Planned Power Shutoffs - Rocky Mountain Voice

By RMV Editorial Board The mid-December power shutoffs weren’t a weather anomaly or a one-off emergency. They were planned. And for tens of thousands of Coloradans, that fact changed everything. Families scrambled for generators. Hospitals shifted to contingency plans. Small businesses began calculating losses they may never recover. What followed stripped away the abstractions surrounding Colorado’s energy agenda. Policy decisions once discussed in targets, timelines and rulemakings showed up in daily life. For readers who missed it, that concern was put on the record on Dec. 23, when Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Gov. Jared Polis, calling on him to reverse his electrification agenda and rein in the Public Utilities Commission (PUC). And th...

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice Coloradans are being asked to prepare for the chance of a planned outage on Dec. 17. The company’s public alerts tell people to watch the map. The filings tell a fuller story about thresholds, timelines and who is supposed to be in the loop when a shutoff is on the table. That framework was not created overnight. It was built through years of filings with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and formally approved in 2025. As of Dec. 16, the documents already on record allow for a clearer picture of what Xcel committed to regulators and what customers were actually told as the wind event approached. Dec. 17 was not an improvisation Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) are not ad hoc emergency decisions. They are a s...

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When outages become policy: Colorado’s energy accountability gap

What Xcel promised regulators and what customers were told before Dec. 17 shutoff warnings

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