The Gazette’s Jon Caldara lays out the train schedule to Crazytown. Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission adopted a rule to slash greenhouse emissions 41 percent by 2035 and tied it to a statewide goal of eliminating greenhouse gases by 2050. Translation: this is not tinkering. This is telling coal and natural gas to pack a box.
Caldara walks through how 2021’s soft-sell “clean heat plans” morphed into a Dear John letter to furnaces and stoves. Utilities objected. Consumer advocates objected. Unions raised eyebrows. The PUC did it anyway. The kicker: you cannot hit 41 percent, let alone 100 percent, without pushing customers off the gas system and jacking compliance costs. He cites estimates of hundreds of millions per year for Black Hills, a billion over five years for Xcel, and typical home retrofits north of twenty grand. Households already pay several times more for electricity per unit of heat than gas, and even NREL says only a sliver of gas-heated homes would save money on heat pumps.
The Bullet Point Brief
- New rule: 41 percent gas-system emission cut by 2035, tethered to statewide “eliminate by 2050” targets. That is a de facto gas goodbye.
- Utilities, consumer advocates, and unions balked. PUC said thanks for the feedback and pressed go anyway.
- Reality check: to reach the target you must remove customers from gas. Think ripping out furnaces, water heaters, stoves, dryers, even industrial uses.
- Price tag: Black Hills pegs compliance near 397 million dollars per year; Xcel around 1 billion over five years; a typical home retrofit tops 20,000 dollars.
- Grid strain and math: only one third of electricity is renewable now, electricity costs about four times gas per heat output, and most homes would not save with heat pumps.
My Bottom Line
I agree with Caldara, full stop. This is ideology cosplaying as energy policy. If your plan requires tearing out working equipment, hiking bills, and hoping the grid magically stiffens in January, it is not a plan. It is a press release.
Colorado needs reliable, affordable, abundant energy. That means keeping firm power online while innovation proves itself on cost and performance. It also means regulators remembering their actual job: least cost, high reliability, transparent tradeoffs. When the PUC drifts into social engineering, ratepayers become lab rats.
So yes, read Caldara. Then call your legislator and your utility. Demand metrics that matter: cents per kilowatt hour, outage minutes avoided, capacity in a cold snap. Stop pretending you can regulate affordability into existence while you regulate firm energy out of existence. Choose physics and pocketbooks over fantasies and photo ops.
Source: The Gazette
