U.S. Senate
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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
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(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
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40%↓
Att. General
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
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(D) George Stern
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(R) Sheri Davis
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(D) Brianna Titone
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(D) Jerry DiTullio
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CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
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80%
40%
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
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(R) Jeff Crank*
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
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(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
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10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
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State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
September 22, 2010 05:56 PM UTC
29 Comments
Didn’t the stage coaches go out of business because of trains, powered by coal? Perhaps by getting rid of coal there will be a new window of opportunity for the stage coach again!
if consumers would be willing to pay 33+% more on their summer bills to pay for it?
If not, how much would they be willing to pay?
Where did you get that statistic you cited?
How much are people willing to pay for something? These things don’t happen in a vacuum.
Everyone is for cleaner air. Period. You get resistance when you start to associate costs with it. If it cost blinking your eyes twice in the morning or it cost $1 per year – you would have little resistance. If it cost holding your breath for an hour, turning your furnace off in February or $1M per person per year – you’re going to get a lot of resistance.
Obviously the majority of posters on this site have a different threshold than the minority.
The poll is meaningless if it didn’t ask how much people are willing to pay (monetarily, habitually, etc) for the perceived benefit.
Namely that $1 of benefit for me outweighs $0.99 of costs to you.
It assumes we can accurately measure all costs and benefits using one currency.
Also, it assumes that it is reasonable to burden future generations with real costs in order to ensure that current benefits outweigh the costs we currently pay.
For brevity’s sake, I’ll stop with three.
These assumptions may work just dandy in the ivory tower of economic theory.
However, they make for bad ethics.
Your choice.
You are pro-choice, right?
But a bogus number, pulled out of some orifice that we’d rather not see.
we already ARE paying 33%+ MORE for Summer, Winter Bills.
Currently I am saving up to retrofit my properties to OFFSET Xcel’s next rate increases. (you bet your ass they will seek higher rates regardless if the energy is coal wind or Gas.)
As profit is the motive. Xcel is not interested in where the energy comes from… Only just the PROFIT margin.
It’s profit margin is essentially constant for all regulated activities which include electricity and natural gas production and distribution. (It has unregulated activities too, like service contracts, and can make as much of a profit as it likes on those.)
Fuel costs are passed on to Xcel customers at cost, which is adjusted with PUC and Consumer Counsel review every time there is a meaningful change in fuel costs.
Yes, there have been rate increases, but those rate increases are driven by actually increasing costs of natural gas and electricity.
The biggest factor driving up natural gas costs has been new pipeline construction. We used to be a region with lots of natural gas supplies and relatively low demand in places you get get the natural gas to in cheap pipeline deliveries, so our natural gas prices were below the national average. New pipelines expanded our natural gas market to a much larger part of the nation, so the supply and demand sweet spot that we were in disappeared and rates when up.
and for natural gas businesses.
so the supply and demand sweet spot that we were in disappeared and rates when up.”
that new Pipeline flows straight to Minnesota. where rates haven’t gone up and is where Xcel has it’s corporate offices.
unless you have been living under a rock you would acknowledge that the “Public Utilities Commission” rubber-stamps “Okey Dokey” to 19 of 20 requests for rate increases by Xcel.
Public Service of Colorado not only did a better Job of delivery but also worked to KEEP our Gas/Electrical rates low. As it was local and a PUBLIC SERVICE.
I acknowledge PSCo. would need to raise rates along the way but I would wager the farm, those increases would pale in comparison to the GOUGING done by Xcel.
Despite its name, Public Service Co. was a private, investor-owned, for-profit company, not a publicly owned utility.
I don’t think the pipelines out here have been built by them, either, but by the pipeline companies/producers.
by a whole lot. The tiered pricing has been a net benefit for me.
All free market enthusiasts should be supportive of pricing that more closely matches the actual costs of production and consumption to the price that consumers pay.
Right?
Consumption of fossil fuel based energy is still heavily subsidized so stop whining about partial fixes to the “free” market.
I’ve been looking in to it, but I don’t actually know anyone who has had it installed.
The only kind of actual solar I’ve had experience with was in Boulder in Elementary school building the boxes and painting the corrugated steel black, then getting burns all over our hands and legs from the hot water that gushed out of them.
