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Latest entry on top:
Jan. 5, 2026
Source: A Facebook page/post by Jesse Kumin -- Boulder County Best Democracy: https://www.facebook.com/
An excerpt from: https://truthout.org/articles/
As Electricity Bills Rise, Activists Are Demanding Public Control of Utilities
Deeper info: https://truthout.org/
“Public power” organizers are pushing for democratized control and truly public ownership of our energy system.
By Derek Seidman (Truthout -- January 2, 2026)
"Electricity bills for millions of utility customers are skyrocketing across the U.S. while the number of households facing extreme utility debt is mounting. Energy costs are being turbocharged by the AI data center boom, which is prolonging the burning of fossil fuels in the face of intensifying climate chaos. Overseeing all this is a powerful regime of investor-owned utilities that dominate our energy system. These for-profit corporations own and control the basic infrastructure we all depend on. Their executives and shareholders profit by raising electric rates or skimping on maintenance. And now, private equity firms are gunning for utilities.
But over the past few years, a vibrant movement for public power has emerged and grown.
Public power means public ownership and democratic control of our energy system. It’s an alternative to corporate-owned, profit-driven utilities. Public utilities in the U.S. are not new, and recent campaigns — from Tucson to Milwaukee, from San Diego to Ann Arbor — seek to expand and improve on this precedent, creating a truly democratic public utility system that serves human needs over profits. A notable victory for public power came with the 2023 passage of New York’s Build Public Renewables Act, and a campaign for public power in New York’s Hudson Valley has been gaining momentum.” ...
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Dec. 26, 2025 -- Boulder Daily Camera op-ed
Steve Pomerance, former member of the Boulder City Council
Can we ever get reliable power from Xcel?
Dec. 23, 2025 -- IDEAS shared with BACES
On Tue, Dec 23, 2025 at 3:52 AM Sarah Larrabee <sarahblarrabee@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Moji and fellow seekers of Independence of all kinds, including energy independence.IMPRESSIVE is the word that best describes the documents attached [Sarah, pls. send the "attached" documents]. Good work, and more to come!!! Maybe we could go over those docs in the next few meetings.SILVER LINING is what best describes a possible outcome of the recent (and to be continued) wind storms. We can remind the public of Boulder's noble effort to establish energy independence [starting] in 2011. A successful election then might have jump-started grid resilience through innovative projects and more localized energy production, using renewable sources- sun, wind, soil, and even municipal trash.
One very popular goal was to get all lines underground, largely for aesthetics and health reasons at the time. Instead of bargaining in good faith with [the City of] Boulder, Xcel raised our rates to pay for countermeasures on ensuing ballots--and for a nasty advertising campaign implying that Boulder would not be able to handle a city utility.
What? Did they expect the mayor to climb the electric pole with a wrench in hand? They must not have read the newspaper stories about what a high percentage of engineers we have here and how passionate we are about preserving a clean environment!----FOR EXTRA CREDIT:Read this article from High Country News on that effort!The notion that high winds caused by climate change could cause unfightable fires was not deeply imprinted on the public consciousness until after the Marshall Fire. Since their [Xcel's] downed lines had a role in that fire and Xcel faced consequences, you would think they would have taken measures to bury lines and improve grid resilience. Rate hikes [came] later, we still have no safety!Their solution to "keep us safe"was to cut off our electricity--never mind that we lost work, access to medical equipment, communication, our stored food, our sense of peace and safety in our own homes.
Many of us also had no heat and water, and gathering places were not set up. Rec Centers and other city facilities were closed. The text messages sent out had no information--only links which often could not be opened because of no wi-fi.
Their voice messages blamed the situation on Mother Nature--a "weather event" which caused downed lines. They skipped over the obvious fact that lines can only come down if they are up in the first place!Xcel will again go crying to the PUC asking for a rate hike because of their expenses in the disaster that they created, just like they did to build the highly polluting Comanche coal plant in Pueblo, and to finance its ensuing failures.
Because of their rate hikes to us, their rates of profitability are high:
- Profit margin over 14% for the past 12 months!
- Quarter 3 revenue this year $3.92 BILLION up 7%over last year.
I should not point fingers though--if I were pulling those ratios I would be tempted to play, and ignore my civic responsibilities also!
Since all that money is not going back to consumers in the form of reduced rates, buried lines or systems innovations necessary to save the planet, then....??? But pretty sure the [Xcel's] CEO level are taking some vacations, building some mansions, investing in some crypto....Here comes the silver lining!Their mess creates our opportunity to publicize our goals and promote the ballot measure.
