The National Laboratory of the Rockies let go 134 employees on Monday, the second time in less than a year that the facility formerly known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL, has terminated staff.

David Glickson, a spokesman for the National Laboratory of the Rockies, told The Denver Post late Monday afternoon that the eliminated positions were in both research and operations. The lab operates under the U.S. Department of Energy and its main location is the 327-acre campus in Golden.

The lab also runs the National Wind Technology Center along Colorado 128 in Boulder County, where workers provide technical support needed to develop new wind turbine designs.

“These actions were taken to adjust to existing and projected funding levels and alignment with DOE priorities,” Glickson said. “We recognize the meaningful contributions of those impacted and the role they have played in advancing the laboratory’s work.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Glickson provided a breakdown of the layoffs by location. The bulk of the layoffs, 114, were of employees at the lab’s South Table Mountain Campus in Golden, with 18 workers laid off at the Flatirons Campus in Boulder and two at a research site in Fairbanks, Alaska. The says it has nearly 4,000 employees, including postdocs, researchers and interns.

U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, whose district in Congress includes Golden, ripped into the Trump administration for its decision to cut more staff at the national lab.

“Donald Trump has consistently put our federal workforce on the chopping block,” the two-term Democrat said in a text message Monday evening. “These are people who work to make energy more affordable, conduct groundbreaking climate research, and keep our state up and running.”

She called the employees at the National Laboratory of the Rockies “some of our country’s brightest minds.”

“Trump’s backwards agenda is going to undo the progress we’ve made to combat the climate crisis and have cascading effects on our economy,” Pettersen wrote. “I’m deeply sorry to the employees whose livelihoods are now in jeopardy.”

The state’s Democratic U.S. senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, also weighed in on the decision.

Bennet said the lab “has been leading the world on energy innovation for decades,” staffed by professionals who are “committed to upholding scientific integrity and the highest standards of excellence regardless of who is in office.”

“I am disappointed to see this announcement, and will continue fighting to ensure the lab retains its core capabilities and unrivaled expertise,” he said.

Hickenlooper said the Trump administration is “driving away some of the smartest and most innovative people in the country.”

“The cost of this reckless assault on science and innovation could not be higher,” he said. “Americans just need to look at their electricity bill.”

In May, the Trump administration slashed 114 positions at what was then known as the NREL campus in Golden. It renamed the lab in December, stripping the word “renewable” from its title, with Assistant Energy Secretary Audrey Robertson saying at the time, “we are no longer picking and choosing energy sources.”

A few months into Trump’s second term, the administration proposed for 2026, targeting projects such as renewable energy research and eliminating programs designed to combat climate change.

The national lab was created in the fallout of the 1973 oil crisis, which spiked the price of oil and limited imports to the United States. The lab was initially named the Solar Energy Research Institute under President Gerald Ford, a Republican, and in 1991 it was renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory by President George H.W. Bush, also a Republican.

The national lab has a wide array of laboratories working within it, including sites focused on research in advanced optical materials, fuel synthesis catalysis, hydrogen safety sensor testing, renewable fuels and lubricants and solar radiation.

Re: “The National Renewable Energy Lab is renamed,” Dec. 3 news story

Changing the name of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the National Laboratory of the Rockies may seem inconsequential to the casual newsreader, but it����ap a true harbinger of this administration’s brutal neutralizing of clean energy technology development in the United States.

It����ap hard to know what the “Laboratory of the Rockies” will actually be; maybe something like analyzing professional baseball in Colorado or such. Regardless, the laboratory will soon lose its position as the leading applied science lab in the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory System for developing marketable, clean energy technologies. This has been done primarily through NREL’s long-term research relationships with American business concerns.

Three more years of slash-and-burn of these relationships will cause irreparable harm to American leadership in this critical 21st-century sector, allowing China dominance for years to come. Bad news for Colorado, bad news for the United States. Very sad.

John A. Herrick, Denver

Editor’s note: Herrick is a former chief counsel for the Department of Energy’s Golden Field Office.

Forty-one years have elapsed since constructed in 1984, but hey, it����ap never too late to make a change. “Renewable energy” is no longer permissible under the “climate realism” Orwellian newspeak of the new regime. The buildings remain in place on the southern slope of South Table Mountain in Golden, but the National Renewable Energy Lab is now the National Laboratory of the Rockies. Wonder what they will be doing there?

Phil Nelson, Golden

Putting on chains altogether now

Re: “Law requires anti-slip devices for 2WD vehicles,” Nov. 22 news story

Can CDOT and the state legislature as a whole imagine the drivers of all two-wheel drive vehicles on many miles of Interstate 70 stopping at the same time to install “anti-slip devices” when snows begin? That is what their new law requires. And notably, many miles of the highway now have an express lane, which “disappeared” formerly safe shoulders. Additionally, if you happen to have an all-wheel drive vehicle, note that if you are rolling on the last 59% of your thousand-dollar tire set’s tread in such weather, you will be breaking the law as well.

Thanks, to all of the genius legislators who so badly want to please the ski industry lobby.