Both solar electricity (photovoltaics) and solar hot water. Our last Excel bill included a grand total of $0.10 for our net energy demand (1 therm of gas). The remaining $18.20 of our bill was for being connected to the electric grid and gas delivery system. Plus, some credits for excess electricity production that will be settled at the end of the year.
We’ve had the PV for almost 3 years and it’s made us much more aware of our energy use.
Without tax credits they wouldn’t make economic sense. With them, the premium you pay for it makes some sense as a hedge against future increases in natural gas prices, and as a “temporary collapse of civilization” scenario since you can have some electricity and hot water during the day when the sun shines, even if the grid goes down.
IIRC, absent tax implications, the return on solar hot water is better than photovoltaics.
Xcel is pretty good about “reverse billing” where you pay for what you take out of the grid and get money back for what you put into it.
It will cost more, and natural gas prices are less stable than coal prices, so electricity prices will vary more. Natural gas is a fuel that is clean enough to have multiple uses, unlike coal. But, the fuel prices for renewables will always be zero, so investing in renewable energy production is like choosing a fixed rate mortgage when interest rates are low, instead of a variable rate mortgage.
In the short term, tiered rates increasing summer bills aren’t nearly so dramatic:
“A typical residential customer uses about 687 kilowatt-hours (kwh) per month during the four-month summer period and about 605 kwh per month the rest of the year. Under the new tiered rates, residential customers with average usage will pay about 2 percent more in summer and about 5 percent less during the rest of the year.”
If it was a 33% hike in summer bills, that would be about $80 a year for an average residential customer over the four months of “utility summer.” For now, it will be more like an increase of $12 a year, offset somewhat in the winter. Every bit of money squeezes people, but it isn’t a huge price to pay for a dramatic increase in air quality. The cost per customer of switching from coal to natural gas and renewables is much lower than the costs of securing comparable air quality increases from cleaner vehicle emissions, for example.
One of the reasons Xcel and other utitilies are more agreeable to these plans than one might expect, despite the fact that it costs more, is that they see some sort of cap and trade system, or a carbon tax as almost inevitable sooner or later, given our international commitments to reduce global warming. So, by transitioning away from coal now, they are avoiding those direct or indirect taxes in the future. The extra costs now were coming sooner or later.
Solar isn’t a big part of the switch, in part because while it is sustainable and clean, it is also expensive and the gird has to be extended to prime solar power generation locations. Most problematically, it is intermittent; it doesn’t generate much power on cloudy days and generates no power at night, so it can’t be a total solution. But, the great virtue of solar power is that it’s peak generation times neatly coincide with peak air conditioning demand times in the summer. So it is a great way to fill that need.
Xcel is also rightly subsidizing customer efforts to insulate their homes better, get more efficient air conditioning systems, and install evaporative cooling systems (swamp coolers and cooling towers) to reduce peak summer demand, and has adjusted its rates to reflect the fact that it costs them more to generate peak demand summer electricity than it does to generate other electricity, because air conditioning use drives power plant construction requirements.
Just wait until the cheap imported wind from China drives American wind out of the market, and then the wind cartel starts running up the prices.
Their wind is flithy compared to ours, because the Chinese use so much more coal than we do.
The plan would retire two coal fired plans (Valmot at 186 MW and Cherokee at 717 MW by 2017 and 2022 respectively, converting Cherokee and part of Arapahoe to natural gas), and would add emissinos controls at Pawnee and Hayden coal fired plants with a combined 950 MW.
“The cost of the plan, if accepted by the PUC, would be $1.3 billion in new construction over the next 12 years. The company predicts a savings of approximately $225 million compared to traditional retrofitting of the plants with emission controls. Xcel officials say the savings would be more than $950 million if there is federal regulation that places a price on carbon dioxide emissions.”
(From an earlier Colorado Independent story linked in the story linked in the original post.)
Total PUC electricity billings in Colorado are on the order of $2.2 billion per year.
“[T]he new poll found that support for the Xcel plan and HB 1365 “remains solid after voters hear about the cost implications of plan,” with 71 percent still in favor with a 1 percent increase in consumer prices and 68 percent support with a 3 percent increase.”
(From the link in the original post.)
It is a fair guess that support will still be more than 50% at an even large price increase. But, the poll doesn’t make clear that summer rate would go up by a larger percentage, while winter rates would go down.
