By: Sarah Montalbano | Complete Colorado
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) 2026 State of Reliability report contains lessons for Colorado’s electricity sector. While the grid as a whole “continues to deliver reliable electric service,” challenges are mounting thanks in part to the “declining availability of aging combustion generation.”
NERC’s report finds that power plants failed more in 2025, with the fleet-wide forced outage rate climbing to 9.2 percent against “historical norms rarely exceeding” 8 percent. Coal-fired plants saw their forced outage rate rise from 11.2% in 2024 to 14.1% in 2025.
NERC surveyed owners of generators that saw substantial increases in outages from 2024 to 2025 and found that of the 26 responses from generators, 16 units “experienced equipment destruction extensive enough to significantly prolong their 2025 outage(s),” another eight experienced supply chain constraints, and six indicated turbine blade release or vibration that needed addressing. NERC also points out that regulatory reasons for outages were the “most consistently increasing” cause of outages between 2017 and 2025, though those “did not indicate any alignment with a particular policy objective.”
Colorado’s Comanche 3
If this sounds like Xcel Energy’s Comanche 3, you’d be right. The 750 MW unit near Pueblo, Colorado’s largest coal unit, has been offline since August 2025 for turbine repairs and is expected to be back only by July 2026. Coal’s share of Colorado generation fell from 28.1 to 23.7 percent in 2025, almost entirely because of that one outage.
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