Peter Ehrlich, Denver

License plata data as boogeyman is oversold

Re: “Big Brother is tracking you – Denver’s descent into dystopia,” Nov. 30  commentary

Robin Reichhardt����ap column oversells and underdelivers by a mile. Renewing an existing license plate contract is clearly not a “descent” into anything, and the details are as mundane as the license plate cameras on our toll lanes and money trees, er, mobile speed cameras. The piece misses a glaring point: The plate data is hard deleted after 30 days. While police can search it later, it����ap not much later.

Among other things the author doesn’t like are data centers, which she used her imagination in describing and tying to Big Brother Denver. The internet is complicated, but there’s no causation between the license plate cameras and the CoreSite — or any other local data center. Flock’s data is not stored in Colorado. Even if it were, plate records contribute no meaningful portion to data center capacity, which is almost entirely videos of attractive people doing banal tasks, cat videos, and, of course, porn.

I do appreciate the writer’s description of herself as a “community organizer” rather than an “informed citizen.”

Bradley Rehak, Denver

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The decades-old energy research hub is now called the National Laboratory of the Rockies,  Department of Energy officials said in a news release.

“We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources,” Assistant Energy Secretary Audrey Robertson said in the release. “Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand.”

The national lab was created in the fallout of the 1973 oil crisis, which spiked the price of oil and limited imports to the United States. The lab was first named the Solar Energy Research Institute under President Gerald Ford, a Republican, and in 1991 it was renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory by President George H.W. Bush, also a Republican.

The Trump administration laid off more than 100 workers at NREL’s Golden campus in May, and it has sought to significantly cut back on solar and wind power research as and eliminates programs aimed at addressing climate change.

“Of course the Trump administration is picking and choosing winners,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the , a Denver-based nonpartisan conservation and advocacy organization. “Donald Trump has a pathological vendetta against wind energy, and he’s determined to make every American pay more for electricity as a result. This renaming exercise is more proof that the Trump administration will always put ideology over common sense.”

The laboratory’s website on Monday evening included a logo at the top with the new name, though the content of the pages continued to reference the previous name.

“This new name embraces a broader applied energy mission entrusted to us by the Department of Energy to deliver a more affordable and secure energy future for all,” Jud Virden, laboratory director of the National Laboratory of the Rockies, said in the release.

But the hopes contained in those lofty words from his have dimmed as the 9.3-acre, state-owned parcel has continued to sit vacant. In recent months, the state instead has begun eyeing the site, which lies in the shadow of the U.S. Department of Energy’s , for an apartment complex.

It’s a shift that vocal neighbors in the Pleasant View neighborhood on the edge of Golden are calling a “bait and switch.” They consider it an affront to residents who had reluctantly come to terms with a lab being built there — but not a busy residential building that could stand as tall as eight stories.

“An eight-story building is nothing like what we have in our neighborhood,” said Adrian Waller, the president of the Pleasant View Metropolitan District and a 31-year resident of the neighborhood. “It would have people 24/7 that would also be using the park.”

He was referring to Pleasant View Community Park, directly adjacent to the Globeville Energy Park site. Laura Cardon, who has lived in the neighborhood for five years, said it has served as a vital natural refuge in an increasingly busy part of the county.

“This is the only big area set aside for nature,” she said, pointing across a tangle of trails to a row of mature trees towering over Lena Gulch. “This is where my kid learned to ride his bike.”

Lu Cordova, who heads up the Global Energy Park in her role as Polis’ strategic planning and projects adviser, declined to respond to a number of questions sent to her by The Denver Post last week.

But in early August, she spoke to the Jefferson County commissioners as the housing plan at the Glo Park site first emerged.

The state, Cordova told the county leaders, still would like to pursue the Global Energy Park — which had commonly been referred to as “Glo Park” in shorthand — as a place where players in industry, government and academia come together, in partnership with NREL. The goal has been to establish and nurture a one-of-a-kind .

But the arrival of the new Trump administration, which slashed 114 positions at NREL in Golden in May amid an aggressive effort to trim federal funding for renewable energy initiatives, prompted her office to explore “pivoting” away from the project.

Chris O’Keefe, Jefferson County’s planning director, put it more bluntly at that same meeting: “There’s a shift that’s taken place at the federal level that’s causing Lu and the state to look at this project differently.”

Also competing for attention, Cordova told the commissioners, is the governor’s long-standing zeal for increasing the availability of affordable housing in Colorado. The land near NREL could serve that purpose, she said.

“We also recognize that, right now, the demand for housing is reaching crisis proportions all over Colorado,” Cordova told Jeffco officials.

That didn’t mollify Pleasant View neighbors, like Nancy Pate, who attended that August meeting and beseeched the commissioners not to sign off on housing at the Glo Park site.

“Now we’re going to throw something else at you that completely doesn’t fit in your single-family and duplex residence kind of neighborhood,” Pate said. “My front yard would be apartments.”

Despite Cordova’s assurances to the county commissioners that the potential housing plan for the site was “so premature,” her office issued a Request for Qualifications from prospective developers. The deadline for submissions to the state was Oct. 1.

This week, Cordova told The Post that two of the submissions she received “have been shortlisted” and that those developers will be interviewed “for viability.”

Jefferson County’s planning and zoning department has not received an application for the site. But at the end of the day, it is not up to the county what goes in there, said county spokeswoman Cassie Pearce.

