Colorado Politics reported that Xcel Energy shut off power in parts of northern Colorado because of high winds and extremely dry conditions tied to a Red Flag Warning. The shutoff started at 8 a.m. Friday and hit areas near Fort Collins and Loveland along the I-25 corridor, according to Xcel’s outage map. The National Weather Service in Boulder warned of wind gusts up to 60 to 70 mph across the northeast plains and nearby areas, with wildfire risk running high.
Here’s why normal people in Weld County and across Colorado should care. When the power goes out, life doesn’t politely pause. Families get stuck. Work stops. Refrigerators warm up. Medical equipment gets dicey. Traffic signals go dark. Small businesses lose a full day they will never get back. How many kids could not attend school? How many businesses had to turn away customers and clients? That is not a theory. That is a real cost that lands on the folks who can least afford another “sorry about that” from a giant system.
And let’s say the quiet part out loud: This isn’t a hurricane or a once in a century disaster. This is wind. In Colorado. In January. For the love of pete! We should be able to run an electric grid in a windy state without flipping the off switch on working people anytime Mother Nature clears her throat.
Yes, wildfire risk is real. I am not interested in pretending otherwise. A Red Flag Warning means conditions are dangerous, and we all need to follow burn bans and basic common sense. But a blanket move toward preventive shutoffs raises a bigger question: are we building a resilient system, or are we normalizing failure and calling it safety?
Because the official response from the utility that keeps asking the regulatory agency that oversees it to jack your rates is to shut off the electricity to thousands of people and then tell them its for their own good. That is a tough sell in Weld County. Folks here will take straight talk and hard work all day long. What they will not take is being treated like passengers while someone else decides the route, raises the fare, and then parks the bus.
How Colorado, you voted for this! Not you personally for any one outage, but for the structure. We chose a model where decisions drift farther from local accountability and closer to bureaucratic permission slips. When reliability drops, the customer still pays. When “mitigation” means “you sit in the dark,” the customer still pays. That incentive setup is backwards.
As a county commissioner, I do not regulate Xcel. The PUC does. And the PUC is appointed by (guess who) the Governor. But I do represent the people who eat the consequences. So I want answers, and I want them in plain English.
- Which circuit areas were shut off, and why those areas?
- How many customers were impacted in total?
- What criteria triggered the shutoff at 8 a.m., and what criteria re-energized the lines?
- What hardening has Xcel completed in these corridors to reduce ignition risk without cutting service?
- When rates increase, what measurable reliability improvements are promised, by when, and with what penalties if they are missed?
Reasonable people can disagree on the exact balance between fire prevention and reliability. But please publish the rules for shutoffs, publish after-action reports, and give counties a seat at the table before the lights go out. Locally, we can press for coordinated emergency messaging, check-ins for vulnerable residents, and a straightforward report-back from Xcel to affected communities. Bring the facts, show the work, and let’s build a system that doesn’t treat turning off the power as Plan A.
Source: Colorado Politics
