The spiking energy bills affecting many Coloradans are caused by colder weather and higher gas prices — factors over which neither regulators nor utilities have control, the Colorado Public Utility Commission reported Wednesday.

Xcel Energy utility bills were on average 52%, or $87, higher in December than they were a year earlier, although some consumers saw their bills double, PUC Chief Economist Erin O’Neill told commissioners in a briefing.

Commissioner John Gavan said he was struck by the magnitude of the costs and the financial pressure they are exerting on Coloradans.

“I can’t remember seeing this level of pain in the consumer community since the 1970s and the gas crisis, which I’m old enough to remember,” he said. “So I take this very seriously.”

The rising utility bills follow the approval by the commission of six electricity and gas rate hikes, several allowing for increases due to rising natural gas prices, that have spurred a near-record number of low-income consumers to seek financial aid to pay their bills.

The state-run Low-income Energy Assistance Plan has received nearly 90,000 requests for bill relief, as of Tuesday, compared with 80,000 for the same period last winter, and has issued $25 million in payments. Energy Outreach Colorado, a nonprofit that helps people with their bills, received 44,000 calls to its HEAT helpline in January.

“This is an unprecedented number,” said Denise Stepto, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit. “Is it sustainable from month to month? There is a lot of pressure to do something.”

The average temperature in December was about 10 degrees colder than it was in December 2021, O’Neill said, and that means more energy was being consumed to keep homes warm. Additionally, commodity prices for natural gas have increased substantially — 40% higher than last year — which is a cost that utility companies pass directly to consumers. Smart meters, recent investments in solar and wind energy, and time-of-use rates for electricity customers are not significantly impacting bill hikes, O’Neill said.

“We share the commission’s concerns and appreciate their efforts to provide greater insight into the causes of higher costs,” Xcel Energy said in a statement. The company said it is adding more low-cost renewable energy and securing competitively priced fuel contracts.

Natural gas continues to be the most reliable and affordable source to heat its customers’ homes each winter, Xcel also said. The company is the largest utility provider in Colorado with 1.5 million electric customers and 1.6 million gas customers.

The price of natural gas for delivery in February has dropped 26% between December and January, to 56 cents a therm, so February bills may be lower, Commissioner Megan Gilman said. But even if the bill crisis is resolved in the short term, there’s a systemic problem. The market for natural gas is unregulated, Gilman said, and fuel price spikes and severe weather events will continue to make prices and rates volatile.

“What we thought were the extremes before February 2021 are not the extremes anymore,” she said.

Addressing the overarching problem is not simple. Price hikes could be spread over time — Xcel Energy is doing this over 30 months with $500 million in gas charges from 2021’s Winter Storm Uri. But that could lead to future price spikes “pancaking” on top of each other, Gilman said. The commission needs to think in the long term, she said.

While the base rates only accounted for 16% of the December increase, both Gilman and Commission Chairman Eric Blank said that the commission should focus on those rates — which they must approve. Blank said the doubling of gas base rates since 2011 didn’t significantly impact consumers when gas prices were low.

“Now the combination of higher commodity prices and the doubling of base rates really puts us in a different world and creates much more affordability pressure,” Blank said.

More attention should be paid to what investments utilities make before the companies come to the commission to add them to the rates customers pay.

Another concern that commissioners expressed is Xcel Energy’s lack of incentive. Blank said there ought to be an alignment of interests between the company and its customers.

“When customers lose, utilities should share some of the pain,” he said.

Gilman said that the mechanism that just passes the cost of natural gas, high or low, on to consumers is also a problem.

“Since it’s a direct pass-through, they do not have an incentive to get you more expensive gas,” Gilman said. “They also don’t have an obvious economic incentive to get the cheapest gas they can. So we need to ensure that they have some skin in the game.”

While 60% of the bill increase was driven by factors the commission can’t control — gas rates and weather — PUC can still have an impact, according to Cindy Schonhaut, director of the Colorado Office of the Utility Consumer Advocate.

“What they can focus on,” she said, “is the 40% of bills beyond the fuel charges,” such as base rates, fixed-use charges and add-ons for specific projects, like pipeline safety.

This story is from The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support The Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun.com. The Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.

This just in from the laboratory: When it comes to the air conditioner chugging away in the window, it’s not the heat — but the humidity that’s causing it to work overtime.

An analysis by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden found that on average more than half of the energy used by residential air conditioning around the globe deals with the moisture hanging in the air on a hot day.

And the projections are that it will become an even bigger challenge as a result of climate change leading to more hot days with warmer air capable of holding more moisture.

The AC is already working hard. In July, a massive heat dome led to heat warnings for more than 100 million people from Portland, Oregon, which saw an unprecedented seven consecutive days above 95 degrees, to Oklahoma City, where it hit 110 degrees.

