Reported by Staff

COLORADO SPRINGS - Westmoreland Coal Co.’s losses more than tripled during the third quarter from a year earlier as a result of unexpected outages at power plants owned by two of its largest customers, combined with a planned outage at its North Carolina power plant.

The Colorado Springs-based energy company reported its losses for the quarter jumped to $12.4 million, or $1.21 a share, from $3.49 million, or 37 cents a share, in the same quarter a year earlier. Revenue fell 20.5 percent to $112.4 million during the same period. For the first nine months of the year, the company cut its losses a fifth to $26.4 million, or $2.68 a share, from $33.2 million, or $3.50 a share, a year ago despite a 12.3 percent drop in revenue to $339 million.

Reported by Ann Rascalli

ITN Energy Systems (ITNES), a clean energy and technology incubator based in Littleton, has been awarded $4.9 million as part of the Department of Energy ARPA-E grant program. According to the company, the primary goal for this project is to develop solid-state electrochromic film on plastic substrates by using ITN’s proprietary roll-to-roll production process to substantially reduce the cost of electrically controlled smart windows for net-zero energy buildings.

These windows when installed and in use will reduce heating and cooling loads and minimize overhead lighting use. ITNES will serve as the prime contractor on the award and is supported by MAG Industrial Automation Systems, EPRI, Southern California Edison and the Colorado School of Mines.

Late last month the U.S. Department of Energy officially announced the awards. In the DOE press release issued, Steven Chu, United States Secretary of Energy stated, “After President Obama announced this effort in April; we received a stunning level of interest – nearly 3,700 submissions. We invited about 300 of those to put together full proposals. Today we are funding 37 projects – 1 percent of the submissions.”

Dr. Mohan Misra Founder & Chief Executive Officer of ITN Energy Systems stated, “We commend Secretary Chu and the Department of Energy for their foresight in creating ARPA-E and swiftly creating grant opportunities to continually foster innovation for clean technologies. This grant reflects our 15 year old heritage of success at ITNES in leading the development of clean technologies in the areas of energy generation, energy storage and energy efficiency.”

After working for more than 20 years in aerospace industry, Dr. Misra founded ITN Energy Systems, Inc.  in 1994 to bring aerospace know-how to the commercial marketplace. The company says that its primary mission is to identify, develop and commercialize emerging technologies for defense and commercial markets by establishing successful spin-offs, joint ventures or licensing arrangements.

Reported by Staff

GRAND JUNCTION - The Bureau of Land Management has announced it is delaying what was to be the first auction of geothermal leases in Colorado. Federal officials say they need more time to resolve questions about the potential impact of geothermal development on water and property rights.

The BLM had planned to offer 800 acres of public property for geothermal during its auction this month, but is now postponing action on the proposed lease until its February auction. Geothermal energy uses the earth’s heat as steam or hot water to heat buildings or produce electricity. Large portions of central and western Colorado are believed to have the most potential for geothermal development the region.

By Richard Martin, Contributing Editor

With the federal government’s $3.4 billion in matching grants for smart grids now allocated it’s a good time to be one of those behind one of the awardee projects that are adding intelligence to electrical grids in towns and cities around the country.

Northern Colorado communities received two of these grants: Fort Collins received $18.1 million to install some 84,000 “smart meters,” which can continually track and display energy use and relay information like outages back to the power company, while Pueblo got $6.1 million to put in 42,000 new meters plus an Internet-like communications infrastructure.

Thse sums are small beans compared to what some other states will receive: “Florida Light and Power and PECO Energy Company received the maximum $200 million grant, while the tiny municipal utility EPB, which is building an unusual fiber-based smart grid in Chattanooga, Tenn., received $111.57 million,” reported Earth2Tech. Several prominent applicants did not receive funding: Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, in California, as well as National Grid and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was created in the Depression to bring electricity to remote parts of the Southeast.

Already funded is the smart grid being installed in Boulder by Xcel Energy, which will be among the country’s most advanced systems when it goes live later this year. Serving around 25,000 homes and businesses, Xcel says the new network will make Boulder “first fully functioning smart city in the world.”

