Boulder’s Path to 100% Renewable Energy (Episode 75)

If you’ve been listening to Building Local Power for a while, you might remember we brought you the story of Georgetown, Texas, and their transition to 100% renewables back in the fall. That was the very first episode in what was initially planned to be a six-part Voices of 100% series. Since then, the series has really taken off and expanded beyond just those six episodes. There really are a lot more than six stories to tell, given that over 100 cities have now committed to 100% renewable energy. So, without further ado, here’s the episode. We hope you enjoy it, and also that you check out the rest of the Voices of 100% series. You can find links on our show page.

What I mean by that is it’s not just about greening the electrons, it’s about understanding that energy is so much broader than just electricity. When we talk about energy, we mean electricity, we mean natural gas or alternatives for heating and industrial processing, and of course petroleum for transportation. When you think about energy, or at least as we think about energy, it represents 99% of our emissions, so when we recognize that in that transition to cleaner resources and cleaner alternatives, it also brings forward all of these amazing opportunities in terms of ingenuity and entrepreneurship and new ways to develop and deploy technology, and really support our low-and-fixed income. It is that great kind of coming together of the Venn diagram of the legs of a sustainability model. We talk about, of course, the economic, social, and environmental, but we also talk about equitably and resilience, so it is a way to kind of bring those pieces together. I know that’s a very long answer, but it is what drives our efforts here in Boulder when it comes to climate and energy.

I just want to ask you because we were chatting before we got online here, before we were recording, about Xcel Energy, so that’s your investor-owned utility company that serves Boulder, and they’ve recently put together a resource plan that pretty much gets them to the level of renewables that five years ago you were talking about a municipal utility could get to. So, does that take away from what you could get by taking this strategy, by looking at having a city-run utility in terms of the 100% goal, but the other goals that the city of Boulder has?

We developed a whole series of goals, one of which is access to renewable energy, but there were other commitments that were made and other goals that related to price stability and looking at high levels of reliability, being able to work with entrepreneurs and our local energy companies to test and model some of their devices and technology, and really shifting the notion of what a utility does, and becoming more of a service provider, rather than the seller of the commodity, which is kilowatt hour. There’s been a lot of talk about the utility of the future, not just here in Boulder, but across the country, as markets shift and as desires shift, and as customers become more literate on choice. So, it’s always been our aim to really figure out how a utility functions in a much different way.

Now, you bring up a really critical point, which is we knew Xcel Energy was going to move in the direction that we’ve always hoped they would move in terms of procuring more clean electricity, more green electrons, and offering that to consumers, but it matters how they do it in terms of ownership structure. As we think about a decentralized model, one which everyone has the ability to have a power plant on their roof, have the ability to over-generate and sell or donate excess power, that whole transactive energy concept, how we start to harmonize the components of electrification of our thermal system, electrification of our transportation system, those are really, really cutting-edge things that we all hear about, and the utility plays a central role in that. We’ve always said, “Where we need to go is, one, that a utility is that facilitator, and it enables those kind of … a new marketplace so to speak.”

So, Xcel is moving in the right direction. The question is are they going to get far enough, are they going to get there fast enough? This last round of bids and the selection of their resources and their last ERP just in the past couple weeks really is exciting. It’s exciting to see that the market has responded, and it is now much … it’s actually cheaper to build new wind and include storage than it is to run existing coal plants in the state of Colorado. That is extraordinary, so what does that mean for our efforts in terms of municipalization? It means that the differential between status quo and what we could do on day one may get a little bit smaller, but our goal is to get to 100% by 2030. That is the goal that our community has committed to, it’s the goal of that our city council has codified, and as I said earlier, when I talk about it matters how we do it, we have a goal for local generation as well.

We are looking to get to 100 megawatts of local generation in the city of Boulder by 2030, so you find that pinch point then between a utility that may be installing and owning large, centralized solar and wind plants in the southeast or southwest corners of the state versus distributed generation on our roof tops that adds resilience, adds those benefits back to consumers directly. So, I think we are seeing that the conversation shifts to not, “Are renewables viable and should that be the direction we go?” but, “How do you do it, and what’s the right ownership structure?”

Are there other complementary measures that the city is taking? Municipalization is kind of the headline thing, right? It’s been going on for seven years. It’s this huge undertaking. There have been a couple of points of big opposition, and I’d like to come back to that. What other things is Boulder doing at the city level, at the local level, to help accelerate toward 100%, other than this conversation about the ownership of the system, although that is, obviously, a very important one?