Denver recorded its second warmest July on record with 16 days at 96 degrees or better, including three days at 100 degrees. On Aug. 3, another heat dome put more than 100 million people under heat warnings and advisories — from Minneapolis to North Texas.

That’s a lot of air conditioning.

The humidity factor does vary from region to region. “Removal of the latent load of moisture will become a bigger issue, though not here in Colorado,” said Iain Campbell, a senior fellow at RMI, an energy think tank. “We live in a desert. If you are in Florida or the tropics, you are out of luck.”

There has been a clear downward trend in humidity since 1980 in the Upper Colorado and Rio Grande basins, including all of western Colorado and the San Luis Valley, Russ Schumacher, the Colorado state climatologist, said in an email.

“On the Front Range and Eastern Plains, it’s not as clear whether there are meaningful trends,” Schumacher said. “Overall, considering that Colorado is far from an ocean, we won’t see the increases in humidity that are expected (and in some places already happening) in coastal areas as the climate continues to warm.”

So for Colorado it is a good news-bad news proposition. There is low humidity in part because we are in a megadrought, with demands to cut water use, reservoirs tapping out, and farm fields shriveling in oppressive heat — but it’s a dry heat.

By way of reference, the average June relative humidity — a measure of how much water vapor is in the air-water mix — in Denver is 46% and in Miami 73%. For every 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature the air can hold 7% more moisture — if there is any moisture around.

Current air conditioning technology is reasonably effective at removing moisture — albeit with some extra energy — up to 60% relative humidity. After that, it’s all heavy lifting.

“In the future there will be places where it will be too hot and too humid to be outdoors,” said Jason Wood, a senior research engineer at NREL, and co-author of the study on air conditioning and humidity.

Still even without humidity, in bone-dry Texas the demand for cooling electricity was so high during the July heat wave that the state’s electric grid operator initiated emergency measures to avoid rolling blackouts.

Texas’ experience is one reason Colorado Public Utilities Commission Chairman Eric Blank asked Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity provider, to do some “worst-case scenario” planning for a heat wave.

The real question is: Why, when it is clear that humidity has been a problem hardly anyone has done anything about it, as almost all air conditioners today are using 100-year-old vapor compression technology?

Today’s AC is based on turn of the 20th century tech

To be sure, vast improvements have been made in that technology and today’s units are to the first air conditioners what the BMW 4.4-liter Turbocharged V8 is to the Model-T Ford’s engine.

Still, both the BMW and the Model T have internal combustion engines. Now electric vehicles are poised to send the gasoline-powered car the way of the horse-drawn buggy, and LED lights are banishing Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulbs.

Meanwhile, ever-improving solar panels are decking rooftops and Tesla Powerwalls are being installed to store electricity at home, but the air conditioner is chugging along on the technology invented in Brooklyn, N.Y., at the turn of the 20th century.

“The pace of evolution of the AC industry is alarmingly slow even considering the best available technology,” a report by the RMI concluded.

This may not be the state of affairs for much longer as researchers, including those at NREL, and companies are searching for new AC technologies that in a two-step process remove moisture and then cool the air.

“They are in a very early stage of development,” said Antonio Bouza, a technology manager at the U.S. Department of Energy. “Just as the internal combustion engine is being displaced by EVs, that’s what we want to do with these technologies.”

It was humidity, ironically, not heat that began the march to the window air conditioner, when a 25-year-old engineer named Willis Haviland Carrier experimented in 1902 with humidity controls for a Brooklyn printing plant bedeviled by swelling pages and blurry prints in summer.

By 1933, Carrier had founded the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America making a unit with technology that became the model for the industry.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that residential air conditioning started to grow in the U.S. Still, in 1952 only 2% of homes had AC and it remained exotic enough to play a role in the 1955 movie “The Seven Year Itch.”

“You have air conditioning! How does it work?” a hot Marilyn Monroe (the story takes place in the summer) breathily asked her lecherous downstairs neighbor as she stands in front of the unit lifting her blouse to bare her midriff.

“The way I feel about air conditioning,” the neighbor, played by Tom Ewell, explains, “no matter how much it costs, if there is no bread in the house, if you have to sell the kid’s bonds, in the summertime in New York City you’ve got to have air conditioning.”

A still from the 1955 movie “The Seven Year Itch”

By 2020, more than 88% of the households in the U.S. had air conditioning and in the next 30 years it will be the fastest-growing energy use in buildings, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Almost all air conditioners deal with humidity by cooling to the dew point, when the moisture in the air drops out as water. This is cooler than need be for comfort and when the water is rung out of the air it releases additional heat with which the air conditioner must cope.

To do the extra work an AC system needs an extra 20% to 30% of capacity, said Eric Kozubal, an NREL researcher developing new cooling technologies and a co-author of the study on AC energy use.

