Record heat has swept across metro Denver and Colorado this March and with the region’s hottest months still ahead, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission worries whether the state’s largest electric utility will be able to meet the demand.
The PUC has directed Xcel Energy to report by April 15 how it will make sure the lights and air conditioning will stay on this summer even though its largest power source could remain offline until at least August.
The 750-megawatt Comanche 3 coal plant near Pueblo hasn’t worked since last August. To help fill the gap, the PUC allowed Xcel to keep the much smaller Comanche 2 coal unit running past its retirement, originally set for the end of 2025.
But Xcel said in a report earlier this month that supply chain problems have delayed repairs to Comanche 3 and it might not be ready to run again until August instead of June as initially thought. That could leave the Xcel system nearly 500 megawatts short of the need that is forecast for the summer.
“We’re learning for the first time that the company will be unable to bring Comanche 3 back into service by June 1, 2026, as the company has consistently told us for months,” PUC Chairman Eric Blank said in a meeting Wednesday.
In a normal summer, Blank said operations might be fine even if Comanche 3 remained idle longer.
“But given that Denver metro temperatures were 30 to 40 degrees above normal highs in March,” Blank said, “I think there may need to be more urgency in the company’s contingency planning for summer 2026 in the event that Colorado experiences extreme summer temperatures over several days and a wide geographic area.”
While it’s good keep an eye on the adequacy of the resources available, people “should not be concerned that there is an imminent threat of the lights going out,” said Joseph Pereira, director of the Colorado Office of the Utility Consumer Advocate.
“When we talk about on any given day you might be 400 megawatts short, what they’re saying is that will eat into that planning reserve margin,” Pereira told The Denver Post on Friday.
Last summer, Xcel Energy asked customers to conserve energy one day in August to avoid managed, rotating blackouts. A report by the PUC staff referred to what Xcel called a “code orange” event, meaning there was a realistic possibility of not having enough power to meet the demand for electricity.
The report showed that other Xcel coal plants experienced outages at points in summer 2025. Pereira said one thing Xcel can do is to make sure several plants aren’t scheduled for maintenance when hot temperatures are predicted.
Blank wants Xcel to make sure that larger customers that receive incentives to agree to have their service interrupted or cut back during emergencies actually reduce their demand if necessary. He also suggested a more robust system for encouraging customers to quickly scale back use.
Pereira doesn’t want to see ratepayers end up paying more for such solutions as providing incentives to certain businesses. He wants the focus on the company, “whose job it is to ensure that they have a reliable system.”
Xcel Energy was due to report on the progress on Comanche 3 to the PUC by June 1.
“But that seems way too late to put anything in place prior to this coming summer,” Blank said.
Xcel Energy has identified resource adequacy as a growing risk for several years and proposed solution to address the concern, company spokeswoman Lisa Andersen said in an email.
“The Commission identified several solutions for additional analysis which we have studied in the past and continue to evaluate as we head into the summer,” Andersen said. “This includes evaluating all opportunities to recover the Comanche 3 repair schedule to bring the unit back online before August.”
Besides the problems with Comanche 3, Blank voiced concern that in its recent report to the PUC, Xcel “appears to be wavering on its longstanding commitment to timely retiring” of its coal plants.
The PUC has approved agreements with Xcel that call for closing all the company’s coal plants by the end of 2030 for environmental and economic reasons. Comanche 3 was the last scheduled to be shut down.
Xcel is the plant’s majority owner and operator. The utility plans to replace the coal-fired generation at the site with renewable energy sources, natural gas and battery storage.
However, Xcel said in its March 2 report on Comanche that options to cover electricity needs over the next few years include keeping Comanche 2 operating beyond the current retirement date at the end of 2026 and keeping two coal units at Hayden Station in Routt County running until 2030. The planned closures are now for 2027 and 2028.
Comanche 3 started operating in 2010 and was expected to run until 2070, but it has been plagued with problems and has experienced numerous outages through the years.