“While that application will be either approved or denied by the Planning Commission, the state has the authority to override that decision,” Pearce said. “Ultimately, the county does not have final say on how this land is used.”

However, the county’s understanding of a recent land swap involving the site “was based on the proposal that the land would be used for lab space by NREL or NREL partners,” she said.

The Glo Park site came into state ownership through a complex land swap executed a few years ago in an area known as Camp George West, which once served as the . The area just off South Golden Road still hosts the Colorado State Patrol Academy and a former prison.

The long and short of the exchange was that Jefferson County ended up with 160 acres on and around South Table Mountain, while the state received the nearly 10-acre parcel it wanted for the Global Energy Park.

There was even a gathering at the governor’s mansion of government officials, business leaders and representatives of research institutions in spring 2023 to draw up a grand vision for what could happen at the Glo Park. Greg Venn, the CEO of Denver-based NexCore Group, said then that a groundbreaking could happen the following spring.

NexCore, the company tasked with developing the Global Energy Park, told The Post last week that it couldn’t comment on the situation.

A spokesman for NREL said the agency wouldn’t be able to respond to questions during the federal government shutdown, which began Oct. 1.

No final decisions have been made about the site, said Shelby Wieman, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office.

“The state is exploring a number of different options, including housing paired with park improvements, to best utilize this plot of land,” she said. “We look forward to continued conversations with community members on the best path forward.”

In the meantime, Pleasant View neighbors are gearing up for a fight.

Last month, 100 or so residents showed up for a community meeting, according to .

Cardon, who also serves on the Pleasant View Metro District’s board, takes particular issue with language in the state’s solicitation of developers that indicated its efforts at the site were “aimed at transforming underutilized State-owned land into a vibrant community.”

“It’s already a vibrant community in Camp George West,” Cardon said. “It’s a really nice eclectic mix of houses.”

And more are coming, Waller said. The metro district president said 600 housing units are in the pipeline for Pleasant View, on top of the 2,200 already there. Adding hundreds more in an apartment complex that he and others see as not fitting with the neighborhood’s existing housing stock — and which could strain the Pleasant View Fire Protection District’s ability to provide service — is not wise or wanted, he said.

“It’s high-density housing and we don’t have high-density housing,” Waller said.

Waller and his neighbors want the state to take a breather before making any final moves in the Pleasant View neighborhood. Maybe conditions will improve for building the Global Energy Park, he speculated.

“Be patient,” he said, expressing hope that the state would hold out until Polis’ original vision became viable again.

“NREL continues to navigate a complex financial and operational landscape shaped by the issuance of stop work orders from federal agencies, new federal directives, and budgetary shifts,” an NREL spokesperson said.

“As a result, NREL has experienced workforce impacts affecting 114 employees across the laboratory, including staff from both research and operations, who were involuntarily separated today. We appreciate their meaningful contributions to the laboratory. NREL’s mission continues to be critical to achieve an affordable and secure energy future. We are grateful for the dedication and commitment of our staff as we continue to advance the laboratory’s work.”

Last week, President Donald Trump’s administration proposed of dollars in federal funding for next year, targeting projects such as renewable energy research and eliminating programs designed to combat climate change.

The energy budget proposal will cancel in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) Green New Deal funding proposed for “unreliable renewable energy, removing carbon dioxide from the air, and other costly technologies that burden ratepayers and consumers.”

The White House Office of Management and Budget stated in a May 2 news release that the budget “reorients Department of Energy funding toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of domestic fossil energy and critical minerals, innovative concepts for nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, and technologies that promote firm baseload power.”

They further stated the budget will also cancel an additional $5.7 billion in IIJA funding provided to the Department of Transportation for “failed” electric vehicle charger grant programs.

NREL has over 3,500 employees, postdoctoral researchers, interns, visiting professionals and subcontractors, according to its website.It wasn’t clear on Monday how many of those employees work out of the Golden campus.

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission is holding meetings virtually and in communities that will be affected by Xcel Energy’s plan to shut all its coal plants in the state by the end of 2030. The PUC traveled to Pueblo last week, listened to comments Monday during a Zoom session and will visit Hayden on Thursday.

The PUC is expected to open a hearing on Xcel’s plan in June.

What Xcel Energy calls its just transition plan for communities includes replacing coal plants with wind and solar power, battery storage and natural gas facilities. Xcel, Colorado’s largest electric utility, plans to end its use of the coal plant in Hayden in 2028 and the last of three units at the Comanche Generating Station near Pueblo by 2031.

Colorado power companies as well as communities across the state have cut back the use of coal and other fossil fuels to strive to meet goals for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions.

Xcel’s plan has been praised for what would be a significant expansion of renewable energy in the utility’s portfolio. And it’s been panned for proposing new gas generation.

An advisory committee organized by Xcel has recommended that the coal units at the Comanche site be replaced with modular nuclear units or a gas plant that would capture the carbon dioxide emissions.

Another proposal that has gained recent support is one by a San Francisco-based energy and climate think tank. The organization looked at Pueblo as a case study and recommended an “energy park” in the area that would combine solar and wind power and battery storage, including thermal batteries that can convert electricity to heat for direct use in industrial processes.