The NREL analysis divided the globe into 60-mile-by-60-mile boxes and within each box added population, a measure of economic activity, air conditioning ownership and weather.

Air conditioning accounts for 4% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions

The study also took into account how much the electric grid depended upon fossil fuels, since the goal was to estimate through computer modeling greenhouse gas emissions from air conditioning.

The researchers calculated that almost 4% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions — 1,950 million tons — come from air conditioning. The bulk of that, 1,190 million tons, were linked to standard air conditioning work cooling and dehumidifying, with the latter accounting for 52% of the emissions.

The rest of the emissions come from refrigerants leaking from units and the releases associated with the manufacture and transport of those units.

The NREL modeling projects that greenhouse gas emissions for temperature and humidity loads will grow five times larger by 2050 as there are more and more air conditioners — particularly in the hottest and most humid places, such as India, Indonesia, China and Southeast Asia.

RMI estimates that providing electricity to the 4.5 billion air conditioners running in 2050, will take 2,000 gigawatts of new electric generating capacity — equal to nearly 2,700 of Colorado’s largest power plant, Comanche 3.

“This is why we need new and better technology,” RMI’s Campbell said.

The federal government sets and periodically increases the minimum energy performance standards for air conditioners, but these do not drive innovation.

“The minimum energy performance standards now are equal to the best available technology 40 or 50 years ago,” Campbell said.

There are versions of the current AC technology that are two times more efficient than what is being sold at the local big box store, but they are more expensive.

One problem is the emphasis on the unit’s upfront price tag rather than its lifetime cost, Campbell said. “Does it help consumers to give them a really cheap piece of equipment that is expensive to run?” he asked. “We’d have to call this a market failure.”

Better AC technology a better solution than a new electric grid

If all the air conditioners in Texas were today’s most efficient units it would have cut the July spike in demand in half and likely avoided any emergency measures or threats of blackout.

“This would also be a much cheaper solution than increasing grid capacity in order to serve an ever-growing base of inefficient air conditioners,” Campbell said.

Another problem is the fact that the industry is heavily concentrated with fewer than 500 manufacturers worldwide, creating a high bar to entry, according to RMI.

In an effort to jump-start technological innovation, RMI and the Indian government offered a Global Cooling Prize with $3 million in prize money.

Two of the world’s top air conditioning manufacturers — Japan’s Daikin Global and China’s Gree Electric  — won with prototypes that improved upon existing technology by adding a second cooling or evaporative coil to deal with humidity, Campbell said.

The second coil and a more finely tuned motor made these prototypes seven times more efficient removing humidity and four times more energy efficient, Campbell said.

Still, they were in essence old-school Carrier technology. Meanwhile around the country, in national labs, universities and startup companies, researchers are working on the next generation of air conditioners.

Using electrostatic charges, membranes and desiccants, which soak up moisture, researchers are trying to develop ways of getting humidity out of the air before cooling — some have received federal funding.

“We aren’t picking a winner. The DOE has funded a lot of technologies with the aim of delivering comfort that is affordable,”Bouza said.

At NREL, Kozubal has been working on twinning cooling with desiccants, which come as solids and liquids.

Using a lithium chloride solution — 10 times saltier than the sea with a strong affinity to absorb water— an NREL team, led by Kozubal, and a start-up company 7AC developed a dehumidifying technology that was ultimately acquired by Emerson, a multinational engineering and industrial services company.

“The Emerson technology is brand new and going into a pilot demonstration phase,” Kozubal said.

The amount of energy such a system could save where it is sticky-humid would be substantial. “You save about 50% of the energy,” Kozubal said. “The added cost of the system could easily be paid for by the energy savings.”

Blue Frontier, a Boca Raton, Florida, startup backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is also using NREL patented liquid desiccant technology matched with evaporative cooling, which, when it gets to market, the company says will deliver up to 80% energy savings compared with vapor compression.

Both the Emerson and Blue Frontier air conditioning units are aimed at the commercial market. “Residential, that might be something farther in the future,” Kozubal said.

Still, improvements in air condition technology are needed across the board as days get hotter and heat waves get longer. “Right now, our grid is very stressed, even though renewables are going in. In the immediate future more efficient air conditioning helps us save energy,” Kozubal said.

This story is from The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support The Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun.com. The Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission on June 10 balked at approving a billion-dollar price tag to shut down Xcel Energy’s five remaining coal-fired generating units — to be paid by customers — and instead is seeking more detailed financial analysis.

The proposed closing costs were part of a settlement agreement between Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity provider, and a group of state agencies, local governments and labor and environmental groups.

The commission, however, wanted more scrutiny of the finances. “We’ve expressed concern over understanding these costs,” Commissioner Megan Gilman said. “We owe that to the ratepayers.”

