Published in the Boulder Daily Camera on January 30th, 2026
You’ve probably noticed it. Xcel’s electric system is becoming increasingly expensive and increasingly unreliable. Great combo… Well, maybe not.
The sad news is “We ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Xcel’s rates are likely to go up — and their reliability is likely to go down. Hang on to your hats — and your bank accounts — and, yes, do make emergency plans and get a battery if you can.
What is a community to do?
First, it is important to understand the root causes of the situation.
Xcel is an investor-owned utility that has had a monopoly in its service territory for close to a century. While the people who work for Xcel are good, competent and caring people, monopolies are not known for their price discipline or their success in innovation.
While we now have three good Commissioners at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, it takes a long time to get an entity that hasn’t been well-regulated under control, and it is very difficult to have price discipline without competition.
While Xcel’s sales have been close to flat for the last 20 years, its after-tax profits have more than tripled, with Xcel having $782 million in after-tax net income in Colorado in 2024! That’s a lot of millions — but of course, a significant amount goes to Wall Street in dividends, not to our communities to build a 21st-century electrical system.
Xcel is in the process of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on what might be called “expensive Band-Aids” for their dilapidated 20th-century system of poles and wires. Those Band-Aids will drive up our rates because when Xcel spends money, we pay the bills. Yet these expensive Band-Aids are likely to fail at protecting us from wildfires or improving reliability in the face of the increasingly extreme weather driven by a warming planet.
Similar to the situation with an old car that requires expensive repairs, and is still unreliable, it becomes time to “bite the bullet,” take on a new car payment and get a new set of wheels. So it is with our electrical system. It is time for a new, 21st-century model.
The good news is we have much of the technology that will allow us to build a 21st-century electrical system with greatly reduced reliance on the vulnerable poles and wires of the 20th century.
The key is to put as much generation and storage as close to load as possible. Storage includes the very large batteries in electric vehicles, including trucks and buses.
While it can appear cheaper to build big wind, solar and gas plants a long way from where the electricity is needed, those calculations often ignore the often very high costs of transmission.
In addition, the costs of utility-scale generation often assume that outages have no costs — something that Boulder County residents and businesses know is clearly false. What are the costs of throwing out food or not being able to work or closing your business or of being very cold or not having the medical equipment you need to stay alive? Those costs are clearly not zero.
So instead of spending hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars on expensive Band-Aids for the 20th-century system, we need to get serious about adding as much solar and storage as close as possible to load and tying the solar and storage and electric vehicle batteries and flexible loads (like water heaters and other appliances) together with computers to make locally controlled microgrids and virtual power plants.
While Xcel has made some small and begrudging steps in the direction of microgrids and virtual power plants, they are overwhelmingly focused on building large, distant generation combined with expensive transmission and complex, vulnerable distribution systems. That approach requires large capital investments that Xcel can control, and the bigger their capital investments, the higher our rates and the bigger their profits.
The Boulder City Council is to be credited with deciding to focus on the reliability and resilience of our electrical system in 2026. Please talk to your local and state elected officials and let them know you want a 21st-century electrical system — not a 20th-century system with expensive and ineffectual Band-Aids.
Leslie Glustrom has been an intervenor and a participant at the Colorado PUC for over 20 years. She is a Senior Advisor to Clean Energy Action and a member of Empower Our Future and the Colorado Coalition for a Livable Climate. She is trained as a biochemist and lives in Boulder.