Pueblo County Commissioner Miles Lucero told the PUC during the hearing in Pueblo that he has heard from many residents that they want a clean energy future. “In that spirit, I believe the Pueblo Renewable Energy Park represents a practical near-term step for addressing our generation needs.”

Michelle Solomon, co-author of Energy Innovation’s study, said Pueblo seemed like a good fit for the park concept. “We’ve been exploring the idea of combining industry and energy generation in a single location to take advantage of way industry can use excess renewable energy to balance out production.”

Energy Innovation believes the concept has the potential to generate jobs and tax revenue from developing an energy/industrial site, said Solomon, who is based in Gunnison.

Pueblo residents, government and business leaders warn that the closure of the last unit at the Comanche coal plant will be a major blow to the area’s economy. A report by the which recommended replacing the coal plant with modular nuclear reactors, said Xcel pays more than $25 million a year to Pueblo County. Most of the revenue comes from Comanche Station.

A report by Michael Wakefield, a professor at Colorado State University-Pueblo, said the coal facility generates roughly $196 million in economic benefits annually.

“Of all of the technologies that we studied, only advanced nuclear generation will make Pueblo whole and also provide a path to prosperity,” the advisory committee’s report said.

However, critics of building nuclear reactors have concerns about the waste and the consequences if the reactors fail. Others say the smaller reactors, billed as more advanced than older, larger plants, aren’t ready for commercial use.

“At scale of any sort, it’s going to be 2035 before we have any kind of small modular reactor fleet,” said Dennis Wamsted, an analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

One company has been licensed to produce modular reactors in the U.S., but none are operating. Wamsted co-wrote that said reactors built or under construction in other countries have run 300% to 600% over budget.

Energy Innovation said its modeling shows that a renewable energy park could produce more than $40 million in annual property taxes for Pueblo County and create more than 350 permanent jobs. Solomon said the study used the Colorado state assessed renewable tax factor template for the renewable projects.

For estimating the number of jobs, the organization reviewed reports by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the , a research organization. The study on the energy park recommends including electrolysis, which uses electricity to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen to produce ammonia for fertilizer and aviation fuel.

The about opening federal land to private data center companies coincided Thursday with Energy Secretary Chris Wright‘s visit to , where he toured research labs, gave a 10-minute talk to employees and discussed plans for the agency, including the push to provide more data storage capacity for advancing technology.

The Energy Department has identified an 11-acre site located west of the Flatirons main campus, near the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, that “would be an ideal location for a data center facility,” according to a posted online Thursday.

The list of locations identified as potential hosts for data centers included storied nuclear research facilities in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as well as sites in Idaho, Missouri, Washington and Illinois.

“So we’re saying we have a bunch of land. Tell us where you would like to build on these lands. Let’s make a deal. Build a data center. Build the energy that supplies that grid. Maybe share some expertise and intelligence. Maybe share some of your computing power there with our national labs,” Wright said during a news conference. “I think there’s a lot of room for things to be done here with just a more creative, common-sense framework that we’re trying to bring to this government.”

The NREL campus has enough land, power, water and broadband capability to host a 100-megawatt data center, and construction could begin as early as this year, the request-for-information document said.

“Through this project, NREL could help the U.S. establish global AI dominance and accelerate the transformation of the U.S. data center industry by dramatically reducing construction timelines, enabling the U.S. to rapidly deploy critical AI infrastructure at scale,” the document said. “NREL aims to establish a site where a developer can continue its usual business operations while using the site as a proving ground. The approach would not only allow the developer to focus on its business objectives but also provide national stakeholders with valuable insights into accelerating AI data center construction and power deployment, paving the way for future industry innovations.”

In a 20-minute news conference, Wright said the intention is to invite private companies onto federal land to do business in a public-private partnership. That could mean the federal government leases the land to a company or the data center developer reserves some of its capacity for NREL’s work, because the federal lab also relies on data centers.

“It would be a commercial arrangement using our land to get some value out of it with a private company,” Wright said.

NREL’s Flatirons Campus is a 305-acre site where more than 1,000 people research and invent ways to improve and strengthen the energy grid. It has enough space to add several hundred thousand square feet of additional buildings.

The Trump administration’s move follows an executive order signed in January by outgoing President Joe Biden that sought to remove hurdles for AI data center expansion in the U.S. while also encouraging those data centers, which require large amounts of electricity, to be powered with renewable energy.

While President Donald Trump has since sought to erase most of Biden’s signature AI policies, he made clear after returning to the White House that he had no interest in rescinding Biden’s data center order.

“I’d like to see federal lands opened up for data centers,” Trump said in January. “I think they’re going to be very important.”

While the tech industry has long relied on data centers to run online services, from email and social media to financial transactions, new AI technology behind popular chatbots and generative tools requires even more powerful computation to build and operate.

A report released by the Department of Energy late last year estimated that the electricity needed for data centers in the U.S. tripled over the past decade and is projected to double or triple again by 2028, when it could consume up to 12% of the nation’s electricity.

The United States, under both presidents, has been speeding up efforts to license and build a new generation of nuclear reactors to supply carbon-free electricity.