At issue is the financial method Xcel Energy is proposing to recover the closure costs. The commission said it wants Xcel to analyze a range of options, particularly using securitized bonds, which are seen as a potential cheaper financing mechanism.

“It is incumbent upon the company to model securitization and other options,” Commissioner John Gavan said. “We will need to take this off to a separate proceeding.”

As part of its electric resource plan — which forecasts the utility’s electricity demand for the next four years and the generating resources to meet it — and its Clean Energy Plan, aimed at cutting the utility’s greenhouse gas emissions, Xcel Energy is moving to close all its coal-fired plants.

The plan is to close the utility’s five remaining units — in Craig, Hayden, Fort Morgan and Pueblo — between 2027 and 2031 at a cost of a little more than $1 billion.

The bulk of that figure — $732 million — is for shutting the 750-megawatt Comanche 3 unit, in Pueblo. The $1.3 billion plant only went into operation in 2010 and will be the last to close at the end of 2030.

The plant has been beset with operating, equipment and financial problems, leading to more than 800 days of shutdowns. Initially, Xcel proposed running the plant until 2040 and then under pressure cut the closure date to 2035 and eventually 2031.

The commission also asked for more detailed data on project operation and maintenance costs for Comanche 3, while it is still in use. “We have seen escalating unexpected costs in terms of unit 3 maintenance,” Gavan said.

Xcel Energy is proposing using securitized bonds to finance the Comanche 3 closure which includes $690 million to pay for the unamortized part of the utility’s investment in the unit, $32 million in cleanup costs and $10 million in bond costs.

The securitized bonds are linked to a guaranteed revenue source from the utility and as a result can be offered lower interest rates, reducing overall costs.

For the three other units, however, Xcel Energy proposed, in the partial settlement of its resource plan submitted to the PUC, using other financing mechanisms, such as accelerated depreciation and a so-called regulatory asset.

A regulatory asset is a financial device in which all the costs associated with closing a coal-fired unit would be gathered in one place and paid off by customers over time — with Xcel Energy also getting an interest payment on the account.

The PUC move may be a concern for the settling parties, said Gwen Farnsworth, a managing senior policy advisor for environmental group Western Resources Advocates, which signed on to the agreement.

One of the goals of the settlement was to close the coal-fired plants as quickly as possible with Pawnee closing its coal-fired unit and switching to natural gas in 2025, followed by the Hayden 2 unit in 2027, and Hayden 1 and Craig closing in 2028.

Breaking the retirement costs off to a separate proceeding could delay the closure process and even lead to knock-on-effects in delaying the acquisition on new, clean resources, Farnsworth said.

Colorado faces the largest increase in homes and businesses threatened by wildfire of any state in the nation with nearly 1 million properties — two-fifths of all those in the state — already facing some risk, according to a new analysis.

The First Street Foundation wildfire risk modeling ranked Colorado No. 7 in the country for structures facing wildfire threats. The foundation also created an online tool — riskfactor.com — that enables homeowners to plug in an address and find the fire risk for their properties.

Over the next 30 years, the model projects that an additional 447,000 homes, businesses, schools and other public buildings in the state will face an increased risk from wildfire — a 19% increase from today. Alabama had the next largest increase in risk, 14.6%.

The area with the greatest wildfire property risk is not Colorado’s forested region, but the Front Range’s growing suburban plains counties — El Paso, Douglas and Larimer, according to the analysis.

“If you think about it, that’s where the people are and where there are people there is more risk of someone starting a fire,” said Chad Hoffman, director of the Western Forest Fire Research Center at Colorado State University. Hoffman was not involved in the foundation’s analysis.

That is also where most of the homes and businesses are located — potential fuel for a fast-moving fire, Hoffman said.

The archetype for future fire risk could be the Marshall fire, a one-day, grass-fed, wind-whipped wildfire on Dec. 30 that destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County.

“Those kinds of fires are clearly becoming more common,” Hoffman said. “These single-day burning periods create a problem.”

While much of the focus has been on the large-scale, intense forest fires that burn for weeks or more, a study by Hoffman and colleagues found that 70% of cumulative area burned in the Western U.S. between 2002 and 2020 were the result of the large, single-day fires.

The First Street analysis looked at the marginal risk of wildfire, with minor risk being less than a 1% chance of being in a wildfire over the next 30 years to extreme risk, defined as a greater than a 26% chance. Annual risk assessment started a 0.03% increased risk for any given year.

In El Paso and Douglas counties, more than 80% of the homes and business properties face a minor risk of being in a wildfire this year — 32,000 and 4,000 properties respectively. In El Paso County, 32,100 properties also face a moderate risk of fire — equal to a 6% chance.

Larimer County ranked third with a little more than half of homes, businesses and public buildings — 82,000 properties — at minor risk and 4,000 facing moderate risk.