So, from the things that are kind of central to our competency as local government, looking at energy or efficiency requirements, not only from our commercial sector but for our rental housing. We were the first community to have rental housing efficiency requirements, which is extraordinary. It’s really dramatically improved the quality of our rental housing in Boulder. We have really taken a different approach in thinking about, as a community, that it isn’t about just one city. If one city is 100% renewable, so what? What really matters is how we share and how we export learning and how we work together and lean on one another in terms of communities, and so the big focus area over the past couple of years has been building out our networks of cities, really relying on one another in terms of going to the state legislature, point to the PUC, looking at the federal level to change policy. We created a couple of coalitions, one is called the Colorado Communities for Climate Action or CC4CA. It’s a coalition of now 22 cities across our jurisdictions. It does include some counties across the state of Colorado, that is acutely focused on policy reform related to climate. We don’t shy away from it. We talk about resilience, we talk about climate. We’ve been incredibly effective at working with the governor’s office and working with state legislators to really remove those restrictions that we bumped into. I think that’s one of the challenges that local communities face. You say… In a regulated state like Colorado, our utility, it’s a regulated monopoly and we say, “Well, we’ll do whatever we can do,” and that really kind of boils down to efficiency or on the customer’s side of the meter.

Yet the things that are the biggest levers we can pull, we continue to bump into the either regulation or policy that is restrictive. We often throw up our hands and say, “Well Gosh, there’s nothing we can do.” We have turned that around to say, “No, in fact, this coalition represents one seventh of the population of this state. We now have a seat at the table. We are working with our state leadership to really devise and develop new policy that enables really, really aggressive local action that really transforms the benefits that we’ve seen in the past.” We are also strongly, strongly focused on the electrification of our transit system. We’ve just launched a program in the past couple of months around that we call carbon 365, really looking at how do we as a community and community members think about the transition of a natural gas. What does that look like? How do we do that so we don’t create winners and losers?

We’ve done a bunch of pilot projects to figure out how you bundle some of these services and really make this transformational change. We’ve done full neighborhood transformations around natural gas conversion. Just this past week we were so honored to host the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance annual meeting. We had 24 cities from around the globe. These are leaders in the world, really thinking about some of the transformational strategies. We are by far the smallest community, but it really speaks volumes to our commitment in this area. We were able to really work collaboratively with those communities to say, “What are the most effective strategies and how do we really pivot away from just offering energy efficiency services to really thinking about the biggest levers we can pull in each community?”

We worked in parallel with our own rental housing association. I would not suggest that it was easy at the beginning, but we are nearing the completion of our compliance period, where we’ve been able to get over 90% of our rental housing compliant with our energy efficiency requirements through SmartRegs. I think the fear at the beginning is that those costs would be really transferred to the renters. We haven’t seen that occur. There’s been some indication that rents in certain areas have increased, but by increasing the literacy of the renters at the same time we’re able to work with the whole system to say, “Oh, what does savings look like and how do you actually transfer the savings to the tenant, not just the cost for the upgrade?” And so, it was a little bit rocky at the beginning, but it really had smoothed out and we have done a number of studies and analysis to show that the benefit has actually been pretty extraordinary in terms of cost saving.

I wanted to get into some of these other policy concepts that you were talking about in this coalition work that you’re doing at the state level, you mentioned kind of bumping into restrictive policies, whether that’s the fact that it’s electric utilities are regulated monopolies, gas utilities are regulated monopolies. It’s something that’s true over 30 states. What are some of those things that you’re asking for when you go to state leaders, state legislators that would give the local community more power to address those issues of climate and energy?

We try to balance our ask between those that are specific to regulation, versus those that are more widespread in terms of policy or legislation. Some examples, the state of Colorado, sure we have… Our governor Hickenlooper has signed an executive order related to climate and set some high level goals, but we don’t have an updated inventory. We don’t have an agency within state government that is actually monitoring and measuring progress, so that’s an area that we’ve been focused on pretty heavily. Clean cars standards, of course, zero emission vehicles, making sure that that’s included in our state plan. Looking at the transition as we think about decommissioning coal and natural gas. To my earlier comment, it does matter how it’s done, so we are looking at things like increasing the size limitation on qualified facilities, looking at ways to remove some restrictions on sizing distributed generation in our communities.

So the 120% rule is a perfect example of that, where it was a fine intention when it was developed years ago with regard to access to the incentives by the utility, yet the unintended consequences, now as we think about solar as a tool for longterm affordability, as we think about solar as a tool for energy resilience in our communities, as we think about the integration of storage in our communities, we run into interconnect requirements and sizing limitations. It’s our goal and our aim to go to the code where those restrictions exist and get sponsorship to relax or remove some of those restrictions. Because, I don’t think that the legislature contemplated that it would be affordable and advantageous for community members to start looking at residential storage, neighborhood scale storage and how that gets deployed within a community. Those are some examples of what we’re really focused on in this upcoming session.