One hidden cost impact is what effect increased natural gas consumption by Xcel to produce electricity will have on natural gas prices (which is hard to determine since they are volatile anyway).
From the same source, estimates job impacts include the following:
Sen. Al White, R-Hayden said:
“I’ve got four out of eight operating coal mines in my district as well as the largest and most impacted coal mine, the Twentymile Mine, which is going to lose about a fourth of their production sales as a result of this bill.”
So, the hardest hit of the eleven mines in the state will see a 25% drop in production, and presumably the others will see a smaller drop. So, the jobs lost in Colorado due to the bill are on the order of three hundred, which is about 0.015% of the all jobs in Colorado (assuming 500 jobs would be 25% of the industry, and that the average percentage job loss will be less than the job loss at the hardest hit mine). But, since construction jobs in renewable energy and plant retrofit will be created, the net job effect will be pretty modest in the medium term.
Also, while construction jobs are in theory temporary and mining jobs are normally thought of as permanent, mining employment varies a lot depending on commodity prices. Cycles of lay offs and rehires are the norm in the mining industry, and few coal mines stay open for more than fifty years (many less) as seams are exhausted. The older a mine is, the fewer years of useful life it has left.
As usual, the Western Slope gets the shaft. The construction and retrofit jobs will be in Denver, while the lost mining jobs will be in Routt and Moffat counties. Up there, coal mining jobs are among the highest paid of anyone in the region.
Josh Penry got on board with the bill because it pleased his oil and gas overlords.
industries over-estimate the “costs” of complying with new requirements by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Government agencies over-estimate the “costs” of industry compliance with new requirements by nearly 1 order of magnitude.
This give the interested observer a good yardstick for estimating what the actual “costs” will be.
as often as it could, given that it always is and always will be outnumbered in democratic conflicts that directly pit the Front Range against the Western Slope.
The need of Western Slope legislators to avoid getting shafted by Front Range lawmakers probably helps explain why Western Slope Republicans tend to be more moderate and practical in working across party lines than their counterparts from the suburban Front Range.
District 55 is already a known quantity. “Moderate” is not a word I would use. As far as District 54 goes, Attila the Hun would be more moderate.
But the Mesa County Democratic Party saw fit to let both of them run unopposed.
Far more people get killed mining it and bringing it to power plants than are killed in producing and delivering comparable amounts of renewable power or natural gas based power. Dozens of coal miners are killing in mining accidents every year in the United States, and more people are killed in accidents with coal trains (coal is the largest volume commodity transported by rail, natural gas is moved by pipelines whose accidents are much more rare). Four thousand coal miners a year get sick with black lung disease.
Coal fired power plants are a leading source of air pollution. Coal-fired power plants shorten nearly 24,000 lives a year in the United States, including 2,800 from lung cancer. Renewables don’t create any air pollution. Natural gas creates far less air pollution (it’s main constituent, methane, is the cleanest possible hydrocarbon).
Coal’s immense air pollution does more to speed up global warming than natural gas, and renewables don’t add to global warming.
Coal tailings are toxic waste, and is also more radioactive than some of the low level nuclear waste from nuclear power plants. These wastes enter ground water supplies and the wildlife food chain.
Coal mining is more destructive to wilderness than natural gas mining and use of renewables. Strip mining tears away and taints open land for hundreds of years, and can never fully be restored. Mercury in air pollution from coal is a leading threat to the bald eagle.
The main reason that the Front Range isn’t a huge strip mine despite the fact that there is a huge coal bed roughly under the I-25 corridor to the north of Denver, while Montana and Wyoming are riddled with them, is that an obscure Colorado Supreme Court case held that mineral rights in coal only create a right to do underground mining and well drilling, and not a right to strip mine. Montana and Wyoming came to the opposite conclusion.
Natural gas used in Colorado power plants and renewables come from North America, just like coal does, so the transition does not increase foreign energy imports.
Electrical power plants are the dominant use of coal (more than 90% of coal is used to produce electricity and coal is used to produce half of electricity nationally although there is great variation from state to state, many states used almost none, some use it almost exclusively) with almost every other energy user transitioning to cleaner fuels. Thus, changing the way the utilities make electricity can make a major dent in coal based pollution and public harm, and effectively makes everything in the entire state economy powered with electricity greener.