Like early-childhood education, smart grids are a cause that nobody doesn’t like. But there are many related and necessary developments that must happen before the technology can fulfill its promise to reduce energy demand and lower consumers’ power bills. For one thing, displaying a home’s energy usage doesn’t mean much unless the residents are willing to act on that information.

“If we give our customers [price] signals, do they actually act on them?” wondered Tom Henley, a press spokesman for Xcel, in an interview with The New York Times.    

There’s also a fundamental conflict between the social goal of lowering demand and the utility’s incentive to keep revenues high. Xcel, in fact, does not even have regulatory approval yet to offer lower rates at times of reduced demand, such as at night.

In Boulder, one of the most progressive cities in the country, energy users are likely to adjust their usage accordingly. In other places that’s not a given; in fact, the promise of smart grids lowering energy expenses doesn’t always work out. Puget Sound Energy, in Seattle, tried a “dynamic pricing” scheme in the early 2000s which was supposed to reward consumers for using high-energy appliances, like dishwashers and clothes dryers, after 9 p.m. Unfortunately news reports demonstrated that many households on the plan actually ended up paying more than ordinary daytime users. The plan was canceled after less than two years. Partly as a result, “utilities and regulators in many states prefer not to touch dynamic pricing,” stated The Economist in a recent feature on smart grids.

Even if regulators, power companies, and consumers all work together to lower energy use, smart grids alone will not deliver the anticipated benefits. Another required element is the spread of distributed mini-producers, such as solar panels that can return power to the grid at times of sunlight and excess generation. While the “demand response” business is already well-established (many large retailers, for instance, use companies like EnerNOC to turn down their lights and their refrigerators at times of peak demand), most utilities are still wrestling with the issue of how to properly handle and credit such reverse-flow energy.

In fact, the biggest beneficiaries of the government’s $3.4 billion funding program, at least in the first five years, will not be communities or end users but the companie supplying the technology.

“The real winners are those who produce the smart grid devices,” writes Terence Chan on Seeking Alpha, the stock-market analysis blog. “The current trend is for small firms with cutting edge smart grid technology to partner with bigger firms who can better distribute and utilize the technology.”

Ultimately, providing better information to power producers and users is a single step in a process that has to arrive at more powerful incentives to conserve energy. The biggest step is a price on carbon emissions – which the U.S. Congress is supposedly going to impose in climate-change legislation that will likely not be passed until at least this year. “Technology,” points out The Economist, “is no substitute for policy.”

Reported by Staff

This evening state regulators will hold a public meeting in Walsenburg to discuss a proposal to build a new power transmission line in southern Colorado.

Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association are partnering on the building of a new substation and a 150-mile transmission line, which would run from the San Luis Valley to Pueblo.

If approved, the project will cost an estimated $180 million roughly to construct, with service expected by 2013.

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Reported by Ann Rascalli

LOUISVILLE - Responding to Xcel Energy’s 2010 solar Compliance Plan submitted to the Colorado PUC last week, the state’s leading solar industry trade group said the plan highlights the need to increase the state’s Renewable Energy Standard (RES)-along with making other forward-thinking policy changes to foster a sustainable renewable energy industry statewide.

 ”We applaud Xcel’s efforts to move forward under the existing framework; it’s clear a large shift is required to continue providing new green jobs in Colorado, and to increase renewable energy across our state,” said Beth Hart, Executive Director of the Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association (COSEIA).

Xcel’s new renewable energy plan calls for adding an additional 257 megawatts of solar power to the grid from on-site sources such as customer rooftops in the next decade. The details of the proposed Solar Rewards program were outlined in a larger plan Xcel filed with the state PUC that maps out how the utility company intends to comply with the state-mandated renewable energy standard of producing 20 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2020. The overall ompliance plan also calls for 700 megawatts of new wind power and about 350 megawatts of utility-scale solar power plants, according to Xcel.

Last year, Xcel announced its intention to cut the Solar Rewards program — which gives rebates to customers who put photovoltaic panels on their property — by about 50 percent from 2009 to 2010. After an outcry from solar advocates, Xcel worked with the Colorado Solar Energy Industry Association and the Governor’s Energy Office to revise its plan.

