Clean Heat State Bill 21-264 Signals Moonshot Efforts by Public Utilities and Green Activists to Scrub Colorado of Fossil Fuels and Further Aggressive Climate Goals

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission is trying to quash a business practice used by traditional natural gas suppliers. The commission hopes that in doing so, they’ll reduce carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.

The practice they’re targeting goes like this: 1) energy suppliers, like XCel, pay homebuilding firms a few hundred dollars to run a gas line for new structures 2) through complex financial mechanics involving a return-on-investment, debt/risk/shareholder calculation 3) part of XCel’s cost (though not necessarily all) gets recouped by added customer fees.

Narrative: Energy Suppliers are Getting a big Break and Shoving it onto Consumers

After looking closer, the data is quite clear: The costs of not using gas utilities are higher than using them. That’s true even with added fees and there’s some data below to support this.

Yet, there appears to be a single-minded push by Colorado state leadership and ecologists to eliminate standard fossil fuels, including conventional natural gas utilities. The effort to do so is in fifth gear despite few reality-based alternatives to maintain the first-world comforts provided to Colorado by cheap, mostly in-state fossil fuels.

Concerns over climate change and greenhouse gases are motivating this push. Greenhouse gases and climate change matter to Colorado citizens, but state agencies and environmentalists have an interest in them that appears to be outsized. Climate change and greenhouse gas, however, are very big globalist concerns. Yet in Colorado, this seemingly broad-minded perspective looks increasingly like higher dollars-and-cents costs for individual citizens of the state.

Is it a Proposed Ban on Gas Lines or Not?

There’s language buried in a 58-page attachment for the roll-out of the Clean Heat State Senate Bill. As of Dec. 1, the rules watered down the hardline policy that owners pay everything upfront for a new gas line to their home. As a compromise, Colorado Public Utilities will require energy companies to undergo a steeplechase of procedures to recoup their spending on new gas lines.

It is basically an end to shared or subsidized lease-style payments for new gas lines. And XCel has said as much. The Dec. 1 version of this attachment says:

Line extension policies, procedures, and conditions shall be based on the principle that the connecting customer pays its share of the estimated full incremental cost of growth, including any costs associated with increases in design day peak demand.

Media accounts do not transparently spell out the legal and economic maze that is now in place, but some things are clear.

Added Demands from PUC for Energy Companies and Utilities:

• Undergo approval from PUC for new gas line charges
• Factor in the “social costs” of more atmospheric emissions
• Likely elimination of the $714 up-front payout that XCel–the supplier of natural gas to almost one-fourth of Colorado’s six million citizens–offers in a new home-building process

It’s a market-driven solution one could say: If a person wants a gas line, they must pay for it instead of everyone else. But the numbers need to add up regarding reliable, affordable energy for consumers. They also need to add up when it comes to the alternative energies being proposed. Do they?

Cost Considerations: The Main Gas Substitute is a Grid that’s TBD Renewal Electricity

Thrive and other custom home builder groups in Colorado are on-board with goals similar to Colorado Public Utilities. Thrive is one of the few Colorado builders offering full-electric or mostly electric houses in a bid to reduce fossil fuels and carbon emissions like those from natural gas. But the cost of these green homes is noticeably greater.

Even with 41% inflation, the only available homes from Thrive are comparatively expensive. According to Zillow, the average cost of a Colorado home in January 2020 was $405,541, but as of November 2022, it was over $570,000. An early December search for Thrive’s eco-friendly homes shows about a dozen row houses in Denver for $469,900 to $589,900. Thrive’s Harmony Courtyard Homes in Fort Collins start at $690,000 for what looks like a two-bedroom, two-bath.

But it’s not just the cost of homes that can go up when conventional natural gas is stopped or limited.

Real Calculations: All-Electric Appliances

The Public Utilities Commission and environmentalists want to move everything to a green-energy electric grid. Some believe the electric grid may make natural gas infrastructure unnecessary in the foreseeable future.

But electric appliances are more expensive to run. For many US locations, a gas stove is 10 to 30% cheaper long-term, according to home construction expert Bob Vila, on his blog. An article reviewed by Ivy-league Ph.D. researcher Rosemary Avance at Consumer Affairs confirms this.

While there are a lot of academic studies and institutional data, finding straightforward, individual-consumer-focused information on this topic takes a lot of work.

Certain Proposed Alternatives Fall Short; One Example is 99.999944% Short

A serious fuel alternative floated by green activists is landfill, biomass, and sewage methane. In the April 2021 issue, Scientific American says these biomethane sources are the ready-to-go sub-out for conventional, methane-polluting natural gas.

What does this look like in practice? Colorado has an example.

Recently the South Platte Wastewater Treatment Plant made some upgrades. At the cost of $7.8 million, they equipped this plant with machinery to harvest natural methane, literally “brown gas” (their term), from wastewater and related sources.

A press release from the California-based eco-engineering firm that built it skillfully avoids the use of the words “sewer,” “sewage,” “wastewater,” or even “waste.” The release claims the project will pay for itself in four years. A financially important note: only 5 percent of project revenue comes from selling the biomethane to XCel’s pipeline; 60% is subsidized by federal green energy funding.

The release boasted that this biomethane operation annually removes “5,000 metric tonnes in fossil fuel-based carbon-dioxide emissions per year.”

But the 5,000 metric tons theoretically removed from the Colorado environment is not a slam dunk. This cut in emissions only offsets 0.000056% of the state’s rough annual 89.3 million metric tonnes of total annual carbon emissions.

The Rush

Bad weather, earthquakes, and fires are all attributed to the ongoing calamity of climate change. And climate-change-minded public officials have a hardline good-evil binary mindset toward fossil fuels. In Colorado, despite an asterisk on the ban for new building pipelines, the state Public Utilities Commission agreed with the environmentalists, in efforts to choke out fossil fuels, the PUC is saddling natural gas utilities with heavy requirements.

In covering Colorado’s push to end gas line subsidies, sympathetic media repeated the claim that California’s ban on new gas lines will save the state’s customers $165 million annually. Split evenly among the two-thirds of California households heated with natural gas (9.23 million homes total), that’s just $1.49 per month.

In covering Colorado’s push to end gas line subsidies, sympathetic media repeated the claim that California’s ban on new gas lines will save that state’s customers $165 million annually. Split evenly among the two-thirds of California households heated with natural gas (9.23 million homes total), that’s just $1.49 per month.

The ramp-down of natural gas does not look cheap or convenient. The latest guidelines for new gas pipelines give the Colorado Public Utilities Commission the ground to say they (technically) didn’t ban new gas lines. They can also say they are sticking with the state’s aggressively ambitious climate goals. But there appears to be a little practical benefit in service or cost for the average natural gas consumer.

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The Maverick Observer is an online free-thinking publication interested in the happenings in our region. We launched in February 2020 to hold our politicians and businesses accountable. We hope to educate, inform, entertain, and infuse you with a sense of community.

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