There is a job impact, but it is mixed and pretty modest compared to the 2,440,000 jobs in the state as of August 2010. Less than one-tenth of one percent of Colorado jobs are in coal as of 2007. There are 2,069 coal miners employed in Colorado at “eight underground mines in Delta, Garfield, Gunnison, La Plata, Rio Blanco, and Routt counties, and three surface mines in Moffat and Montrose counties.” The miners are generally unionized. Only a fraction of those jobs would be lost if Colorado’s utilities relied less on coal to produce electricity (since underground mined Colorado coal is a superior product to the softer coal mined in some other parts of the country and is exported greater distances as a result), and some natural gas industry production jobs somewhere, renewable energy technology infrastructure jobs in Colorado, and power plant retrofitting jobs in Colorado would be created by the switch. Most of the coal mining jobs lost from Xcel’s switch would be lost in Wyoming and Montana. None of the plausibly resulting job cuts for coal miners are in countries with unemployment rates significantly higher than the state average and many would be in counties with unemployment well below the state average.
“The miners are generally unionized.” is incorrect. The majority of Colorado miners are NOT UMW. In fact, in 1995 Peabody shut down its Empire Coal Mine in Moffat County because the workers unionized and went on strike. There is only one union coal mine operating in NW Colorado (Deserado) and it happens to be the smallest. That said, they are high paying jobs and the coal mines are a major economic driver in Moffat, Rio Blanco and Routt Counties, which makes any threat to coal a major concern to folks in NW Colorado.
However, there is a real chance that if we can actually pass federal climate change legislation that coal mining in CO and WY would INCREASE because of the vastly better burning qualities in comparison to eastern coal. WY coal producers are actually pushing for legislation in Congress.
Additionally, to say that any transition to natural gas will not increase foreign imports is false. The gas market is global and the US is the largest importer of liquified natural gas (even at the depressed prices of 2009, we were importing because we pay more than Europe) and will continue to be. Any increase in demand will likely raise market prices and promulgate increased importation AND domestic development. The gas for the Xcel plan will likely come from WY and TX due to Anadarko’s large operations in those areas.
Finally the statement of
is patently false. During the Bush years over a dozen citizens’ proposed wilderness area were leased for natural gas development with over 1/2 of those leased being drilled. Coal has a far better record of performing successful reclamation (due to SMACRA–Surface Mine and Control Reclamation Act) that O/G has ever dreamed of. Say whatever you want about the dirty nature of coal, but they do a good job of reclaiming what they have destroyed. Plus, tying any threat to bald eagles is pretty weak. Their recovery was directly tied to the DDT ban and they are one of the best successes of the Endangered Species Act, Mercury effects all creatures, bald eagles just nominally more so.
With the reclamation side, coal is (currently) much much much better than natural gas. There are actual regulations and quantitative requirements for restoring vegetation following coal operations. In Colorado, at least, reclamation/revegetation is strictly qualitative (and generally comes down to “that looks pretty good”).
However, regarding US competition for liquified natural gas (LNG), I was under the impression that the US doesn’t compete well for imports vs Europe. An incredible aspect of US natural gas production is that we have vast areas where we can store gas (e.g., old oil fields, old salt mines, etc). Thus, we can keep production pretty constant over the year, store excess produced gas in the summer and then use this stored gas to meet increased winter demand.
In Europe, the ability to store gas is limited, thus they pay whatever is necessary. So, in winter at least, Europe is willing to pay higher prices than the US. (So all this is what I was told by an energy economist a couple years ago. I have no reason to doubt him, but I’d be interested if this is no longer the case.)
“There is only one union coal mine operating in NW Colorado (Deserado) and it happens to be the smallest.”
I stand corrected. I relied on a source that I either misread or that was out of date.
“[I]f we can actually pass federal climate change legislation that coal mining in CO and WY would INCREASE because of the vastly better burning qualities in comparison to eastern coal.”
I have no doubt that either cap and trade or a carbon tax would reduce total coal consumption by electric utilities. Whether or not CO and WY would benefit because we have better coal than Eastern coal mines would depend a great deal upon the way that the legislation was drafted. There are more legislators close to Eastern coal interests than to Western coal interests, so I would not be surprised to see climate change legislation that treated all coal use equally come out of Congress, if any legislation passes at all, even if there are good scientific reasons for making a distinction.