While Biden’s executive order focused on powering AI infrastructure with clean energy sources such as “geothermal, solar, wind and nuclear,” Thursday’s statement from Trump’s energy department focused only on nuclear. But in a lengthy request for information sought from data center and energy developers, the agency outlines a variety of electricity sources available at each site, from solar arrays to gas turbines.

Colorado already is asking how it will be able to provide enough electricity for the surging demand for data centers as it phases out coal-burning power plants.

Data centers come with controversy, especially in the American West, where water is a valuable but vanishing resource. Data centers use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to cool their facilities. They also require an enormous amount of electricity, which often requires the burning of more fossil fuels, creating more greenhouse gas emissions that accelerate climate change.

A 100-megawatt data center would use enough electricity to power about 20,000 homes.

When asked from where NREL would draw enough water and electricity to support a 100-megawatt data center, Wright said the Energy Department would ask private developers to also build the electrical capacity to run their systems. A map included with the request for information shows nearby Xcel Energy substations as well as additional space for windmills, solar and battery storage.

“You’re going to co-locate power,” Wright said. “You’re going to build a data center, and you’re going to build the power and resources to power it.”

He did not answer where the necessary water would come from.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

We urge caution as the White House rapidly cuts jobs and programs, but such prudence likely must come from Congress. After decades of being unable to cut the deficit and begin paying down the debt, now is the moment for Congress to rise to the occasion and replace the sledgehammer being wielded by the White House with something more artful, such as a ball pein.

U.S. Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper – two long-time fiscal moderates with bipartisan credentials — should lead a charge. The likelihood of two Democrats succeeding when Republicans have the House and Senate is low, but it’s better than the alternative of crying about Elon Musk being unelected.

Shutting down the U.S. government in protest of the cuts, will only make matters worse for federal employees and anyone in need of services from the U.S. government. Democrats who agree that the U.S. can’t sustain this level of spending and Republicans with concerns about the president’s approach can unite around legislation that begins the slow retraction of money from the U.S. economy.

Bold, meaningful cuts are needed. But indiscriminate slashing that harms more Americans than it helps is a blatantly cruel and vengeful act by the Trump administration. Congress, which holds the purse strings, is at fault for not wielding its power.

There are reasons to worry that President Donald Trump’s rescission plans could hit Colorado hard in the coming months. There are about 57,000 federal workers in Colorado. Let’s assume the state’s strong job market could easily absorb 10% to 15% of those employees losing their jobs as long as things remain stable in other parts of our economy. Gov. Jared Polis issued a press release of support for laid-off workers, outlining how they could file for the state’s unemployment insurance to cover some of their lost wages while they look for another job. He also noted that the state has 60,000 job openings at the moment.

That won’t work, however, if federal funding to states is also drastically slashed and the state finds itself cutting jobs and freezing hiring as well, or if tariffs impact businesses in the private sector and cause layoffs.

Far less easy to absorb will be the commercial real estate that could be vacated. The Denver Post reported last week that the federal government rents 4.1 million square feet of commercial real estate in this state and that 90% of that is in Denver, Larimer, Jefferson, Arapahoe, El Paso, Boulder and Adams counties.

Terminated leases will add empty commercial real estate space to a market already struggling to rebound from the change to work from home.

Our military bases employ thousands of civilians alongside thousands of enlisted members. Colorado is also home to significant military contractors, meaning cuts to the Department of Defense spending are likely to ripple through our private sector as well.

Colorado is also home to a base of scientists who work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden and the Geologic Hazards Science Center in Golden.

Bennet and Hickenlooper should lead Colorado’s House members in a thoughtful response to the cuts. If Democrats don’t come forward with their own proposal for eliminating the deficit over time, then Republicans will only be emboldened to continue with this executive branch power-grab.

For example, Congress can easily push back on the 7,000 Internal Revenue Service employees laid off last Thursday across the nation. Cutting staff from the IRS likely will not save money as the IRS is one department that largely pays its own way by recovering unpaid taxes from people who either accidentally or intentionally underpay. If layoffs aren’t going to actually net the federal government money, there is no way to justify them.

Congress could pass legislation requiring the White House to restore the IRS to full funding and the full employment levels necessary to enforce our tax laws. Whether or not Republicans would ever agree to such a pushback on policy from the White House is another question. The GOP has also spent the last 10 years unfairly vilifying IRS employees.

Americans expect Congress to exercise its constitutional duty to check the powers of the White House. The last time Congress attempted to put its foot down on Trump’s actions was over funding for the border wall, and in a show of weakness, lawmakers backed down.

America didn’t rack up $36 trillion in debt in a year, and we shouldn’t try to pay it all off in a single president����ap administration. Eliminating the $1.83 trillion deficit (which has only grown since last fiscal year) may not even be possible without tax increases. Trump has said he plans to use tariffs to that effect, which will only work if Americans are still spending money on discretionary goods.

We need a long-term plan to stabilize our finances without tanking our economy. Colorado’s elected leaders need to step up now with a plan of their own that pushes back on this reckless approach to cutting spending.

