The Boulder City Council is expected this week to send a sharply worded letter to Xcel Energy outlining what it describes as “major concerns” over the utility’s failure to meet emissions targets, its use of prolonged power shutoffs and rising costs for customers.
The draft letter also makes clear that, despite those concerns, the city is not seeking to exit its franchise agreement with Xcel at this time. Voters approved that agreement in 2020, ending a yearslong municipalization effort in which Boulder sought to leave Xcel and form its own electric utility. The franchise agreement laid out a series of commitments from Xcel and identified specific years in which the city could choose to exit the deal. Exiting the agreement requires a two-thirds vote by the city council or the passage of a ballot measure.
The letter details a series of grievances, including Xcel’s reliance on extended power shutoffs as a wildfire prevention tool. During windstorms in December 2025, thousands of customers in Boulder lost power for days. City officials said the outages put residents of an assisted living facility at risk of losing access to oxygen. The outages also cost local businesses tens of thousands of dollars on average, according to the Boulder Chamber. Emails obtained by Boulder Reporting Lab showed that Xcel’s 2024 power shutoff brought Boulder’s wastewater treatment plant within minutes of spilling untreated sewage into Boulder Creek.
The letter states it is “simply not acceptable” for power to be shut off for days at a time. It calls on Xcel to develop a plan to reduce both the frequency and impact of shutoffs, make “substantial progress” on hardening the electric grid and compensate customers who suffer financial losses as a result of outages.
The letter states the shutoffs are “a consequence of prioritizing litigation avoidance ahead of protecting our community” and that Xcel has “eroded the trust of your customers.”
Under the franchise agreement, Xcel committed to specific greenhouse gas reduction targets. The company has pledged to eliminate coal-fired electricity by 2030. About half of Xcel’s supply in Colorado in 2025 came from coal and natural gas combined.
The utility has missed the local emissions benchmarks outlined in its agreement with Boulder for both 2022 and 2024, according to city officials. The city will have multiple opportunities over the next five years to opt out of the franchise agreement.
“Two missed milestones out of two is not a positive start,” the letter states.
The agreement also requires Xcel to set aside 1% of the annual revenue it collects in Boulder, about $1.2 million per year, for undergrounding powerlines in the public right of way. One project along Broadway in North Boulder undergrounded roughly a mile of lines at a cost of about $3.9 million, according to city officials.
The letter acknowledged that Xcel has met that commitment but said the efforts fall short of what is needed.
“These efforts do not match the scale of the problem and the danger to our community,” the letter states, calling for an expedited program to improve system resiliency and reliability through “accelerated and expanded undergrounding.”
The letter also raises concerns about rising energy costs for customers. Xcel has pending cases before the Public Utilities Commission seeking higher electricity and natural gas rates.
“It is imperative that the financial benefits of the clean energy transition are shared with Xcel’s customers and steps are taken to address the insecurities many in our community feel as they face continually rising utility bills,” the letter states.
The Boulder City Council is scheduled to vote on Jan. 22 to send the letter to Robert Kenney, president of Xcel’s Colorado operating company.
Sydney Isenberg, a spokesperson for Xcel, said the company understands the impacts of using wildfire mitigation protocols such as power shutoffs. She said the shutoffs are used solely to protect public safety and are not employed lightly. Isenberg said Xcel will continue refining its protocols based on community and customer feedback.
“We appreciate Boulder’s feedback highlighting areas of progress we’ve made and look forward to our continuing collaboration on shared goals,” she said. “We are proud of the progress we’ve made together and in our commitment to continuous improvement remain focused on advancing shared priorities while balancing affordability and reliability for all customers.”
Update: This story was updated with a comment from Xcel on Jan. 22.
Undergrounding sounds easy until you actually put numbers to it. As you reported, the city mandates collection of $1.2MM annually toward this effort, and it cost $3.9MM to underground one mile. What do you think it will cost to “underground” Boulder? Billions! Has the territory and cost even been defined? Then you go on to report “The letter acknowledged that Xcel has met that commitment but said the efforts fall short of what is needed. ” What exactly is needed? This cost will be borne by ratepayers, and if Boulder wants priority, that prioritization cost must be borne by the citizens of Boulder. Are Boulderites willing to see their electric bills and “undergrounding” taxes rise substantially? Undergrounding Boulder alone is a multi-billion-dollar initiative and Xcel is not capable of absorbing that without significant rate effects. What is also overlooked is the long-term environmental damage undergrounding will cause. Trees have to be uprooted and cannot be planted directly over underground lines. The landscape will be drastically affected. Boulder should be more realistic about and accept more responsibility for any undergrounding effort instead of playing the blame game. Your reporting could better convey the true facts surrounding undergrounding electrical grids.
I think burying cable can and should be prioritized for the locations that have the highest windspeeds. The intersection of Highway 93 and Marshall Rd is a good example. It lies directly downwind of Eldorado Canyon, which is basically an enormous wind funnel. Burying a couple miles of cable downwind of that would greatly reduce fire danger. To your point, burying the entire grid would not be very cost effective, whereas targeted use of cable burying would be.
Tree maintenance is another highly effective mitigation strategy. Excel and the city could do more partnering in that.
Was this was your interesting comment on the cost being the same as rooftop solar+batteries for all https://www.reddit.com/r/boulder/s/2oJEQadNin ?
(Unfortunately, an extremely regressive subsidy, but maybe still worth it!)