The county facing the greatest increased risk from wildfire is Broomfield, where over 30 years, properties that face some additional fire hazard risk rises 48% to 20,400 — equal to more than three-quarters of all the county’s homes, and business and public buildings.

The foundation’s model incorporates data on formation of fuels, wildfire weather and wildfire behavior from agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The First Street Foundation is a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based nonprofit research and technology group focused on defining climate risk in the U.S.

Across the country there were 49.4 million properties with at least minor wildfire risk, led by California, Texas and Florida. There were 4.2 million properties facing severe or extreme risk from fire.

“Enhanced understanding of the specific nature and location of wildfire risk enables communities to more effectively lobby for funding for fuel treatments, prescribed burns and other wildfire risk mitigation strategies that may be used to reduce risk to houses, business and communities,” the foundation said in a statement.

This story is from The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support The Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun.com. The Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.

Xcel Energy is seeking $950 million in natural gas and electricity rate increases that would raise the average residential utility bill by $16.49 by the end of this year with the increase climbing to $18.32 by 2023.

Three proposed rate hikes — one for electricity, one for natural gas and one to recoup money from a spike in natural gas prices in the winter of 2021 — are now before the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

And that is just the beginning, consumer advocates say.

“We are going to see more increases,” said Cindy Schonhaut, director of the state Office of Utility Consumer Advocate. “There are additional increases that have been decided and haven’t been fully implemented.”

It is all part of an ongoing trend, Schonhaut said. An analysis by the consumer advocate office, which represents residential and small business customers in rate cases, found that since 2019 the average residential electricity bill is up 27%.

This piling on — or pancaking — of rate requests has consumer groups worried about bill shock at a time inflation is pushing all prices higher.

“Xcel is asking for the stars, the moon and the sun and they’ll probably just get the moon, but that’s still quite a lot,” said Bill Levis, the former state director of consumer advocacy and now a consultant to AARP, which represents retirees and older citizens.

“The commission really has to be concerned because they see the people who can least afford it— the low-income and elderly — are going to have to pay for it,” Levis said.

As a regulated utility, Xcel must gain the approval of the PUC for any investments in new projects or increases in customer rates.

Denise Stepto, a spokeswoman for Energy Outreach Colorado, which helps low-income households pay utility bills, said in an email, “we know that bills will be higher for all customers. For lower income customers this means a higher percentage of their income is going toward keeping up with their energy bill.”

And in a protest filed by the Utility Consumer Advocate in Xcel’s gas rate case, the agency questioned whether the proposed increase, along with the impact of other hikes and the COVID pandemic, would affect consumers and small businesses “in an unjust, unreasonable, or discriminatory fashion.”

Xcel executives, however, say they are faced with the demands, many embedded in state laws, of transitioning to clean energy and providing electricity and natural gas for a growing economy.

“It’s important to note the increases are paying for a more robust, reliable system and helping us meet our climate and clean energy goals — something that will benefit all our customers,” Michelle Aguayo, an Xcel spokeswoman, said in an email.

“We understand that families are dealing with cost increases across the economy due to inflation,” Aguayo said. “We remind our customers that if they’re having trouble paying their bill, to contact us as quickly as possible so we can help set up a payment plan.”

As to how much of a percentage increase the pending rate requests represent to the average residential customer depends upon which rate case one looks at since Xcel offers different average residential bills in each of the three rate cases it has filed with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

“Xcel does a good job of comparing apples and oranges,” Levis said. “There are so many add-ons to the bills it is not possible for people to know what they are paying for. Part of the problem is that they are not comparing the same things.”

One proposed settlement, with parties including the PUC staff and the Colorado Energy Office, would cover the $550 million in extra electric and natural gas costs incurred by Xcel as a result of a severe winter storm in February 2021 — which the utility said led to natural gas prices soaring a hundred-fold.

Electric bills would temporarily rise $1.49 and natural gas bills $5.59 under the settlement. The increases would take effect in April and extend through September 2024.

In that case it said the average electric bill was $74.55 and the average natural gas bill was $47.55

On Jan. 5, Xcel filed a $182.2 million settlement, which included PUC staff and the consumer advocate office, in its electric rate case that would increase the average bill $5.25. Xcel said this represents a 6.4% increase on the average $81.42 electric bill.

Xcel then filed a natural gas rate case on Jan. 24, seeking a net $188.6 million in new revenue, which would raise rates in three steps over three years for a total increase of $8.14.

The first increase, which would go into effect in November, would be $4.16, about a 6.7% increase Xcel said on an average residential gas bill of $62.42.

“In our filings, the commission usually requires that we present average customer bills based on the rates that are in effect at the time,” Aguayo said. “That’s why filings made at different times have different average bills. Bills change primarily because fuel prices change.”

