Colorado Leads West in Renewable Energy Push

By David Frey, 10-07-07

Thanks to new wind farms, a massive solar plant, a wind turbine blade factory and an ambitious governor and legislature, Colorado has become a rising star in developing renewable energy. Its work has attracted international attention and put Gov. Bill Ritter in the national spotlight.

While Colorado stands at the forefront of these issues in the Rockies, though, it doesn’t stand alone. Long a supplier of fossil fuels like coal, oil, natural gas, even uranium, the West increasingly sees its energy future in the sun, wind and earth.

“The West does have some of the best wind, geothermal and solar resources in the country,” says Doug Larson, executive director of the Western Interstate Energy Board, the energy arm of the Western Governors’ Association.

What began a few years ago as a worry over stable power supplies has evolved into environmental concerns, including mounting global warming fears. Alternative energy has topped the agenda of the association, a group of leaders of 19 states and three Pacific islands. This fall, the organization is hosting a series of workshops meant to speed up alternative energy technologies in the West.

“We need new resources to meet the growing needs of the West,” Larson says. “Those resources have to be much cleaner than they’ve been in the past, and I think the push has been accelerated by a number of governors’ concerns about climate change.”

At a recent stop to the heart of oil and gas country on Colorado’s Western Slope, Ritter stressed what he calls the “New Energy Economy.”

“It’s not going to be any one thing, the energy future of this country, but it will certainly involve renewables,” Ritter said in an interview.

Ritter appeared at a new West Garfield County campus of Colorado Mountain College built mostly with donations from the natural gas industry, and its curriculum caters to their needs. In one classroom, an instructor showed off an apparatus of glass vials and copper tubing meant to replicate the refinery process. Much of Ritter’s audience consisted of energy industry officials and community leaders from natural gas boom towns.

His message: energy plays a key role in Colorado’s economic development strategy, but not necessarily their kind of energy. The focus, he told them, is “really on renewable energy.”

It’s a message he recently took to Washington when he testified in front of a House committee last month and took the Bush administration to task for not doing more to encourage alternative fuels.

“I expressed frustration that the federal government had done too little,” Ritter says. “There’s a remarkable opportunity to promote renewable energy.”

Testifying in front of the House Select Committee on Renewable Energy and Global Warming, Ritter, told legislators: “There is great frustration among governors that there is not a federal policy that supports what states are doing around renewable energy.”

Ritter’s efforts been aided by a sympathetic Democratic-controlled state legislature. Lawmakers this year doubled the state’s renewable energy portfolio standard for public utilities to 20 percent by 2020. They established a clean energy fund to pay for the Governor’s Energy Office and created tax credits for renewable energy. They launched a program to place wind turbines on schools, called for state vehicles to run on biofuels, greened up state buildings and schools and boosted building efficiency standards, amid a dizzying array of renewable energy and efficiency legislation.

“It was the greenest session to date,” says energy office spokeswoman Megan Castle.

Ritter’s first visit by a foreign head of state was by the Swedish prime minister who came praising the state’s work toward renewables in the absence of federal efforts. Meetings with Danish officials led to the construction of the Vesta Blades turbine blade factory in the town of Windsor. Recently, a Dutch diplomat paid a visit, also with renewables on his mind.

“It speaks to how far we have come how quickly,” says Ritter spokesman Evan Dreyer.

Other Western states are making headway, too. After addressing legislators, Ritter accepted an award on behalf of the Western Governors’ Association from the Alliance to Save Energy. Two years ago, the organization launched a Clean and Diversified Energy Initiative, calling for a 20 percent boost in energy efficiency by 2020, 30,000 megawatts of new clean and diverse energy by 2015 and better transmission over the next 25 years.

“The push for efficiency is occurring throughout the West,” says the group’s Larson. “It’s not just limited to the ‘left coast,’ if you will.”

Earlier this year, Montana passed a “Clean and Green” energy bill, providing tax incentives for renewable energy development and transmission, and it created a renewables portfolio standard. Wyoming has seen a growing number of wind farms. Gov. Dave Freudenthal has been pushing clean coal and carbon sequestration, as well as boosting renewables.

“It’s a really important topic for him and it’s definitely at the top of the agenda,” says Freudenthal’s spokeswoman Cara Eastwood.

New Mexico’s Gov. Bill Richardson, a longtime proponent of clean energy, has called for an even bigger push for renewables. The state passed a flurry of clean energy bills this year, boosting tax credits, increasing the renewable portfolio standard, encouraging green building and promoting biofuels.

New Mexico, Wyoming and Nevada have created agencies specifically to tackle the thorny problem of bringing renewable energy into the grid. It’s a lot harder to tie in scattered wind farms and solar arrays than it is to plug in a power plant, one of renewables’ biggest stumbling blocks.

“Wyoming is one of the national sweet spots for wind power, but the constraint is the transmission lines to get that power to market,” Freudenthal said at a recent summit.

But if Rocky Mountain states are making progress toward renewables, they still lag behind others. Many states – among them California, Iowa, Vermont and Texas – invest far more than Colorado, despite its rising-star status.

Ritter’s Governor’s Energy Office gets $7 million to push renewables and efficiency, Castle says. Texas devotes $98 million to it.

“We are charged with making the most out of this money that we can,” she says.