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Coal plants across Colorado have been shut down with all of them expected to close by the end of 2030. Rules by the city of Denver and the state are aimed at eventually making buildings all electric. Colorado has a goal of getting nearly 1 million electric vehicles on the roads by 2030 and recently moved ahead of California for the nation’s top spot in market share of electric vehicles sold in the state.

But does Colorado have the juice to keep up the pace on the road to a clean-energy future? Can the state shutter several power plants and still meet the everyday demands of keeping the lights, heat and air conditioning on — all while hitting targets for reducing emissions and expanding the use of renewables? How much will it cost?

The surging number of power-intensive mega computing centers and risks posed by more frequent and severe bouts of extreme weather are raising questions about how much the electric grid can take. And not just in Colorado.

A new study that participated in said the U.S. transmission system of a half million miles of power lines will need to at least double in size by 2050 to remain reliable at the lowest cost to ratepayers.

said about half the continent is at elevated or high risk of energy shortfalls over the next five to 10 years as power plants are retired and the pressure for more electricity escalates.

Colorado’s largest electric utility, said in a proposal to replace the Comanche coal plant in Pueblo with new renewable energy sources and natural gas that projections show it will need from 12,500 to 14,000 megawatts of new power in the coming years. A forecast the company filed with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission said the demand for power could grow at a compounded rate of 4% from 2023 through 2031, compared with an average annual rate of 0.7% in the past five years.

“The plan is going to allow us and the state to meet our and the state’s ambitious emission reduction goals and also allow us to meet what we expect to be new demands from more building electrification, more transportation electrification and new data centers that are coming into the state,” Robert Kenney, president of Xcel Energy-Colorado, said when the proposal was released in October.

Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy plans to spend $45 billion on capital investments in the next five years with about $22 billion of that for Colorado.

Colorado’s second-largest electric utility, is a wholesale power provider that serves electric cooperatives in Colorado and three neighboring states. Lisa Tiffin, senior vice president of energy management, said the Westminster-based utility has been planning for several years to meet the growth in its normal electric load as well as increases driven by more electric vehicles, electrification of buildings and oil and gas operations and new data centers.

Working with its member cooperatives, Tri-State is adding renewable energy projects and ensuring the company has a reserve of power resources it listed on Tiffin said, “The reserve margin starts at 22% and increases to 30% by 2028” when its last coal unit in Craig will close.

“Houston, we’ve got a problem”

Overall, is Colorado on track to successfully shut down coal plants to decrease heat-trapping emissions, making the electric grid carbon-free and meeting the burgeoning demand for more power?

“If you’d asked me that question two years ago, I would have said, ‘Absolutely,’ ” said John Gavan, a former member of the PUC.

But Gavan worries about holdups on some renewable energy projects intended to replace coal units already scheduled to close. The closures could leave Colorado without enough “firm generation,” power that can be turned on and off as needed as opposed to wind and solar farms.

“It could lead to keeping coal plants online,” Gavan said. “What irks me is that nobody is standing up and saying, ‘Houston, we’ve got a problem.’ ”

Jack Ihle of Xcel Energy said the company “is not looking to extend the retirement dates of the coal plants.” The schedule has been established through a number of PUC orders, is part of state air quality regulations and has broad support in Colorado, said Ihle, the Colorado utility’s regional vice president of regulatory and strategy analysis.

Delayed renewable projects that were authorized about three years ago under an Xcel Energy clean energy plan are due in part to delays in approval of contracts for various reasons, said Mike Kruger, president and CEO of the trade group During that time, higher interest and inflation rates as well as supply-chain disruptions drove up prices, making it tough for companies to make good on their original bids on projects.

“If we were able to go from when the PUC gave approval, you would have seen more of these projects completed,” Kruger said. “But the longer we waited, the more the costs went up and the less able companies were to make the  bid price.”

In December, the PUC gave preliminary approval to increase the bid prices after requests from energy companies and Xcel. Kruger believes the state won’t meet its goals for expansion of renewables and decreased emissions by the end of the decade if the projects don’t go forward. The electric sector is required to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2030.

“Not only are we closing the remaining coal plants in the state, but we’re seeing quite a bit of load growth, unlike anything we’ve seen in two decades,” Kruger said.

a consultant for the power sector, said in a December report that demand for electricity nationwide is forecast to rise by nearly 16% by 2029. Among the main drivers, according to the report, are data centers and manufacturing, spurred by the federal and

but other states are becoming draws for the industry. Colorado has 56 of the facilities that house infrastructure for streaming, business computing, cloud storage and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. Xcel Energy has said it has “nearly 9,000 megawatts of opportunities” in the pipeline for powering data centers and about half the growth is likely to occur in Colorado in part because of its commitment to cleaner energy on the electric grid.

But renewable energy advocates worry that massive data centers could pose risks to achieving Colorado’s climate goals.

“In some states, utilities are building enormous new gas plants to serve data centers. To meet Colorado’s climate goals, we cannot have a massive buildout of new fossil fuels to serve data centers,” Garrett Royer, acting chapter director of the Colorado Sierra Club, said in an email.

‘Instead, we need data center operators to take the lead in procuring clean energy to serve their energy demands so the costs aren’t passed on to our communities,” Royer added.

