Colorado stands at the center of a metaphorical “harmonic convergence” of global energy trends and both national and state energy policies.
If the legislature responds to this fleeting opportunity by passing a package of bills to implement Gov. Bill Ritter’s “new energy economy,” Colorado can add jobs in economically depressed areas and buttress our energy security – while taking the point in the worldwide struggle against global warming.
Ritter’s energy proposals kicked into overdrive last week when President Bush endorsed renewable energy and alternative fuels in his State of the Union address – including a call to reduce U.S. gasoline consumption by 20 percent by 2017, with three- fourths of that reduction coming from the use of renewable fuels such as ethanol and biodiesels.
Meeting that goal by the present process of making ethanol from corn would require a five-fold increase in current production levels – with drastic impacts on the nation’s food supply. That’s why Bush urged stepping up the nation’s investment “in new methods of producing ethanol, using everything from wood chips to grasses to agricultural wastes.”
As it happens, Colorado is ideally positioned to lead that charge, in part because of the “Collaboratory,” a research consortium created last year by Gov. Bill Owens and the legislature linking the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden with the University of Colorado, Colorado State University and the Colorado School of Mines. Those researchers are hard at work on techniques to harness the kind of “cellulosic ethanol” and biomass fuels touted by Bush and many others.
Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, wants to further that process with a bill to promote growing oil-energy crops such as safflower, canola, camolina and sunflowers on dryland farms. Such crops can be used to make diesel fuel without further straining our overstretched water resources. Gardner focuses on speeding the transfer of existing research from laboratories to farmers. State-funded crop subsidies aren’t in the cards.
The push for renewable energy couldn’t come at a better time for hard-pressed eastern Colorado, where a six-year drought was finally broken by a devastating blizzard that caused widespread livestock losses.
Eastern Colorado may not have much water, but it has wind in abundance. As state Sen. Ken Kester, R-Las Animas, notes, ranchers can even continue grazing their cattle under the towering windmills that generate electricity for urban consumers. Since each windmill can provide lease payments of $3,000 a year and a wind farm may host up to 80 windmills, this endeavor may make the difference between bankruptcy and prosperity for much of Eastern Colorado.
Of course, electricity generated from the wind or the sun is useless without a way to transmit it to consumer markets. That’s why a bill by Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald and Rep. Buffie McFadyen aims to ensure that clean energy from renewable sources can be loaded into the state power grid and exported to lucrative markets like California. A related bill by Gardner and Kester creates a Renewable Energy Transmission Authority to streamline that process.
Rep. Judy Solano, D-Brighton, and Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Aspen, likewise seek to expand the supply of renewable energy with a bill providing standards to allow customers of rural electric associations to install renewable energy systems in their homes and businesses.
Finally, a key proposal by Schwartz and Rep. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder, would raise the bar set in 2004 by Amendment 37. That voter-approved law required Xcel Energy and large municipal utilities to get 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2015. The bill would raise that standard to 20 percent by 2020.
These bills are affordable because they rely mostly on blending existing research with new federal efforts and private-sector initiatives. The legislature should pass this environmentally responsible and economically alluring program.
