate Bill 258. Perhaps that’s why it passed 5-2 out of committee last week with bipartisan support.
It deserves the full General Assembly’s support and the governor’s, as well.