By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project
Sarah Montalbano, the author of the Complete Colorado piece below makes a great point in her article about renewables.
In response to a recent article by fellow energy writer Allen Best, see the second link below, about Colorado hitting an energy milestone of “More than half the state’s electricity came from wind, solar and hydro during the first months of 2026”, Montalbano notes that perhaps it’s not time for celebrating yet.
Quoting from her Complete piece, “The trouble is that this jubilant announcement of a ‘majority’ renewables power grid owes more to a stark drop in coal-fired generation than the wind and solar that was added. Percentages rely on both the numerator — how much wind, solar, and hydropower was generated — as well as the denominator, or how much total generation there was.”
Montalbano is right. A percentage varies inversely (one goes up, the other goes down) with the number in the denominator. When the bottom of a fraction gets smaller, the value of the fraction increases.
E.g. consider 1/8 = 0.125, 1/4 = 0.25, 1/2 = 0.5, and so on.
And that’s what is mainly driving Best’s jubilant claim. Per Montalbano’s piece, Colorado is generating less power over all with coal shutdowns. Our denominator is getting bigger, we’re not doing more renewables.
And all of this gets hidden by one of the statistics that are easy to ignore. Quoting from Montalbano again:
“Moreover, the EIA’s figures [the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s figures, the government figures Montalbano bases her contentions on] are in-state generation, not consumption, so it doesn’t count electricity that the state must import over transmission lines, and it does count electricity the state is exporting (and thus not consuming) when there are wind gluts. Total in-state generation has hovered around 56,000 GWh over the past decade while Colorado has grown. The state must import more as dispatchable generation retires, and the percentage of renewables masks what actually powers Colorado homes.”
So we are actually in a deficit, importing power from other places to make it up, and then patting ourselves on the back for our glorious transition to renewables.
Yep, sound just like the kind of unreality that’s becoming par for the course here in Blue Colorado. https://completecolorado.com/2026/07/12/dont-pop-cork-yet-colorado-renewables-milestone/
https://bigpivots.com/colorados-milestone-of-53-renewables/
https://bigpivots.com/colorados-milestone-of-53-renewables
Related
Check out the tweet by Jake Fogleman below. Sure, we can go renewable without any loss in our standard of living!
READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT THE COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT
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