Clare Valentine, senior policy adviser at Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates, said she’s “cautiously optimistic” that utilities, thanks in part to Colorado laws, will meet rising power demands first with renewable energy and not with new natural gas generation or keeping coal plants open longer than planned.

“Many data centers want to utilize clean energy to power their facilities. Utilities can and should work closely with them strategically to ensure renewable energy can meet that load growth,” Valentine said in an email.

And the state of Colorado should not provide incentives to attract data centers, Gavan said. He was a vocal critic of a failed bill in the 2024 legislative session that would have offered state sales and use tax rebates to centers that locate in Colorado. Opponents were concerned about the centers’ huge water and energy needs.

Polis and Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said data centers can benefit ratepayers if the centers are carefully planned.

“There are a lot of relatively fixed costs on the system,” Toor said. “So if you add a new large load in a place where we already have the transmission that we need, you’re taking costs that everybody is paying for transmission and now spreading them over more kilowatt hours. It tends to exert a downward pressure on everybody’s rates.”

Scaling up transmission nationwide

When a study of the nation’s transmission system kicked off two years ago, the rising demand for electricity wasn’t the most important subject researchers were discussing.

“U.S. demand had been relatively flat. Now everybody is talking about it,” said David Palchak,, a senior researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The U.S. Department of Energy led the that was joined by NREL and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The study, released in December, identified a dramatic expansion of the country’s transmission system as the most cost-effective, reliable method of meeting the growing demand for electricity.

A big reason for the focus on transmission is the addition of more renewable energy to the grid. The energy sources are often far from populous areas, requiring more long-distance transmission lines.

“A simple example is when the wind is blowing really hard in the middle of the country and you have more than you need, you can ship it to another area,” Palchak said.

Expanding the transmission system would also help with increasing weather extremes: heat domes in the Pacific Northwest, winter storms in Texas. Areas going through withering heat or frigid temperatures can lean on their neighbors via grid connections, Palchak said.

The nation’s roughly half million miles of lines would need to be at least doubled by 2050, the study said. And researchers emphasize the need for interregional planning, coordination and construction.

Xcel Energy’s $1.7 billion Colorado Power Pathway will move power from renewable sources on the Eastern Plains to the Front Range via loops of roughly 550 miles of high high-voltage transmission lines. A segment that runs through Cheyenne, Kit Carson, Morgan and Washington counties is expected to be in service this year.

Palchak and other researchers say a national transmission expansion could be done at major cost savings, that every dollar invested would save $1.60 to $1.80. The study’s various scenarios show that accelerated transmission growth would save $270 billion to $490 billion nationwide through 2050.

“In the near term you get reductions in fuel costs” with wind, solar and battery storage, Palchak said.

In the long term, money would be saved because fewer new power plants would have to be built. Palchak said several different parties, including industry experts and state governments, gave feedback during the study.

“The hope is that people are going to be able to pick this up and be able to use it, maybe influencing the decisions they are going to be making,” Palchak said.

“It’s possible this time’s different”

“I think it����ap important to always remember that forecasts are not reality and we’ve seen forecasts before that have been wildly overstated in terms of the forecasted load growth versus what actually showed up,” said Mark Dyson, a managing director at , a nonpartisan think tank focused on a zero-carbon energy future.

“That said, it’s possible this time’s different,” he added. “Contracts are being signed today for facilities that will add hundreds of megawatts, even gigawatts of power once they’re constructed.”

Dyson said the growth in the electricity load was relatively flat for the past 15 or 20 years. Now, the move to electric vehicles, more electric heating and cooling, increased manufacturing and the spread of data centers are boosting demand. He sees a strong case for expanding transmission systems to help meet the growing load and for more connections across regions.

“We also need to be smart about how we use the grid in general,” Dyson said.

That’s where come in. The equipment and practices enable systems to get more power from their electrons, sometimes avoiding the need for expensive new infrastructure. The technologies include:

• Reconductoring, or without having to permit and build new transmission towers.
• , or siting clean energy alongside existing fossil generators to leverage their grid connections.
• Dynamic line ratings, which adjust the carrying capacity of transmission lines based on real-time measurement of conditions.
• or aggregated distributed energy resources such as batteries, electric vehicles, rooftop solar and smart thermostats that can feed into the grid.

The use of grid-enhancing methods is more common in other countries, Dyson said. In the U.S., utilities are compensated for capital expenditures, lessening the incentive to use grid-enhancing technologies, RMI said.

Rebecca White, PUC director, said the state wants to see those types of technology used because they save money for ratepayers. She noted that a report by the found that upgrading transmission lines is a cost-effective way to increase capacity in existing transmission corridors.

“Nationwide we see at least a 60 gigawatt potential by the end of this decade from aggregating the flexibility inherent in these resources that are already out in the world and have already been bought and paid for,” Dyson said.

“We take reliability very seriously”

Once criticized as being too reliant on coal, Tri-State has been closing coal facilities and will shut more by 2031. The utility retired its share in plants in New Mexico, closed its plant in Nucla in 2019 and retired its share in a plant in Craig in 2025.

Tri-State plans to retire its last unit at coal plant in Craig in early 2028, about two years earlier than previously scheduled. A coal unit in Springerville, Ariz., will be retired in 2031. Tri-State is preparing requests for proposals for more renewable energy sources in addition to dispatchable sources that can be turned on and off as needed, such as natural gas.

