Taking Back the Grid (Boulder's attempt at energy municipalization)

[marmar]

(Dissent magazine) There’s a government takeover of the energy industry brewing and it’s not in Venezuela or Greece—it’s in Boulder, Colorado. In late 2011, the progressive town (squeezed “between the Rocky Mountains and reality,” as a local saying has it) scored two ballot initiatives empowering city hall to pursue “municipalization” of its electricity grid. The voters’ justification? Ditching fossil fuels and going solar, as the private utility that currently supplies Boulder’s energy, Xcel Energy, refuses to do.

Boulder is in many ways a natural setting for a voter-led experiment in wresting the grid back from corporations and going green. Residents of this college town, which is also home to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, are accustomed to regional jibes about their cultural isolation from the rest of the state: there’s a Buddhist university that Allen Ginsberg helped to start; people with dogs, by law, are not owners but “guardians”; and one would be forgiven for not knowing that marijuana has only been legal for a year. Eccentricities aside, the Boulder-Denver economy is booming and the area boasts among the highest levels of personal health and happiness in the country.

Moreover, the Rocky Mountain West has always had a strong constituency of environmentalists; those living at the foot of the mountains see how much there is to lose without strong laws in place to protect open space and wildlife from private exploitation. In 1967, environmentalists pushed Boulder to buy a “green belt” of protected lands to guard the city from overdevelopment, and the city borders one of the United States’ largest continuous stretches of national forest. Little wonder that Boulderites are trying to dissociate themselves from a regional and national energy politics dominated by coal lobbyists, climate deniers, and arctic drillers. Lucky for them, local geography is also on renewable energy’s side: despite snowy winters and a high elevation, the Boulder-Denver area is among the sunniest places in the United States.

Yet three years after its citizens voted overwhelmingly for a pair of ballot initiatives in favor of energy municipalization, Boulder’s plan to de-privatize its grid and create a public utility remains stalled. Onlookers from both left and right are watching with rapt attention to see if the experiment can still succeed—and if it can be replicated elsewhere. ................(more)

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/taking-back-grid-boulder-municipalization-xcel-energy

[NYC_SKP]

1. This isn't new, municipalities are often successful at detatching from the major players.

I wish them luck, but I don't know why they call it an experiment.

Is it the first time a municipality has left Xcel this way?

[zipplewrath]

2. GOP areas do this

Winter Park, Florida (which used to boast the largest concentration of millionaires per capita) took over their grid. It wasn't a bunch of tree hugging lefties either. It was a definitely GOP community that got tired of lousy service. They wanted more buried lines and more reliable service.