Less in doubt is the dollar amount that will be added to customer bills. When the second step in natural gas rates would go into effect the additional charge increases to $18.32 before falling to $13.40 when the last extreme weather surcharges expire in September 2024.

Based on the latest filings the average gas and electric bill is about $143.84, which would mean the rate hikes would add up to a 12% increase in 2023.

The rise in rates, however, will not stop there.

The PUC is now reviewing the utility’s $1.7 billion Power Pathways regional transmission project — 560 miles of transmission lines encircling eastern Colorado — designed to bring wind and solar electricity to Front Range population centers from rural areas.

Then comes Xcel’s $7 billion electric resource plan with aims to double the amount of renewable electricity generation and storage.

A Utility Consumer Advocate’s analysis estimates that just those two projects will boost the amount customers will have to pay by 44% in 2031 compared with what they are paying today.

“The energy transition is going to be expensive,” Schonhaut said.

This story is from The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support The Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun.com. The Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.

When Holly Hynes, the internationally renowned costume designer, sat in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House watching the Colorado Ballet’s “Nutcracker” she thought that it looked “pretty gorgeous” – then she got a closer look at the wardrobe backstage.

The 33-year-old costumes – hand-me-downs from the San Francisco Ballet – were definitely showing their age. “They were worn … patched,” Hynes said. “The capes were so heavy.”

It was time for new “Nutcracker” duds and Hynes, who has created tutus and tights for the New York City Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, London’s Royal Ballet and La Scala in Milan, was commissioned to design them.

It was part of a $1.5 million revamp of the company’s production with all new sets and 177 new costumes. But not long after Hynes saw “The Nutcracker” in Denver, the plans were almost upended, as were so many things, by the pandemic.

As theaters closed and new productions were postponed, all the shops that depend on supporting plays and dance saw their work evaporate.

“I had 17 projects that came to a screeching halt,” Hynes said. “It was great that the Colorado Ballet decided to go ahead. It made a huge difference to 18 shops in this project. Many of them would have folded if they hadn’t had the Colorado Ballet.”

In effect, the Colorado Ballet created its own stimulus package for costume designers and makers in the depths of the pandemic.

“We started talking to the shops in New York and here in Colorado and they were very anxious to do the work, because they had none,” Gil Boggs, the Colorado Ballet’s artistic director, said. “We got some benefit on price and we weren’t rushed.”

And the shops poured more effort into the project, Hynes said. “The work that came out of them was three times what we would have gotten if they had other projects.”

One of the workshops that was thrown a lifeline was Parson-Meares, in Long Island City, New York. In its four decades, the shop has made the costumes for a legion of Broadway shows, including “Phantom of the Opera,” “The Lion King,” “Cats” and “Hamilton.”

But in early 2020 it had no work and its 58 employees were furloughed. Then the Colorado Ballet came knocking.

“The Colorado Ballet gave us work at a time when we would have had none,” said Sally Ann Parsons, owner of the workshop. The contract enabled Parsons to bring back 35 employees, split up into three shifts so there would never be too many people in the studio.

Among the costumes Parsons-Meares was asked to make were the tutu for the Sugar Plum Fairy, the mice – very important in the “Nutcracker,” for those not versed in it – the toy soldiers and the jester-like polichinelles, who spill from under Mother Ginger’s huge skirt.

Then the difficult part of crafting and fitting the costumes began. Normally the designer is very hands-on with the workshops and the ballet company and the costumes are fit to the dancers who will wear them.

But now everyone was isolated. Hynes’ assistant drove into New York City and came back with loads of swatches and trim and over five days she selected the fabrics while sitting on her back porch. “There was a sense of urgency because we were worried whether we’d be able to get everything, whether there would be supply-chain issues,” she said.

Designs and cloth were distributed to the workshops and they began sewing. But the dancers who would be wearing them were back in Colorado. Measurements for each dancer had been sent along.

“We did fittings on dancers we knew, or Holly knew” that were about the same size, Parsons said. Hynes borrowed neighborhood kids for the children’s costumes. Her assistant had a camera so she could view the fittings remotely. “Holly didn’t see costumes close up until last spring,” Parsons said.

And while the new costumes may not last another three decades, they were built to stand up to time.

“The costumes in a ballet like ‘Nutcracker’ are used for years and years, so you need to think about how you can make them adjustable,” Parsons said. There is extra material in the side seams and extra material in the bodices.

“Stretch is our friend so we want to incorporate it into jackets, bodices,” Hynes said. “The good thing about ‘The Nutcracker’ is that it fills the seats. The bad thing is it always needs to be continually upgraded and refurbished. It is never-ending.”

Boggs wanted to keep the ballet in its Victorian setting, as it was in the original production – no modern adaptation, he said. “I am a little anxious to see the audience’s reaction to changing something that was working well.”