In 2023, according to the latest available figures, Tri-State got 40% of its electricity from coal; 33% from renewables; 17% from the marketplace; and 10% from natural gas and oil.

Tri-State expects renewables to make up 70% of the energy on its system by 2030 and anticipates cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 80% from 2005 levels by then.

Tiffin said Tri-State goes through a robust modeling process to determine the volume and kind of energy it needs for peak demand. A 100-megawatt wind facility might generate only 14 megawatts of power in certain instances, she said.

“What can we truly count on? That����ap how we stack up that capacity against our reserve margins,” Tiffin said.

The utility serves a total of 41 member associations in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska and New Mexico. Tri-State has about 1 million electric customers over 200,000 square miles. It has various partnerships across the region that allow it to buy power from providers when it needs to. Under most public utilities are required to join interregional wholesale energy markets by 2030 unless qualifying for a waiver.

“We want to leverage interconnections where we can,” Tiffin said. “One of the benefits of being in a cooperative system is we are very much trying to expand the ability, flexibility of our members to bring on resources, which includes some programs at utility scale.

“The more of that we have, the more we avoid those big transmission bills,” she said.

Updated at Jan. 1, 2025, at 10:10 a.m. to add details.

“Nobody can embargo sunlight,” Carter said. “No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters. It����ap free from stench and smog. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored and used.”

It was a rare umbrella day in Golden. Carter’s timing for his proclaimed “Sun Day” was off. But he was on the mark about solar energy in ways that we have yet to fully appreciate.

Carter had advanced schooling in nuclear energy, but by 1975 he was thinking about renewables. He invited Ron Larson, an electrical engineering professor from Georgia Tech, to share lunch and talk about renewable energy.

“At that time there wasn’t much to photovoltaics,” Larson told me recently. “It was over $100 a watt. Now it����ap less than $1 a watt.”

Larson moved to Colorado in 1977 to work as SERI’s first principal scientist and stayed. In multiple roles he helped pivot our energy use. Since then, thousands have followed.

One component of SERI’s mission — to advance use of solar energy — was outreach to 300 builders and architects in Colorado to help them learn how to construct houses with lessened need for fossil fuels.

John Avenson, an engineer with AT&T/Bell Labs, was among the beneficiaries. The house in Westminster that he built in 1981 faces south and has large windows coupled with effective shades.

On Facebook the day after Carter’s death, Avenson rued the widespread failure to acknowledge Carter’s early thinking: “Every house built since then should have been this good or better but the program was cancelled by (President Ronald) Reagan.”

Avenson’s house near Standley Lake Reservoir was built with a natural gas furnace. He rarely used it, his gas bills never surpassed $180 for a full year. After tweaking and new technology, he was finally satisfied the house would do fine at -20 degrees without the furnace. In 2016 he had Xcel Energy stub the gas line.

When I visited him on New Year’s Eve, he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. “I’m an Arizona kind of person,” he said. He keeps the house at 72 to 78 degrees. It will be featured on a Jan. 25 broadcast on PBS.

I asked Avenson about Carter’s death. “Oh, so sad,” he replied. “He influenced my life and didn’t know it.”

Steve Andrews was also influenced by Carter. A veteran of the Vietnam War, he had used the GI Bill of Rights to take college classes in basic engineering. That led to an internship and then a job at SERI. He wrote the guidebook for the 1981 Denver homebuilders’ annual Parade of Homes featuring about a dozen passive-solar homes across the Denver metro area.

Then, Andrews got laid off. As president, Reagan had no real use for renewable energy. He famously that Carter had placed atop the White House. He also halved SERI’s budget. Andrews, a recent hire, was among the first to go. The mission of SERI was also narrowed, pushing outreach to the back burner. Andrews recalled that the director, Denis Hayes, was fired after accusing his bosses at the U.S. Department of Energy of being something to the effect of “dull gray men in dull gray suits thinking dull gray thoughts.”

Later, under a former oilman, President George H.W. Bush, SERI was resurrected as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. NREL has now expanded to a staff of 3,675 employees and broadened its influence.

Can it be a mere coincidence that Colorado, in 2004, adopted the nation’s first voter-initiated renewable energy portfolio standard? Or that Colorado in recent years has adopted a dozen or more first-in-nation policies and regulations designed to curb greenhouse emissions? We might be guilty of parochial pride, but there can be no doubt that Colorado belongs in any national conversation about the pivot to a new energy economy, to use the title of former Gov. Bill Ritter’s center that is affiliated with Colorado State University.

Ironically, passive-house building has gotten little traction. The economics are unassailable, and the technology just isn’t that difficult. It does take basic site-planning. Andrews, in his post-SERI career, once calculated that 85% of houses in metro Denver face east or west. That results in unwanted summer heat, but little in winter, when it is wanted. Housing should face north and south.

Colorado has decades of work ahead in decarbonizing its buildings. We need to remember what Jimmy Carter understood nearly 50 years ago.

Allen Best publishes BigPivots.com, an online journal that tracks Colorado’s transitions in energy and water provoked by climate change.

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