Some ideas:Protest at Xcel Building with signs [like]:
- Spread the wealth around- Put the power underground.Everybody who lost food or work or had a medical emergency or accident or evacuated to a hotel or... (no matter how small the loss), should make a claim--so in other words, all ratepayers.
This will send the strongest message and also get a lot of publicity (potentially) for BACES.Letters to the editor and comments on social media to take this "weather event" as a springboard for action and voting.Sorry I kind of overlaunch when I get going....I hope some of you made it through this letter!Sarah--Sarah B. Larrabee, RealtorCreating healthy, vibrant communities through home ownership, land stewardship and regenerative agriculture303-579-2515
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December 19, 2025:
1- The Boulder Reporting Lab
After two Xcel power shutoffs in a week, thousands in Boulder remain without power as questions mount
SOURCE: https://boulderreportinglab.org/2025/12/19/after-two-xcel-wildfire-related-power-shutoffs-in-a-week-boulder-weathers-the-latest-test-but-bigger-questions-loom/
Comment by Evan Ravitz:
Extreme fire conditions prompted a second planned shutoff as 100-plus mph winds and a small downtown fire underscored the risk. Improved preparation limited impacts, but back-to-back outages have renewed scrutiny of Xcel’s approach to long-term wildfire risk.
Xcel spent many millions keeping the City of Boulder in court when we tried to start our own electric utility (like Longmont, Ft. Collins and Colorado Spgs, which all have cheaper and more reliable electricity) that could have been spent on putting lines underground. AND they plan on using billions to build lots MORE transmission lines, when they should spend it to incentivize home solar. That’s what Germany did successfully with “feed in tariffs,” basically paying homeowners MORE for excess electricity fed back to the grid. The President of Xcel Colorado testified to City Council that 2/3 of the cost of electricity is for transmission and distribution and only 1/3 for generation, so incentivizing home solar would save us a lot of money too. But Xcel is GUARANTEED costs plus profit, so they want to waste as much on unneeded transmission as the PUC will allow, even tho it will cause more fires or cutoffs! Council should again work to get us free of this parasite. This year they decided not to, with no public hearings.
2- Sarah B. Larrabee -- COMMENTS (shared with BACES)
My two cents...Interesting thoughts have been with me since "sincere" random Xcel comments started to appear alongside notices that they would be forced to cut our power...
"We're thinking of your safety"
Hmmm, or maybe a path to raising rates because of the wind.
"Your safety is first priority..."
Or, maybe Xcel's billion dollar profits is first.
"Weather conditions have brought down the lines"
No, you have; if the lines were not UP nothing could bring them DOWN. Xcel could have and should have made a bid for our business 20 years ago by including:
burying lines underground, supporting renewables, incorporating grid resilience through solar projects, etc.
Instead Xcel chose to accelerate profitability by increasing consumer rates. Thus we, their customers/rate payers, were forced to underwrite Xcel for:
- Filing lawsuits against the people of Boulder for choosing energy sovereignty,
- Creating ballot measures to curb the growing move towards clean renewables,
- Extensive negative ads to dupe voters about the costs and the issues around clean energy which could have included increasing safety during winds through undergrounding.
It might help to publicize this and point out the unfair nature of customers having to pay for Xcel's poor decisions--taking the "cheap" way out instead of UNDERGROUNDING THE LINES!!!!
Sarah B. Larrabee, Realtor
Creating healthy, vibrant communities through home ownership, land stewardship and regenerative agriculture
303-579-2515
Instead Xcel chose to accelerate profitability by increasing consumer rates. Thus we, their customers/rate payers, were forced to underwrite Xcel for:
- Filing lawsuits against the people of Boulder for choosing energy sovereignty,
- Creating ballot measures to curb the growing move towards clean renewables,
- Extensive negative ads to dupe voters about the costs and the issues around clean energy which could have included increasing safety during winds through undergrounding.
It might help to publicize this and point out the unfair nature of customers having to pay for Xcel's poor decisions--taking the "cheap" way out instead of UNDERGROUNDING THE LINES!!!!
Sarah B. Larrabee, Realtor
Creating healthy, vibrant communities through home ownership, land stewardship and regenerative agriculture
303-579-2515
=====
Nov. 9, 2025
Boulder Daily Camera--Letters to the Editor; April 19, 2024 -- Contributed by Evan Ravitz
Ditch our Franchize With Xcel
By: Evan Ravitz
July 20, 2015
By: Leslie Glustrom
By: Leslie Glustrom
Posted By Moji Agha on Nov. 7, 2025 -- A look back at 2015
In Boulder, Colorado, a Move to Municipalize the Electric Company
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Nov. 6, 2025
Some Local Energy Thinking
By: Paul Croce -- Statement in support of BACES
As a historian, I can testify that learning about the past is a challenge. For all of us, comprehending what is going on in the present is difficult enough. Predicting the future is well-nigh impossible! But there is one certainty: energy prices will keep going up. The easiest sources of fossil fuels have been found, so exploration will get more expensive; and increasing population and more elaborate devices needing more energy is increasing demand. That’s even before considering the pollution from burning all that oil, natural gas, and coal.
