Opinion: Boulder`s energy future – what`s your vision?


As the Boulder City Council moves forward with its exploration of Boulder`s energy future, it will be important that Boulder`s citizenry create a vision that we feel is worthy of our efforts, significantly limits our emissions of greenhouse gases, and gives us financial stability in our energy rates.
The political process must necessarily focus on the means – do we try to cut a deal with Xcel to get us what we want without tying ourselves to their mostly fossil fuel powered future, or do we create a municipal utility, like Fort Collins or Colorado Springs, and use that freedom to pursue other alternatives? But ultimately more important is having a vision of what is both technically possible and economically feasible so that we have some goals to focus on.
What is your vision for Boulder`s cleaner energy future? Does it involve large scale photo-voltaics (PV) installations that ordinary citizens and businesses could buy into more cheaply or if their rooftops don`t work for solar? Does it involve Boulder creating a pumped storage pond below Barker Dam, so that we can store renewable energy when the wind blows and use it when the weather is calm? Does it involve replacement of air conditioners with two stage evaporative coolers that would reduce peak load as well as overall energy consumption and still provide cool dry air?
Or does your vision involve more individual actions? How about an Efficiency Bank, funded by local investment, where you can borrow money to improve your house`s insulation and pay it back on your energy bills? What about changing the rules on net-metering PV installations, so that you could build a big PV installation on your roof and sell power to your neighbors? Could neighborhood scale Bloom boxes (fuel cells which convert natural gas directly to electricity) work as a replacement for the huge and expensive new gas plants that Xcel is proposing to build? Or should we supply a significant portion of our energy needs by burning wood from beetle-killed pines? Do you have a new idea for cheap heat storage for your solar hot water system? Or a quick way to cut your lighting bill? Or charge a plug-in hybrid vehicle?
Citizens for Boulder`s Clean Energy Future is putting on a forum on Feb. 3, for local citizens and businesses to put forward their best ideas. Presentations will be brief, two minutes with two Power Point slides. That way, more people and businesses can make their pitches and expand our collective vision. By the way, you don`t have to be an expert or have the ultimate solution – just show what you are thinking about and why you think that it is realistically feasible to get done in the next ten years or so. The location and information as to how to submit will be on the RenewablesYES.org web site shortly.

In case you think that such planning should be left to utility companies and their experts, you should know that much of the really innovative thinking is done by non-utility folks working outside the box. Just for example, Xcel`s Windsource program was thought up and designed, not by Xcel, but by Boulder`s own Western Resource Associates, formerly the Land and Water Fund. And the idea of “solar gardens” emerged in various places, including from some Boulder citizens.
In fact, many times the big utility experts are wrong. For example, Paul Fenn of Local Power (local.org), who spoke in Boulder this fall, points out that thinking about wind and solar as purely generation resources on the regional grid is not the most cost-effective approach. Renewables should be integrated into the system by matching their intermittency with the other local generation sources, interruptible loads and storage options, and this should be done on a micro-grid scale, to maximize their cost effectiveness, and implemented in a planned sequence, to minimize rate impacts.

One final area to think about – what other uses could Xcel`s SmartGridCity fiber optics system be put to, if, as seems likely, it will be replaced by the more modern and flexible internet based smart grids? Could it be a basis for a large area network, so that all Boulderites could have wireless internet access everywhere in town? Some one of you out there may have the answer.


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