Clean Energy Mandates in HB 1030 Could Undermine Colorado’s Critical Infrastructure

By Sarah Montalbano | Commentary, Complete Colorado

Legislators in Denver are off to the races this session with a heavy-handed bill that will chase data center investment out of Colorado.

House Bill 26-1030 creates a new bureaucracy, imposes burdensome labor and workforce requirements, and requires data centers to use 100% clean energy.

If lawmakers believe data centers are “essential critical infrastructure,” as the bill claims, then the legislature must allow them to use whatever electricity sources they need. If the goal is to drive data center developers to Wyoming, then lawmakers should continue down this path.

Mandating unreliable energy

The worst part of HB 1030 is its requirement that data centers must be powered with 100% renewable and clean energy resources after 2040. Enterprise-level data centers need an uptime of 99.995 percent, which means being offline for only 26 minutes per year. They’ll prefer dispatchable power on demand, 24/7/365, and they need backup systems that will work no matter what the weather.

Before 2039, data centers must be powered with a 3-to-1 ratio of nameplate capacity–or the amount of power produced under ideal conditions–between “clean” and thermal resources. That means that, for every 1 megawatt (MW) in nameplate capacity of natural gas or coal-fired energy, there will need to be 3 MW of wind, solar, or other clean energy sources.

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