1- Use of solar power and other non-fossil fuels is an increasingly easy and cheap step. With these, you can avoid spiking costs; with battery storage, you can bypass energy outages; and you can do your part to reduce pollution—starting with the air right around you that you breathe! Not everyone will save as much as the family in Boulder, CO, who cut their power bill from $150 to $10 per month [as claimed by this published ad] : https://www.dailycamera.com/
2- And you can use your voice to contact your elected representatives. Ask them to support net metering so that when you do switch to alternative energy, and start producing your energy at home, you actually get real dollars for the energy your own system produces. You invested; you produced the energy; you should get the money. If you have a rooftop “power plant,” you should be “compensated for your contribution,” as Energy Sage points out; that’s an American company that compares energy systems: https://www.energysage.com/
3-And then, consider forming or supporting a local collaborative for energy sovereignty, such as BACES (the Boulder Area Coalition for Energy Sovereignty) to jumpstart all these trends and encourage your community to create a municipal electric utility. Your town can join the 2,011 communities in the US with their own not-for-profit electric utility run locally:
You might wonder, How do municipal utilities do all these wonderful things? It’s not rocket science. It’s democracy. Locally owned and locally managed, municipal utilities maintain local scrutiny of local operations with local interests at heart. Even just the process of looking into a municipal utility provides each community, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, with “a yardstick of its own” to measure the service they are currently getting and to consider a change.
Energy sovereignty collaboratives/coalitions encourage power to the people—real electric power in the hands of people in your neighborhoods. That can be a path to non-fossil fuel designs at more homes, with more citizens being compensated for their contributions, and more public management of utilities. Join the right side of history!
Paul J. Croce, Emeritus (Senior) Professor of History and American Studies at Stetson University and past President of the William James Society.
As a historian, I can testify that learning about the past is a challenge. For all of us, comprehending what is going on in the present is difficult enough. Predicting the future is well-nigh impossible! But there is one certainty: energy prices will keep going up. The easiest sources of fossil fuels have been found, so exploration will get more expensive; and increasing population and more elaborate devices needing more energy is increasing demand. That’s even before considering the pollution from burning all that oil, natural gas, and coal.
Rather than just letting that future drain our wallets, we can do some things now. They are as easy as 1-2-3…
1- Use of solar power and other non-fossil fuels is an increasingly easy and cheap step. With these, you can avoid spiking costs; with battery storage, you can bypass energy outages; and you can do your part to reduce pollution—starting with the air right around you that you breathe! Not everyone will save as much as the family in Boulder, CO, who cut their power bill from $150 to $10 per month [as claimed by this published ad] : https://www.dailycamera.com/
2- And you can use your voice to contact your elected representatives. Ask them to support net metering so that when you do switch to alternative energy, and start producing your energy at home, you actually get real dollars for the energy your own system produces. You invested; you produced the energy; you should get the money. If you have a rooftop “power plant,” you should be “compensated for your contribution,” as Energy Sage points out; that’s an American company that compares energy systems: https://www.energysage.com/
Also, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly popular, and those systems have an enormous appetite for energy. If an AI data center is coming to your community, ask your representative to demand that those companies pay for their own increased pressure on your community’s energy systems, and that the companies cycle off during peak hours to reduce pressures on your system. After all, a good way to improve is to keep things from getting worse. Big changes in technology? Big opportunities to keep the big changes from creating big problems starting with big increases in your electric bills.
3-And then, consider forming or supporting a local collaborative for energy sovereignty, such as BACES (the Boulder Area Coalition for Energy Sovereignty) to jumpstart all these trends and encourage your community to create a municipal electric utility. Your town can join the 2,011 communities in the US with their own not-for-profit electric utility run locally:
Your community can create a municipal electric utility in a year or two;
That will bring lower rates, on average 11% less than with private utilities;
With less pollution—good for the planet and your lungs;
That will bring lower rates, on average 11% less than with private utilities;
With less pollution—good for the planet and your lungs;
and
With fewer power outages—municipal customers have been without power for only 75 minutes a year, while investor-owned customers have been without for an average of 142 minutes per year.
