New West Energy Grok

Rural Coops Face Net Metering

By Richard Martin, 4-20-07

You’d think that utilities would get behind the movement across the West toward “net metering,” which allows owners of small solar- and wind-power systems to put the excess energy they generate back onto the grid, and be compensated for it. The electricity produced by homeowners or ranchers, after all, is power they don’t have to generate or buy on the market.

Rural Electricity Associations, however, have lined up against Colorado’s House Bill 1169, which would significantly raise the amount of user-generated power utilities have to allow on their grids. The measure passed the House in late March and is currently before a Senate committee in Denver. The associations argue that raising the net-metering caps would allows big-box stores and agribusiness to get into the energy business, and would raise rates for non-energy-producing ratepayers.

“What this bill does is blow the lid off the existing net metering law,” Rep. Cory Gardner of Yuma said last week. “Instead of allowing individuals to produce power for their own needs, it creates a giant loophole for people to get into the power business on the backs of rural electric rate payers.”

This, of course, is nonsense. The net metering bill would require REAs to allow just one percent of their electricity to come from net metering for the first two years, and only five percent in the long run.

As State Sen. Brandon Shaffer of Longmont told the Sterling Journal-Advocate, “Coloradans have voted for change and the rural electric cooperatives are pushing for the status quo.”

In other energy news:

-- The value of Western Slope oil and gas wells continues to climb, to the benefit of current stakeholders including “an undisclosed private company” that agreed last week to sell a group of fields to Plains Exploration & Production Co. for nearly $1 billion, most of that in cash. The fortunate seller is thought to be Denver-based Laramie Energy LLC.

-- If you were hoping gas prices would fall in time for summer vacation, you’re out of luck. Inflation in March was fueled by rising gas prices, and analysts are predicting 3 bucks a gallon at the pump in some areas. The good news: prices will actually average a few cents less than last summer, according to Guy Caruso, energy information administrator for the Energy Department, who was speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures at the Warwick Hotel in Denver on Tuesday.

-- A dead rhinoceros, a mysterious length of pipe, and a venerable Texas ranching family alleging a corporate vendetta all add up to one bizarre lawsuitfor Denver-based Forest Oil Co. The company holds a lease to drill on the McAllen Ranch, a 70,000-acre spread in South Texas, and rancher Jimmy McAllen says a dispute over royalties has led to a nefarious revenge plot that includes Forest Oil’s gift of old pipe for a corral. The pipe, McAllen claims, was saturated with radioactivity that not only killed one of his two black rhinoceroses but also gave him the rare form of cancer that led to the amputation of his right leg in 2005.

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