A Flight Into Energy’s Future

By Richard Martin, 8-28-08

	Caption: On a clear day you can see the gas rigs

Bumping along at 7000 feet in a Cessna Citation, we could see below us Colorado’s dirtiest power source – and its cleanest.

Below us to the west, near the Colorado-Wyoming border in northern Weld County, stood the Rawhide coal generating station, which provides much of the electricity for the booming towns of Fort Collins, Longmont, and Loveland. To the east lay long rows of white turbines making up the Ponnequin Wind Farm, Colorado’s first, built starting in 1998.

Strung along the plain facing west, toward the Front Range, stood four dozen or so 50-meter-high turbines like sentinels guarding the flatlands stretching into the hazy distance. Farther east hundreds of drilling rigs, pumping natural gas, were scattered amid the suburban sprawl of Northern Colorado. Interspersed were new developments of mini-mansions, stranded on the plain like ships adrift on an undulating sea of green and brown.

In Denver, 100 miles to the south, a string of Democratic leaders had spent three days extolling the prospects for a clean-energy revolution that will create millions of new jobs while safeguarding the atmosphere. Here, from overhead, we had a more mixed perspective.

Piloted by Bruce Gordon, the founder of EcoFlight, the small plane carried a small group of media types on a convention-related trip to overfly some of the critical energy-producing areas of the Front Range. Our tour guide was Mike Bowman of 25X25, an energy advocacy group working to insure that by 2025, 25% of America’s energy comes from renewable sources.

The 60 megawatt Ponnequin facility “really kicked off wind-power development in Colorado,” said Bowman as Gordon circled around to the south. From a base of zero less than a decade ago, Colorado now has more than one gigawatt of installed wind power, ranking it sixth among the states. By 2015, according to Keith Hay of Environment Colorado, the state could be producing more than two gigawatts, or 3.5% of the state’s total electricity needs.

Still, over the next 15 years the electricity demand in Colorado, as in other Western states, will soar: the state will need nearly 5 gigawatts of new power just to keep up with increased demand. The Rawhide plant, built by the Poudre River Power Authority in the early 1980s, supplies 274 megawatts with another 260 of backup genarting capacity for summertime peak loads.

We couldn’t see them but the Rawhide plant and its surroundings, including a 500-acre reservoir, support their own bison herd. The Poudre River authority boasts that Rawhide consistently ranks among the top 5% of coal plants nationwide in terms of sulfur dioxide emissions.

Electricity from the Rawhide plant costs about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour – far less than the power generated by the wind turbines about 15 miles to the east. The other thing we couldn’t see as we swung south and headed back to the Rocky Mountain Metro Airport, near Broomfield, was massive power transmission lines – because they don’t yet exist. While Colorado has extensive wind- and solar-power potential, it’s hamstrung, at the moment, by a lack of transmission capacity. Spreading small-scale power plants using renewable energy sources across the state would help shift the electricity mix, said Bowman, but it’s infeasible.

“Distributed generation could produce a lot of power,” he said, “but there’s no incentive for the investor-owned utilities to build it.”

More than half a century of political favors and state subsidies have created “an effective monopoly” for the electric power providers, he added, and the move to renewables “is a threat to their economic existence as they operate today.”

Appropriately for this fly-over view of the West’s energy past, present, and future, a thick pall of brown smoke lay over the land, emanating from some unknown source to the northwest. As we flew over the burgeoning suburbs along the I-25 corridor it seemed for a few moments that the fate of the warming planet hung, like our small, crowded aircraft, on a knife-edge between disaster and prosperity. Bowman pointed out an old industrial site on the fringe of Longmont.

“That’s an old sugar-beet plant,” he called over the engine noise. The Front Range has a string of such plants, perhaps half a dozen, that used to process beets into sugar, fueling a major industry at the turn of the last century. Those plants are still now, but they may see life again.

“They’re talking about retrofitting them to produce fuel from biomass,” Bowman told me. “The technology’s almost there.”