The new program will give rebates to more people over time, though the amount of rebates will decrease.

“This is a huge improvement,” said RJ Harrington, director of legislative and regulatory affairs for Boulder-based Simple Solar. “We are very pleased. We feel that this is keeping the wind under our sails. We applaud Xcel’s efforts to move forward under the existing framework; it’s clear a large shift is required to continue providing new green jobs in Colorado, and to increase renewable energy across our state.”

Describing Xcel’s Energy plan to reduce solar incentives in quick successive steps over coming months, Hart said: “The plan offers more transparency in the declining incentive “staircase”, and there are efforts to offer more clarity to the marketplace by smoothing the design and pace of the step reductions.  Xcel, the Governor’s Energy Office and CoSEIA are creating a process that is fair, transparent and workable.”

Xcel’s new renewable energy plan calls for adding an additional 257 megawatts of solar power to the grid from on-site sources such as customer rooftops in the next decade. The new program will give rebates to more people over time, while the amount of rebates will decrease.

“This is a huge improvement,” said RJ Harrington, director of legislative and regulatory affairs for Boulder-based Simple Solar. “We are very pleased. We feel that this is keeping the wind under our sails.”

The revised Solar Rewards approach is to increase the amount of solar energy on the grid while decreasing the incentives over time.

“We applaud Xcel’s efforts to move forward under the existing framework; it’s clear a large shift is required to continue providing new green jobs in Colorado, and to increase renewable energy across our state,” stated CoSEIA’s Executive Director Beth Hart.

The Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association (COSEIA) worked with Xcel Energy and the Governor’s Energy Office on the outlines of the Compliance Plan which was submitted to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission

“We are pleased to see important concepts included in the plan to grow the number of solar installations on Colorado rooftops,” Hart said.  CoSEIA and prospective solar customers had been very concerned about forecasts previously published by Xcel Energy in the 2009 Compliance Plan; predicting a steep drop in solar incentives for 2010.  The newly-released Compliance Plan reveals Xcel’s plans for continuing to offer financial incentives under the Solar*Rewards program, avoiding the anticipated “solar cliff”.

Describing Xcel’s Energy plan to reduce solar incentives in quick successive steps over coming months, Hart said: “The plan offers more transparency in the declining incentive “staircase”, and there are efforts to offer more clarity to the marketplace by smoothing the design and pace of the step reductions.  Xcel, the Governor’s Energy Office and CoSEIA are creating a process that is fair, transparent and workable.”

Reported by Staff

The annual meeting of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association  took a surprising track on Wednesday when its chairman urged a new direction in the relationship between industry and state regulators.

Senior EnCana executive, Don McClure ,asked energy companies and regulators to cooperate after several years of contentious arguments between the industry and Governor Ritter’s administration over the adoption of new, more restrictive drilling regulations.

Some state lawmakers, including Republican gubernatorial candidates Scott McInnis and Josh Penry, and members of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, were in attendance at COGA’s annual meeting.

McClure told his audience they should cooperate on boosting the supply and use of natural gas, which burns cleaner with reduced emissions compared to coal and oil.

“Colorado is in the crosshairs of a national energy policy,” McClure said.

While the EnCana executive suggested state regulators are taking too long to approve drilling permits, he also praised the commissioners’ pledge to reduce the backlog, which was at 749 in September, but down from more than 2,000 earlier this year.

McClure displayed a chart for attendees that illustrated the drop in drilling rigs across the country since last fall. Nationally, rigs are down 50 percent, 68 percent in the Rockies, and even higher at 75 percent in the Piceance Basin, Colorado’s most active drilling area.

McClure blamed low gas prices and a glut of gas in storage. But he also urged regulators to “set the right tone.”

“Any sustainable energy solution requires balance - a balance that requires environmental stewardship while protecting the competitive interests of the state against other regions,” McClure said.

Reupblican gubernatorial candidates McInnis and Penry have gone on the record as opposing Ritter’s push for environmental rules on natural gas production in the state. Penry has been especially critical.

“The industry itself was not excited about the rules,” Penry told the media after Wednesday’s meeting. “With the regulators in the room, everybody puts on a smiley, diplomatic face.”