Skeptical: Boulder, Xcel in talks to end city’s bid to create municipal electric utility – Boulder Daily Camera
Boulder and Xcel Energy on Wednesday announced they are discussing a possible settlement to ongoing litigation that would end the city’s push to form a municipal electric utility.
Boulder politicians getting cold feet? Perhaps temporary insanity. No worries, they are still leaving themselves an out to move forward.
The city’s bid to municipalize is not being suspended, however. Boulder now heads on a dual path, on which it continues to work on its application to the state Public Utilities Commission to acquire certain Xcel facilities and create its own utility, while also engaging in settlement talks with Xcel.
So far, the elite, progressive (but I repeat myself) Boulder politicians have spent $10.4 million of the citizens money. Idiots.
I agree with Pat Murphy that this could just be a mirage to buy time politically, a defensive maneuver to make sure that if and when the city wants to raise more bonds to keep funding the effort that it can say to the fence-sitters, “We tried, but Xcel was being unreasonable. We need to keep going with the muni.” The city has been doing this all along. When it first set out to study the muni, it said one of the goals was to “be in a stronger negotiating position with Xcel.” Negotiate for what? People kept thinking they were going to get more reliable service, or that users of solar panels would get a better deal for selling their power on the grid. The city fudged the qualifiers for the off-ramps. Those were never honest goals. They reached a point where they said, “We’ve surpassed the off-ramp conditions, so we’re going ahead with the muni.” Their intent was to go ahead with it all along, because the off-ramp conditions weren’t real conditions, anyway. So, while it looks encouraging, like the city is looking for an “out” politically from it, because their PUC filings haven’t gotten them anywhere, I won’t believe it until I see it.
If they do decide to abandon the muni, I think the city is going to try to make it look like they got what they wanted. That was the whole idea. You see that in the article, “We’re going to have to get something, because we’ve spent money on this,” but I don’t see how Boulder is in any negotiating position. We’re a city of less than 100,000 people. In terms of Xcel’s customer base, we’re a small fraction. I think Xcel could say, “We’re planning on building out the following on renewables, do you want to participate,” and the city could say yes or no.