Looking at how we work with our local manufacturer… Excuse me, our local distributor of electric vehicles. And trying to answer that question, the role of local government, what should we be focused on? Is this a deployment of charging infrastructure? Is it looking at rebates and incentives to get more vehicles on the road? Is it to really think about the future of charging infrastructure and where that will head? Does it make sense to really focus on level two charging or should we figure out how to get more DC fast charging? How do we look at shared lead opportunities between our governmental agencies looking at autonomous vehicles?

One of the projects that I’m really proud of, we use some of our Department of Energy Ready Grant, which is really focused on reliability and resilience, and using some of those dollars to partner with a local transit authority to help them purchase their solar, to put in some storage. But also, this great forward thinking idea of electrifying their bus system, and then looking at charging those buses with solar, and then looking at some autonomous routes on the CU campus. So there’s this vision of where we want to go and these projects are more than just these one off projects. We’re also looking at a micro grid on the CU campus, but not just because we can do a micro grid, but what’s the purpose. What are we trying to, what problem are we trying to fix, what questions are we trying to answer? So we have this great benefit of having the federal labs here, having the university and its research applications to really say what do we need to do as a community, how do we establish a a real clear understanding of roles and competencies of all of the players. And that’s been a really exciting I think over the past year or so, and it’s been a transition.

Now back to your earlier question, all of this is in parallel with our work around municipalization. We know what we can get to if we don’t municipalize, and how far and fast we can go, and we know if we are not a regulated utility, the role of that electric utility shifts pretty dramatically, and it becomes a much stronger player in all of this transition.

Yet, it does create a good starting place for us to think about new ways to partner with the utility. I remain hugely optimistic and open to the fact that we could still work out some type of deal between the city of Boulder and Xcel Energy. I think that they recognize the benefit and the shift in this utility landscape. When we look at utilities that are really doing great things, Xcel as typically towards the top of the list. But at the end of the day we as a community have been tasked by our community to really figure out how do we get to our goals related to energy, how do we get to 100% renewable electricity, how do we get to 100 megawatts of local generation? And I have not seen the pathway yet with Xcel. But again, I remain hopeful. They are doing what they have been required to do by our public utilities commission. After we finalized our transfer of assets of proceeding at the PUC, we have been working with him pretty closely on the completion of our required contracts to move into the transition that allows us to go into the condemnation action.

I can’t say with any amount of certainty that we will create an electric utility, but what I think is important is that we are able to look back and say it’s been worth it. And right now I can say that the work that we have done, we have learned so much in the past eight years about our energy system, about the needs and desires of our community, about the role that resilience truly plays, and how energy and electricity really fit into our overall objectives to decarbonize our energy supply.

What I would say to that is, whether it’s symbolic or not, I think it sends a very strong signal to the marketplace. I think it sends a strong signal that we as communities are going to stand up straight, and we are going to make our voices heard in terms of where we want to go. And that’s really, really important. As I look across the state of Colorado, we have a handful of communities, some of which you would never expect to establish 100% goals. And it is extraordinary because they are looking at it from the perspective of protecting their customers, protecting their most vulnerable population, looking at the fact that using renewables to stabilize the cost of electricity, to understand the health implications of burning fossil fuels, it is totally shifting the narrative around what communities can and should be doing.

I would also say that it’s disingenuous and patently false to say that no one entity can go 100% renewable. I think the science indicates in getting the grid to 80% would be relatively easy, but that last 20% would be tough. And no one denies the physics. That’s not the issue. The issue is that when a city’s run on 100% renewable energy, that’s an accounting reality, not a physics reality. And I think that’s really exciting. So don’t get hung up on someone claiming, “Well, you’re never going to get to 100%.” Looking five years back, we would never have thought that wind would be at price parity, much less solar, be at price parity. Never in a million years would we thought that storage would be a potential dispatchable resource for utilities. But here we are.

When you think about establishing a target for 2030, much is going to happen between now and 2030, much will happen in the next 30 to 50 years. So I would say to any community that’s contemplating this, be bold, recognize the benefit, and recognize that energy is at the center of this sustainability challenge, and it’s also an indispensable ingredient of our modern economic life.

The last piece is that, bringing it back to the idea of climate, we don’t have to talk about energy and 100% renewable energy as the biggest lever around climate change. We can talk about resilience. Because it’s equally important. But the reality is climate change carries serious consequences for us as humans and for ecosystems. And it’s a crisis that’s going to affect our food, our national security, our water, our ability to live where we choose, and basic human needs, et cetera. And we see it every day when we look at our windows here in Colorado.

It is extraordinary, it is incredibly hopeful when we see communities across this state declare their intention to go to a 100% renewables for whatever reason. So again, it is a movement. It’s a movement that I think we’re going to see continue, and it’s going to greatly expand in the coming years.