For Hynes the costumes are, in the spirit of ballet, an exercise of theme and variation. “The first act is a period piece and in the second act you can let your imagination go wild,” she said.

“We try to carry something from the party scene that has stuck in Clara’s brain that carries over to the Land of Sweets,” Hynes said. One of those is her mother’s plum-colored dress transformed into the Sugar Plum Fairy’s tutu.

Another is a fabric print on a couch in the party scene that becomes the massive tent-like dress of Mother Ginger in the second act. “I don’t know if the audience will catch it, but it is fun for us,” Hynes said.

One ballet tradition is that the dancer who first dances in a costume has his or her name sewn into it. When the Colorado Ballet would rent costumes from a big company, like American Ballet Theater, Ramos said he’d sometimes find the names of great dancers, like Mikhail Baryshnikov or Angel Corella, in his costume.

“It is very rare to have a costume made on you,” Ramos said. “It is so special to have your name in a costume. We are the first.”

Colorado Ballet’s “Nutcracker” runs through Dec. 24 at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in the Denver Performing Arts Complex. For information and tickets, visit coloradoballet.org/The-Nutcracker. You’ll also find special COVID safety rules.

This story is from The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support The Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun.com. The Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.

After concluding that oil and gas operator KP Kauffman Co. had engaged in “a pattern of violations,” fines for the company were boosted to $2 million, the second-largest penalty ever issued by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

In August, the commission levied a $1.8 million fine on the Denver-based company, known as KPK, for 22 violations at seven sites, but at a recent hearing the COGCC staff argued that the company’s failures were not isolated incidents and that an “aggravating” multiplier should be applied.

The largest fine, $18.25 million, was issued in 2020 to Occidental Petroleum Corp., the state’s largest operator, for a 2017 house explosion in Firestone that killed two people.

Jeremy Ferrin, the commission’s enforcement supervisor, said KPK was “a poster child” for the use of additional enforcement tools such as the multiplier or suspension of operating certificates. “This is a situation where we need to do something.”

The five members of the commission unanimously agreed, boosting the fine Sept. 21.

“There was persistent disregard for the commission’s authority on multiple occasions,” Commissioner Priya Nanjappa said. “There was a pattern of violations.”

Commissioner John Messner said he “found many of the facts around this hearing to be very disturbing … there were systematic deficiencies.”

KPK operates low-producing oil and gas wells on the Front Range, wells mainly acquired from other companies.

According to DrillingEdge, KPK has 1,250 wells in Weld County, 125 in Adams County, 53 in Arapahoe County and seven in Elbert County, among others. It has a field office in Fort Lupton.

The majority of the wells produce the equivalent of less than a barrel of oil a day, and only five of the company’s wells produce more than 10 barrels a day, according to an analysis by the League of Oil and Gas Impacted Coloradans, or LOGIC, a nonprofit community group.

Some of the violations centered on flow lines, which carry oil, gas and water to collection tanks and have been a source of leaks and spills, according to COGCC inspections.

One of the violations was for trucking contaminated soil away from a well site and spreading it on a field behind a company office without a permit.

The notice of alleged violations, referred to in testimony as NOAVs, for the seven sites followed an order in April to shut 87 wells and clean up 29 sites for violations that included fouling farm fields and covering a road with oily waste. Those earlier infractions were not part of the case before the commission this week.

In commission testimony over Zoom, Kevin P. Kauffman, 65, KPK’s founder and CEO, said that the collapse of oil prices and the pandemic had hobbled the company’s ability to operate and deal with compliance issues.

“We have not performed as well as we might have under these difficult situations,” Kaufman said. He also conceded that relations between KPK and the commission staff have deteriorated. “I am truly sorry.”

“We are committed to improving,” Kauffman said. “I hope you will give me a chance to show what an excellent operator KPK can be.”

Over the course of the hearing Kauffman and other KPK staff gave a litany of reasons for problems at their sites, including historic contamination that was there when they took over the properties, other oil and gas operators damaging their flowlines, COGCC not getting back to company requests in a timely manner, and landowners not letting the company onto to their property to correct violations.

“It seems that a lot of these situations were somebody else’s problem,” Messner said. “Are you trying to insinuate that the majority of the NOAVs, the spills, these situations are not KPK’s responsibility?”

“Without breaking it down,” Kauffman replied, “it is difficult to answer your question.”

The commission still has to decide whether to impose other penalties, such as suspending KPK’s certificates of clearance, which allow it to sell its oil and natural gas, and to determine the company’s ability to pay the $2 million fine.

In testimony, company officials said KPK could not even pay half of the proposed fine. KPK is already dealing with a a $3.5 million settlement with federal and state air quality regulators over emission violations from its tanks that included $2.5 million in equipment upgrades and a $1 million civil penalty.

