By Leslie Glustrom
Boulder has a chance to take an “off ramp” from its 2020 electric “franchise” agreement with Xcel in 2025. Many Boulder residents would like to take that off-ramp and look for a different, more localized and responsive supplier.
In a recent op-ed, Boulder Chamber of Commerce President John Tayer asked “Are you kidding?”
The answer is absolutely not!
The effort to move beyond Xcel’s monopoly is not driven by a desire to repeat the municipalization battle, but by a desire to go down a path known as Community Choice Energy, where one or more communities aggregate their demand and go “shopping” for a better deal.
It is also motivated by a desire to build a 21st-century electrical system with an emphasis on local generation and storage to better withstand the increasingly severe extreme weather events of this century.
Communities all over Colorado, ranging from Fountain (south of Colorado Springs), to the area around Steamboat Springs (Yampa Valley Electric) to the Roaring Fork Valley (Holy Cross Energy) to the area around Grand Junction (Grand Valley Electric) and more have been able to find better deals when they had the chance to go shopping for an alternative supplier. (For some examples, search “Guzman Energy Colorado.”)
Boulder and other communities that are retail customers of Xcel deserve this same opportunity.
Xcel is able to buy wind, solar and battery storage for well under 4 cents per kilowatt hour, but they sell it to their residential customers for just under 14 cents per kilowatt hour. Nice business if you can get it — but you can’t while Xcel has the monopoly.
Clearly, there is room for competitors to bring our community a better deal.
While Mr. Tayer makes a big deal out of the $2-3 million a year spent on municipalization, Xcel takes over $20 million a year out of Boulder for its “after-tax-net-income” (aka “profits”).
Without competition, Xcel has virtually no incentive to exercise true price discipline. While Xcel will incessantly assert that they care about costs, the “proof” is in your Xcel bill and the generally ever-increasing rates we all pay.
With Xcel’s plans to make over $22 billion in capital expenditures in Colorado over the next five years, Xcel’s customers can expect to see a string of very substantial rate increases — and for Xcel’s excessive profits to continue to balloon!
Yes, there is indeed widespread support in the community for breaking away from Xcel’s monopoly, with story after story of abysmal customer service.
These anecdotal stories are supported by an extensive analysis done by the Public Utilities Commission staff and presented to the PUC on April 30, 2025.
The presentation has been summarized in several media outlets, and the data is on the PUC webpage under “Key Issues Before the PUC.”
While the PUC reports on outages and customer service are extremely detailed, a couple of key points underscore the decline in Xcel’s service: In 2024, the average number of outage minutes more than doubled from the 2014-2023 average, and customer complaints approximately doubled from 2022 to 2024.
Residential and business customers who have experienced extended outages and long and fruitless waits on Xcel’s “customer service” line know only too well what these numbers mean in real life.
Anyone remember how Xcel handled the preemptive power outage in April 2024? (If not, just do a quick search for “Xcel Outage April 2024 Boulder.”)
Xcel is a member of the Boulder Chamber of Commerce and likely exerts considerable pressure on that organization, and, to my knowledge, Mr. Tayer has little or no experience at the PUC, and seeing the details of how Xcel actually operates.
No, Boulder residents are definitely not kidding about wanting to have the freedom to look for a supplier of electricity other than Xcel.
Boulder residents and businesses clearly understand the benefits of healthy competition — something that Xcel does not have.
Hopefully, our City Council will let the community vote on the off ramp this year and have a discussion on whether our community might benefit from moving beyond Xcel’s monopoly to a system that includes competition to provide more price discipline and successful innovation for a 21st-century electrical system.
No, Boulder residents are most certainly not kidding!
Leslie Glustrom is trained as a chemist and biochemist. She has spent most of the last 20 years participating at the Public Utilities Commission working to decarbonize our electrical system and helping to build the climate movement in Colorado and beyond. Glustrom lives in Boulder.