When outages become policy: Colorado’s energy accountability gap

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 they exposed a deeper problem than electrification itself—a system of energy governance moving faster than accountability, transparency or public consent.

Legislative oversight on energy policy has been applied unevenly.

In 2023, Democrat legislative leaders convened a Joint Select Committee on Rising Utility Rates, calling PUC officials and consumer advocates to testify about how rates are set—and to debunk claims that clean energy policies were the primary cause. 

Then-Senate President Fenberg dismissed the idea that the clean energy push was behind the spikes, calling it a “red herring” and pointing out that the transition had actually saved ratepayers money while letting utilities turn a profit. 

PUC chief economist Erin O’Neill echoed that view in her testimony, stressing natural gas price swings as the real culprit and explicitly ruling out renewable investments or early clean heat requirements as major drivers.

Legislative oversight on energy policy hasn’t been absent—it’s been delegated.

Democrat majorities set this course back in 2021 with Senate Bill 21-264. The law required investor-owned gas utilities to file Clean Heat Plans and handed the PUC the job of setting longer-term emissions targets through rulemaking.

It also built in a safeguard—a 2.5% cost cap on annual gas bills—but left the details of how that cap works to the regulators themselves. In the end, the biggest calls on timelines, trade-offs and enforcement landed with three appointed commissioners.

Those choices are no longer theoretical. They’re showing up in higher bills, grid stress and the planned outages families just lived through.

That’s exactly what the Republican lawmakers’ December 23 letter to Governor Polis was getting at—not just partisan friction, but a real shift in who’s making Colorado’s biggest energy calls.

The PUC’s Dec. approval of the Clean Heat Plan requires natural gas utilities to cut emissions by 41 percent by 2035—a timeline that now sits alongside questions about cost, capacity and whether the grid can realistically absorb the shift.

Major energy decisions—from limiting natural gas use to pushing electric vehicles and closing coal plants—are now being made through the PUC.

The problem here isn’t just infrastructure. It’s visibility.

The Department of Regulatory Agencies says the PUC oversees planned shutoffs through internal filings—including PSPS playbooks, decision logs and after-action reviews—that are filed as confidential and kept out of public view, even when outages prompt audits or investigations.

That leaves ratepayers paying for outages, grid upgrades and wildfire-related costs without seeing the information used to justify those decisions.

The PUC has scheduled a series of Jan. hearings and public comment periods on natural gas plans, transmission line appeals and related energy rules. That process follows decisions already made—and outages already experienced.

Delegated Decisions, Real-World Consequences

Planned shutoffs are no longer treated as rare emergency measures. They are becoming part of how the system is managed as electrification accelerates and demand grows.

Yet even as those hearings move forward, the bigger shift is already underway. What used to be rare emergency blackouts are quietly becoming a standard tool for managing a grid pushed harder by rising demand and retiring reliable power.

Supporters of the Clean Heat Plan argue its targets are required to meet statutory emissions goals. But reliability isn’t something to balance against policy ambitions. It’s the foundation that makes every other goal possible.

At the same time, dispatchable power is being taken offline. Coal plants such as Pueblo’s Comanche Unit 2 remain slated for closure even as the grid grows more dependent on weather-driven resources.

The costs are already hitting home. Homeowners face expensive appliance and panel upgrades. Businesses absorb downtime. Ratepayers see deferred investments return later as higher bills.

When the federal government steps in with a temporary reprieve to keep plants like Craig Station Unit 1 operating temporarily, it’s a sign of how little margin the system has left.

If lawmakers acted when rates rose, the case for oversight is stronger now that outages are being planned.

Reliability can still be put back at the center of energy policy, but only if shutoff plans are brought into the open, mandates are matched to real grid capacity—and the legislature reasserts its role.

Electrification doesn’t fail because it’s ambitious. It fails when it moves ahead without transparency, realistic timelines or public consent.

People who have lived through shutoffs, rising bills or lost business shouldn’t be expected to shrug and move on. Elected officials answer to constituents, and so do the regulators and executives shaping energy policy.

Accountability starts when voters ask where their representatives stand—and whether reliability and affordability are still being treated as non-negotiable. And whether they agree with sentiments expressed in the Dec. 23 letter requesting that Polis reverse course on his energy agenda.

Energy policy that depends on public patience rather than public consent won’t hold. Colorado can do better.