With fewer power outages—municipal customers have been without power for only 75 minutes a year, while investor-owned customers have been without for an average of 142 minutes per year.
You might wonder, How do municipal utilities do all these wonderful things? It’s not rocket science. It’s democracy. Locally owned and locally managed, municipal utilities maintain local scrutiny of local operations with local interests at heart. Even just the process of looking into a municipal utility provides each community, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, with “a yardstick of its own” to measure the service they are currently getting and to consider a change.
Energy sovereignty collaboratives/coalitions encourage power to the people—real electric power in the hands of people in your neighborhoods. That can be a path to non-fossil fuel designs at more homes, with more citizens being compensated for their contributions, and more public management of utilities. Join the right side of history!
Be part of the future wave! And pay less, by becoming energetically sovereign!
Summary bio:
Paul J. Croce, Emeritus (Senior) Professor of History and American Studies at Stetson University and past President of the William James Society.
Author of Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, June 1995); and Young William James Thinking (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); author interview.
Presenter on Learning Across Differences, The 2020 History of Psychology Wallace A. Russell Memorial Lecture, American Psychological Association.
Creator of The Public Classroom with essays, presentations, and podcasts featuring stories and explanations from history and culture for learning across differences.
Contributor to the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the philosophy blog Civil American, the public interest platform Public Seminar, history pages including History News Network, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, and US Intellectual History
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Power Struggle: The Hundred-Year War over Electricity
By Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley.
New York: Harper & Row 1986
Review by Timothy Schoechle
For anyone with an interest in renewable energy and in the reshaping of the electric power
system, Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley’s Power Struggle is both a “must-read” and an
indispensable reference. For those simply interested in industrial and social history, it provides
an informative narrative of how technological systems can be shaped by economic, cultural, and political forces. This book is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when it was
published nearly thirty years ago. As a collaboration between a professor of Community
Planning and an experienced Washington DC journalist, it is written in a flowing and engaging
story-telling style that makes it hard to put down.
Electricity might be ranked along with the discovery of the wheel, of fire, or the introduction of
agriculture in its importance in the context of human history. It is hard to imagine what life
would be like without electricity, yet its introduction occurred barely 130 years ago. We take it
for granted—generally without considering how and why its delivery has been shaped the way it has or what alternative shapes it might have taken. Today, our electricity system—generation, transmission, distribution, and use—is at a transition point brought about by enormous forces including the phenomenal effects of climate change, unacceptable environmental risks, and technological advances in renewable energy. Although Rudolph and Ridley recognized these factors thirty years ago, the primary difference today is the suddenly vanishing economies of scale that were the original foundation on which our electricity industry was built.
The book traces the history of political and technical intrigues underlying the 100-year
struggle—among “...industry executives, community activists, consumers, environmentalists,
Wall Street analysts, and governmental officials.” It opens with a lively account of the 1982 $24
billion engineering and financing debacle of the Washington Pubic Power Supply System
(WPPSS), then characterized in the press as “woops”. The WPPSS was a bubble of industry
hubris and overbuilding that—in spite of overwhelming political influence at state and federal
levels—was brought down by persistent citizen action and its own financial missteps.
To understand how the industry became structured the way it is, the book then rewinds to the late 1800s and begins the chronicle of the technical and institutional history. In particular, it looks at the early role of financiers and bankers beginning with Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan and their complex and stormy relationship. From the beginning the electricity industry was characterized by the need for enormous investment in generation and transmission infrastructure in the form of large centralized structures depending on major economies of scale. No industry was more capital intensive—three dollars of investment being required for every dollar of revenue. For this reason, the electricity industry became entwined with the banking industry and Wall Street from its very earliest days.
J.P. Morgan, a wealthy Manhattan banker and financier of the late 1800s, was one of Edison’s
first customers and backers—but early-on the two split over business strategy. Edison saw the
new industry as a public service delivering electricity to consumers as a commodity, while
Morgan saw it as a manufacturing industry selling equipment to the proliferation of private and
municipal power generators that were springing up during the 1890s. The authors recount how
Morgan, through much maneuvering, co-founded Edison General Electric, then eventually
removed Edison and his name, ultimately taking it over entirely. By the late 1920’s Morgan
owned over a third of all electricity generation in the United States. At that time half of all
industrial capital in the United States was invested in electric power.
One of the most revealing accounts in the book is the early evolution of the investor owned
utility (IOU). Between 1897 and 1907, publicly owned municipal power systems grew twice as
fast as investor owned power. By 1912 there were 1,737 public power systems and 3,659 private companies in operation. As the authors describe it,
For the owners of private electric companies, the most disturbing fact about public power companies was that their charges for electricity were half that of the privately owned...