No, I was thinking about the lower priced portable systems. I’m coming at this from an RV background. I have a set of 4 200w thin film panels that I picked up on Amazon for about $600 and will probably pick up a 1.5 – 2KW power station for $350-$500. I just need something to keep my fridge and freezer from melting. If things hit the fan in winter, I have a 2KW Honda generator to keep the furnace blower running.
None of these arguments make any sense. You seriously think it will be a multi-billion dollar expense to underground? As in there are several thousands of miles of above ground lines in our 28 square mile city? Look around – how many above ground lines do you see in Boulder? Most of it already is underground.
Uprooting trees? How have we managed to avoid this with our water, gas, sewer, and other underground cables? This is not a real concern.
I encourage you to go to Fort Collins. They are substantially larger in size than Boulder and their city-owned electric utility has managed to underground the vast majority of their lines. This is not some far fetched idea. It’s already been down by our neighbors with less resources. Yes it will be expensive – and it only gets more expensive every year. Do the best time to start was 30 years ago – and the second best time is today. If we owned our utility – we could commit to undergrounding 25-50 miles a year rather reasonably. In a decade this problem will have been substantially mitigated. Longmont and Fort Collins don’t suffer power outages like we do. Boulder is not special – this is entirely the consequence of letting a for-profit corporation own our utilities. It doesn’t need to be like this.
If this is so cost-preventative, please explain how Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, and our neighbor Longmont were able to do this with their municipal utilities? None of them turned off their power preventatively either. Moreover, I’ve never once heard about damage due to undergrounding infrastructure, and let’s also recall Boulder just laid a fiber optic network that didn’t remotely approach those supposed figures nor were any trees uprooted to do so. So perhaps should be citing your sources of info, esp before excoriating the reporting. Lest we all forget that same, tired fiscal austerity argument is why our city leaders abandoned our Muni effort in the first place and accepted “climate target” instead as a foolish compromise that’s squarely put us in the situation.
The failure at the sewage treatment plant and senior care facility are failures in planning. All essential services should have redundant energy systems, composed of some combination of battery and/or generation. This isn’t a new idea. Datacenters have been doing it for years. Their reliability ratings and certifications require it.
What is the city’s plan for critical infrastructure in the event of a truly catastrophic grid failure? If anything, the CC and the rest of us should be grateful that Xcel’s planned outages are safely exposing our vulnerabilities. We should be using these as a dry run for something worse.
BTW, Amazon has a lovely selection of portable battery power systems that can be charged from solar panels and Honda makes gas generators that run quietly and relatively cleanly for anyone who’s interested.
I agree that Xcel should prioritize high-risk areas like Highway 93 for underground utilities. We can’t just say it costs too much, it has to start somewhere. We live in Wonderland Hill which has all underground utilities, and we are at a loss as to why utilities were turned off for us for days. If it is a matter of connectivity, Xcel should find a way to isolate those areas that pose no risk.
At a high level, the grid architecture is comprised of 3 voltage levels, with the backbone being high voltage, regional and local distribution branches in medium voltage, and neighborhoods in the low voltage group. Most of the medium voltage network and pretty much all of the high voltage lines in Colorado are on poles and towers. I’m spitballing here, but I think your neighborhood was probably affected by an outage in the medium voltage segment that your local area transformer connects to.
All of that said, as a short term measure, I think Xcel could stand to focus on 2 areas, the first being prevention through increased tree maintenance. The second by streamlining their startup procedure. In order to bring the system back online safely, they need to inspect the lines to confirm that they aren’t down or impacted by fallen trees limbs and similar grounding debris. One way to do that is manual inspection, which is time and labor intensive and probably what they do now. Another is by using drones with computer vision.
For more than 30 years this country has ignored an avalanche of scientific warnings about disasters coming down the tracks with climate change. Massive, prolonged climate change-induced wind storms start wildfires when power lines arc and/or come down, and there is no way to prevent all arcing without de-energizing overhead lines. This has already happened in Marshall and a dozen other places across America. The Boulder City Council needs to stop whining, get with the times, recognize that from now on there WILL be necessarily extended power outages, and support the hardening of facilities like medical units with retrofits including backup generators. Expensive? Difficult? Yes. But this is the REAL price of burning fossil fuels while acting as if God’s in His Place and All’s Well With the World, Inside the Boulder Bubble. Having ignored three decades of warnings, we need to stop acting like crybabies on the deck of the Titanic who aren’t getting our evening caviar, and start looking for things at hand that can act as flotation devices.
The good news, Denise, is that power storage is getting cheaper. It’s not as expensive as it used to be and there are a lot more options. I think there is a lot we can do to make ourselves more resilient.
If the grid were 100% powered by safe, clean, renewable energy, there would still be a grid. There would still be powerlines. I support ending dependence on fossil fuels. I recognize that our fire issue is worsened by global warming. But chinook winds are an inherent aspect of the Front Range climate. So we must improve our electricity resilience regardless of the source of the electricity.
Wow, that “strongly worded letter” ought to set things right with Xcel. What is the backup plan for when they ignore the city’s feeble complaints and warnings? The City of Boulder never misses an opportunity to praise the quality of its staff, yet we spent a decade and tens of millions of dollars in a wasted effort to municipalize our electric utility. Tit for tat legal maneuvers aren’t the winning strategy. Maybe the answer is to get some real professionals onboard who understand how to do this — like in our neighboring cities. Time’s a wasting. Xcel can’t even manage to meet its emission benchmarks so things will only get worse over time on all counts. But the community won’t pass a ballot initiative to go local with the utility unless Boulder can demonstrate some level of competence and seriousness which was lacking previously.