“to say that any transition to natural gas will not increase foreign imports is false.”
You are right in saying that there is at least some LNG trade, and that international trade in LNG is influenced by natural gas prices. But, it really isn’t accurate to say that the “gas market is global” either. There are significant differences between natural gas prices even within North America and those price differences generally represent areas served by different pipeline networks. Trade other than by pipeline is a very small share of current consumption.
LNG trade is growing, but it is an immature industry. According to the U.S. EIA, “On an annual basis from 2003 to 2008, the United States imported between 13% and 16% of its natural gas requirements. Most of these imports were in gaseous form delivered by pipeline from Canada. However, natural gas imports have also come in liquid form from overseas. Between 1% and 3% of U.S. demand for natural gas was met by LNG from 2003 to 2008.” In the most recent year for which numbers are available it accounted for 1.5% of U.S. consumption. There are only 26 export terminals (in fifteen countries) and 65 export terminals (in eighteen countries) in the world, many of those are only a few years old, and those aren’t big enough to meet the entire demand. It is also requires specialized tanker ships that are in limited supply and are less cost effective as the trip distance increases. It is much more expensive to build an LNG ship than an oil tanker.
The infrastructure isn’t in place to create a single global market in natural gas, and it isn’t trival, you need to reduce the temperature to 260 degrees and the pressure to 600 times normal for natural gas. There are still places, like West Africa, where large amounts of natural gas are simply burned off because they don’t have the infrastructure to contain it and sell it where it is needed. Certainly, the market in natural gas, is far less global than the market in oil, for example.
The main country we import LNG from is Trinidad and Tobago, which makes economic sense primarily because it is so close to the U.S. Each LNG tanker can make a lot of trips, move a lot of LNG each year, and justify its cost. Most of the natural gas produced in countries with LNG export facilities is considerably cheaper to export to countries that are closer to the exporters like Europe. Despite the fact that we pay higher prices than the Europeans, only about 25% of LNG imports (about 0.4% of total U.S. natural gas consumption) is imported across the Atlantic Ocean and none is imported to the U.S. across the Pacific Ocean (we actually export a little LNG from Alaska to Japan, which partially offsets our transatlantic imports). The other 99.6% of natural gas used in the United States comes from North American and from Trinidad and Tobago.
Re: Reclamation.
The surface area that natural gas drilling destroys is much smaller in acreage for comparable production amounts than the surface area destroyed by strip mining coal and is far less complete. Access roads probably do more damage to the surface than the natural gas wells themselves. Natural gas drilling generally doesn’t completely preclude surface use, strip mining of coal (which is most of the production nationally, although Colorado is an exception), does. Nobody does mountain top removal natural gas drilling.
Natural gas drillers probably don’t do as much to restore the land that they lease, but natural gas leaves behind less noxious waste in the first place. All you have to do to natural gas to make it useable in your home with minimal venting is to put an odor agent in it. Leakage goes mostly up, not down. Coal, in contrast, is a vertiable chemical stew of yuck. The stuff that doesn’t get burned or doesn’t leave out the smoke stack is a real problem. SMACRA helps restore land that is strip mined, but you can’t ever really fully resort a strip mine to its original state. Strip mining, even when restored, is far more destructive than, for example, clear cutting a forest and letting it grow back. The toxic waste creating by coal mining and using coal to produce electricity also isn’t regulated to nearly the extent as comparably toxic wastes from industry.
The Bald Eagle did make progress when DDT was no longer used, but it is still affected much more by mercury and all other forms of heavy metal pollution than most other animals because they are at the top of the food chain and heavy metal toxin concentrations multiply as you move up the food chain with every step. In the same way, mercury has much more of an impact on top predator fish (like the largest tunas) than it does on those at the bottom of the food chain. Coal is one of the main sources of mercury in the environment now that many of the other sources have been regulated or eliminated. Pollution from coal rivals habitat destruction as a leading threat to the Bald Eagle, and while it isn’t in as much trouble as it used to be, its small numbers mean that its survival as a species will always be fragile.
should read “reduce the temperature to minus 260 degrees Fareheit”