The brutal infighting between private power companies gave way to a wave of conflicts over whether a town government or private entities would control electricity. In major cities the debates raged behind meeting room doors and in public forums. It was the beginning of a far-reaching power struggle that would last for more that a century and come to have a deep impact on local communities, the nation’s political atmosphere. On the one side were political reformers, aware of how far the control of the emerging electric trusts might eventually extend. At stake was the control not only of markets and geographic territories, but the expansion of political and economic influence, and ultimately the future of an industry to be worth
hundreds of billions of dollars. (p. 32)
The mounting growth of public power brought great angst among the leaders of private power
companies. Then, in 1907, Samuel Insull, protégé of Thomas Edison and head of Chicago
Edison, came up with a creative and pivotal solution. He brought forward the notion that
electricity was a “natural monopoly” and that competition was not in the public interest. Instead, he proposed the idea of the public utilities commission (PUC) as a means to regulate and thus legitimize private utilities as monopolies. His breakthrough idea was promoted heavily by the industry and PUCs were formed beginning in Wisconsin and New York, soon to be followed throughout the United States. The PUCs were to fix standards of service and electricity rates, including guaranteeing the IOUs high rates of return on capital assets. This move was highly successful and gave the IOUs a leg up on municipals and rural cooperatives because of their access to capital and their legislative and political influence. Over the following decades, the local municipally-owned (munis) found themselves increasingly hampered and hemmed-in, while IOUs and private holding companies expanded their domains of generation and transmission throughout the country. However, It was not long before the inequities and unintended consequences of regulation became apparent. Asset bubbles and industry excesses grew throughout the 1920s with increasing centralization and consolidation, ending abruptly in 1929 with the stock market crash that began the great depression.
The book goes on to cover subsequent eras in the electricity industry’s evolution, including its
major contribution to the 1929 crash, the subsequent collapse of the Insull and Morgan empires, and the ascendency of federal influence during the depression era. The authors offer absorbing accounts of the presidential nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt, fiercely fought by the industry, and the subsequent New Deal landmark electrification projects including the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) along with massive hydro and transmission projects that finally brought electricity to virtually the entire country.
The authors describe in detail the behind-the-scenes political scheming and manipulation around nuclear power that emerged during the 1950s and grew into the 1980s. Nuclear power,
inherently tied with government subsidies and guarantees, was not as much about generating
electricity as it was about generating money. The authors provide a fascinating account of how
the industry was able to adroitly maneuver its way around the citizen push-back that emerged
after the March 1979 accident at Three Mile Island and continue to build their money machine.
It was not until another accident in April 1986 at Chernobyl that the public resistance became
effective.
The book recounts how a recurring theme over a century was used to deflect or disable citizens and environmentalists—the idea that public power was “socialist,” or even “communist.” A similar notion has also afflicted renewable energy initiatives—that they are “impractical.” The authors describe these myths that persists today,
A vastly different perception dominated the industry and federal government. Industry executives believed that alternative technologies (such as solar, wind, and geothermal energies) held promise for the future but were “impractical” in the short term. There was a more fundamental problem as well. Such decentralized power sources were not technologies that could be utilized for increasing centralization of the electric power industry and for laying the base for greater corporate expansion in the future... [T]he central issue of the energy debate and the one that had existed since the beginning: Who really controlled the decisions
over choices of technology? ...what the industry and Wall Street wanted or what the public wanted? (p. 140)
Power Struggle is a vital resource for those examining today’s reemerging debates around such topics as renewable energy, municipalization, the “smart grid”, nuclear power, developing
countries, and utility regulation. The American electricity system is unique among industrialized nations in its privatized nature that springs from an ideological belief in capitalism and “free markets”—yet ironically, regulated monopolies are in fact anything but “free”.
In the final chapter of the book, the authors describe how the electricity system is facing a
fundamental “transition” away from a centralized structure. But at that time they were not aware of the dramatic drop in the costs of wind and solar (and natural gas) technologies that today suddenly undermine what has always been the fundamental organizing principle of the electricity industry—the advantages of centralized, capital-intensive economies of scale. One only need look at Germany’s success of rooftop solar to see a spectacular example of the popularity and economic viability of decentralized renewable energy not reliant on economies of scale.
Perhaps a editorial complaint with the book might be the manner in which the references are
organized. There are no footnotes or citations embedded in the text, but rather there are general summaries by page groups in the back of the book. Not only are these awkward to use, but they point only generally to the many important references cited. Nevertheless, Power Struggle is “required reading”—and quite engaging. The authors have provided an important historical sourcebook for those seeking to map the road a new clean energy future.
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