“Enhancing already steep penalties will not achieve the [goals] we want to achieve,” Kirk Mueller, an attorney for KPK told the commission.

A majority of the commission appeared to agree. “I want to see compliance, this is more important to me than the penalties,” Commissioner Bill Gonzalez said.

Messner proposed suspending part of the penalty pending completion of a remediation plan with tight deadlines.

The hearing was adjourned until October to give KPK and COGCC staff time to work out a proposed remediation plan. Commission Chairman Jeff Robbins will oversee the negotiations.

“We have a very bright future,” Kauffman said, “if the commission will allow.”

This story is from The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support The Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun.com. The Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.

After concluding that oil and gas operator KP Kauffman Co. had engaged in “a pattern of violations,” fines for the company were boosted to $2 million, the second-largest penalty ever issued by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

In August, the commission levied a $1.8 million fine on the Denver-based company, known as KPK, for 22 violations at seven sites, but at a recent hearing the COGCC staff argued that the company’s failures were not isolated incidents and that an “aggravating” multiplier should be applied.

The largest fine, $18.25 million, was issued in 2020 to Occidental Petroleum Corp., the state’s largest operator, for a 2017 house explosion in Firestone that killed two people.

Jeremy Ferrin, the commission’s enforcement supervisor, said KPK was “a poster child” for the use of additional enforcement tools such as the multiplier or suspension of operating certificates. “This is a situation where we need to do something.”

The five members of the commission unanimously agreed, boosting the fine Sept. 21.

“There was persistent disregard for the commission’s authority on multiple occasions,” Commissioner Priya Nanjappa said. “There was a pattern of violations.”

Commissioner John Messner said he “found many of the facts around this hearing to be very disturbing … there were systematic deficiencies.”

KPK operates low-producing oil and gas wells on the Front Range, wells mainly acquired from other companies.

According to DrillingEdge, KPK has 1,250 wells in Weld County, 125 in Adams County, 53 in Arapahoe County and seven in Elbert County, among others. It has a field office in Fort Lupton.

The majority of the wells produce the equivalent of less than a barrel of oil a day, and only five of the company’s wells produce more than 10 barrels a day, according to an analysis by the League of Oil and Gas Impacted Coloradans, or LOGIC, a nonprofit community group.

Some of the violations centered on flow lines, which carry oil, gas and water to collection tanks and have been a source of leaks and spills, according to COGCC inspections.

One of the violations was for trucking contaminated soil away from a well site and spreading it on a field behind a company office without a permit.

The notice of alleged violations, referred to in testimony as NOAVs, for the seven sites followed an order in April to shut 87 wells and clean up 29 sites for violations that included fouling farm fields and covering a road with oily waste. Those earlier infractions were not part of the case before the commission this week.

In commission testimony over Zoom, Kevin P. Kauffman, 65, KPK’s founder and CEO, said that the collapse of oil prices and the pandemic had hobbled the company’s ability to operate and deal with compliance issues.

“We have not performed as well as we might have under these difficult situations,” Kaufman said. He also conceded that relations between KPK and the commission staff have deteriorated. “I am truly sorry.”

“We are committed to improving,” Kauffman said. “I hope you will give me a chance to show what an excellent operator KPK can be.”

Over the course of the hearing Kauffman and other KPK staff gave a litany of reasons for problems at their sites, including historic contamination that was there when they took over the properties, other oil and gas operators damaging their flowlines, COGCC not getting back to company requests in a timely manner, and landowners not letting the company onto to their property to correct violations.

“It seems that a lot of these situations were somebody else’s problem,” Messner said. “Are you trying to insinuate that the majority of the NOAVs, the spills, these situations are not KPK’s responsibility?”

“Without breaking it down,” Kauffman replied, “it is difficult to answer your question.”

The commission still has to decide whether to impose other penalties, such as suspending KPK’s certificates of clearance, which allow it to sell its oil and natural gas, and to determine the company’s ability to pay the $2 million fine.

In testimony, company officials said KPK could not even pay half of the proposed fine. KPK is already dealing with a a $3.5 million settlement with federal and state air quality regulators over emission violations from its tanks that included $2.5 million in equipment upgrades and a $1 million civil penalty.

“Enhancing already steep penalties will not achieve the [goals] we want to achieve,” Kirk Mueller, an attorney for KPK told the commission.

A majority of the commission appeared to agree. “I want to see compliance, this is more important to me than the penalties,” Commissioner Bill Gonzalez said.

Messner proposed suspending part of the penalty pending completion of a remediation plan with tight deadlines.

The hearing was adjourned until October to give KPK and COGCC staff time to work out a proposed remediation plan. Commission Chairman Jeff Robbins will oversee the negotiations.

“We have a very bright future,” Kauffman said, “if the commission will allow.”

This story is from The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support The Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun.com. The Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.