By Scott Weiser | The Denver Gazette
An energy office report shows six less-costly options, including nuclear power.
Colorado Energy Office Executive Director Will Toor joined a group of “renewable” energy advocates on a press call recently, arguing that Congress should retain Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for wind, solar, and grid-scale batteries, rather than reallocating the funds to other technologies, including nuclear power, which President Trump has set as a priority.
Underpinning that argument is that wind, solar and batteries are the “fastest and most affordable way for utilities to meet this demand.”
That’s not what a April 2025 report, commissioned by the energy office itself, has found.
On the contrary, the report from Ascend Analytics, “Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in Colorado’s Electric Sector by 2040,” places the wind, solar and battery scenario as the most expensive of seven emissions reduction options.
The seven scenarios in the Colorado Energy Office’s Pathways report begin with a baseline $43.1 billion scenario for “zero carbon” power by 2040. The scenarios range from $51.6 billion for the “OT100” scenario, which the report said “is the most efficient pathway to a carbon free grid in 2040″; to $54.1 billion for a hydrogen-limited scenario; to $54.7 billion for a scenario involving geothermal energy; to $56.1 billion for a “distribution system level focus” scenario; to $60.8 billion for a small modular reactor scenario; and, finally, $61 billion for a wind, solar and battery only scenario.
Trump has ordered a halt on federal grant funding for various renewable energy projects in January, but those orders were swiftly appealed and most of the 2024 grants were restored.
Cuts are still possible if bills before Congress pass and the president signs them.
“For our consumers, the really big effects of a repeal would be making energy more expensive and less reliable,” Toor said at the press conference. “As utilities need to expand generation and transmission and distribution infrastructure, adding wind, solar and batteries is the fastest and most affordable way for utilities to meet this demand.”
When pressed about his statement that wind, solar, and batteries are “the fastest and most affordable way for utilities to meet this demand,” while the Pathways report shows it as the most expensive option, Toor did not directly address the discrepancy.
Instead, Toor responded, “I think from our perspective, we think that all clean energy sources are important and we think that the structure and the Inflation Reduction Act, that created a really technology neutral clean energy tax credit that could support wind, solar, storage, geothermal, advanced nuclear, those are all important.”
“In the near term, the investments that we see on the ground are certainly wind, solar, and batteries, but we think all of these advanced technologies are important to the future of our country and support continuing tax credits for all of them,” Toor added.
Amy Cooke, board chair of Always On Energy Research, a non-profit energy research organization that provides cost and reliability energy modeling, said Colorado energy officials have chosen the most expensive alternative to achieving the state’s climate goals and are falsely claiming that wind, solar and batteries are the most affordable choice.
Using federal tax credits to socialize the costs of expensive renewable energy projects in Colorado across the entire national economy, Cooke said, forces people who get no benefit from Colorado projects to pay for costly programs that still increase the cost of electricity for Colorado consumers, not reduce it.
“The thing that news outlets around Colorado are saying, is that without these tax credits, the cost of electricity in Colorado will rise,” said Cooke. “It’s not that the cost will go up because tax credits don’t necessarily decrease the cost. They don’t make electricity cheaper. They just disguise who pays for it.”
She added: “So every dollar of subsidy granted to Colorado’s utilities is a dollar pulled from taxpayers somewhere else. So, why should working families in Mississippi or Maine or New Mexico be forced to subsidize high-cost energy policy decisions that are made in Colorado?”
Cooke said that if the tax credits end, Coloradans will quickly face the real costs of the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Roadmap and likely would object to the expense.
“Toor and Polis perpetuate this narrative and it’s based on a misleading and frankly a lazy metric of the levelized cost of energy, the LCOE,” said Cooke in an interview with The Denver Gazette. “And it doesn’t take into account the total system cost. The Colorado Energy Office’s own report says the single most expensive way to decarbonize the state is wind, solar, and batteries, and it barely meets reliability standards.”
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