Rick Aster has spent a career checking up on his favorite patient, the Antarctic ice sheet. Lately, the Colorado State University seismologist is worried about the patient’s weight loss.

A little slimming amid the constant pressure of global warming could be OK — West Antarctica has an unusual rock underlay that could moderate ice melt. Even at the current rate of 150 billion tons of ice per year.

But what Aster and his colleagues have confirmed recently is that Antarctic melting could accelerate in a so-called feedback loop, overflowing the continental rock “bowl” holding in a massive glacier and letting in seawater that will make the ice sheet melt even faster. 

The Antarctic seismology researchers have also learned more about the gravitational pull of all that fragile ice, and how up to now it’s saved much of Earth’s coastline from further disaster. The mass has acted like a magnet, pulling liquid water up and around the Antarctic in a thicker layer than natural sea level would dictate. That kept water levels down at coastal cities to the north, from Miami to San Diego to Honolulu. 

If West Antarctica keeps melting at current rates, this pull is gone, said Aster, co-author of a sea level study published this month in Science Advances. That means even more coastal inundation on the other continents. 

The Antarctic glaciers alone could raise sea levels in North America by 10 feet by 2150, Aster said. Add in the melting glaciers of Greenland, the world’s second largest ice store, and there’s a world of trouble unless humans slow down climate change, Aster said. If we do, the Antarctic’s contribution to rising seas could be limited to just a fraction of that, the new study shows. 

Scientists have sometimes comforted themselves with the knowledge that Earth has been through everything before. The West Antarctic ice sheet was nearly gone in the warm period before the last ice age, Aster noted. Continents survived. 

“What’s really different in terms of today’s global warming, and different than anything that the Earth has seen as far as we know,” Aster added, “is the rapidity of human-caused climate change. We’re spiking the carbon dioxide and otherwise changing the climate so rapidly that we’re in territory where it’s hard or impossible to find natural analogs that we can study in Earth’s past history.”

Geologic time goes by in ticks of thousands or millions of years; climate change time appears to be passing in mere double digits. 

“It’s happening so rapidly that we can see these large effects even in a human lifetime,” Aster said. “And that is something that the Earth has not seen before, as far as we know. So that’s the most stunning thing to me.”

The study directs a spotlight toward global warming in real time. The Earth actually is melting, at an accelerated pace that has geologists accustomed to thinking in 100,000-year blocks now measuring change at the 100-year level. 

Aster and team’s contributions to the study are not directly aimed at ice melt itself, but what happens to the geology underneath underneath when that snowcap disappears. Simplified answer: The rock pushes up under the reduced pressure and slows the loss of ice to the sea. The team found that parts of the bedrock in West Antarctica, the area below South America, are rising at about 2 inches a year as it sheds ice, among the fastest rates on earth.

Wait, that could be good, right? A self-correcting problem? As the seas rise and threaten coastlines, the coastline itself rising up could solve that? Correct, Aster says, but only if the melt is held to a low or moderate level. At the current glacier-gushing rates, the “float” of continental rock can’t keep up with the fast rise of sea water. 

At the higher rates of melt, North America will see its ankles — Miami and New Orleans — inundated within our lifetime unless temperatures are stabilized. 

If humans slow global warming, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet can substantially stay in place and help reduce the worst-case sea level rise attributed to the Antarctic by 40%, the study says. 

“Earth uplift can be our friend and the Earth’s friend, if we don’t ask too much of it,” Aster said. 

After years of harsh critiques from environmental groups and departing co-op members over its slow pace of change, Tri-State Generation is now winning praise for plugging in and planning a host of solar and wind farms to replace dirty coal. 

The Westminster-based utility serving a million consumers through co-ops in four Western states will link to hundreds of megawatts of new solar power by the end of 2025. Its newest five-year building plan was unopposed when filed with state regulators, and wins praise from environmentalists for a wide array of new wind farms and innovative battery storage solutions. 

The big utility, meanwhile, is making it easier for disgruntled member co-ops to accelerate renewable projects they build for themselves outside the Tri-State grid, in one effort to head off more defections like those that turned United Power and Delta-Montrose Electric Association into independents. 

Tri-State is even throwing a technically advanced green wild card into its future studies, saying it will consider an innovative geothermal electricity project in Colorado while seeking “dispatchable” or always-on backup power sources. Before now, most such “dispatch” power fill-ins by other utilities included new natural gas turbines, which emit less greenhouse gas than coal but are still controversial among renewable energy advocates. 

The utility has its eye on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, and if it succeeds, will be well on its way to achieving an 89% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, ahead of state targets. The utility is also getting credit for recent agreements to spend big in supporting economic development in Western Slope communities where it is closing coal plants, which are large employers and vital money engines in small towns. 

“Tri-State should be commended for aggressively pursuing federal funding to support its plan to retire existing coal units and acquire new renewable generation and storage resources,” Clare Valentine, senior policy advisor at the renewable resources nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, said, “all in a way that maintains reliability and delivers climate and economic benefits to member cooperatives and communities.” 

Tri-State’s resource plan for how it will generate power from 2026 to 2031 was filed as an unopposed “settlement” with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, giving it every chance at approval. Now Tri-State will start seeking bids on the projects in its resource plan, and see which ones make economic sense after lucrative federal subsidies are factored in. 

As a nonprofit co-op utility, Tri-State did not qualify for federal tax credits that can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars until a recent rule change. With the change, and the continuing drop in long-term costs to build solar and wind generation, Tri-State can build renewable replacements without blowing up prices for its co-op members, vice president of communications Lee Boughey said. 

Tri-State’s five-year resource plan filed with the PUC starts with construction of a large lithium-ion battery array in New Mexico in 2026, along with a smaller iron-air battery test in eastern Colorado. The advantage of iron-air batteries is they can hold up to 100 hours of backup power, while current battery arrays hold about four hours. Powdered iron rust is charged with generated electricity, turning it back into metallic iron. Exposed to oxygen, the iron rusts again, releasing a steady electrical current that can be sent out on the grid, all employing cheap, environmentally friendly materials. 

The five-year plan also includes a new 140 megawatt solar farm in western Colorado in 2026, and another in New Mexico in 2029. Much of the rest is wind, with five new wind farms proposed to go online between 2026 and 2031 in Wyoming and western Nebraska, eastern Colorado and New Mexico. 

Those are in addition to large solar hookups that are part of Tri-State’s current five-year plan, including 595MW of solar already online in 2024 and finishing up by late 2025. Symbolic of Tri-State’s rapid transition, Boughey said, is the new solar farm that surrounds a closed Tri-State coal-fired plant in New Mexico. 

The schedule for bringing renewable energy online will allow Tri-State to stick to its current schedule of closing coal-fired Craig Unit 1 by the end of 2025, which it co-owns with other utilities; Unit 2 in late 2028; and solely owned Unit 3 on Jan. 1, 2028. Tri-State also plans to close the large 458MW Springerville, Arizona, Unit 3 in 2031. 

The change in the mix would mean that by 2030, 70% of the co-op members’ energy mix will be from clean sources, Tri-State said. In that same year, Tri-State would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions from electrical generation by 89% from the state’s 2005 baseline, the association said. 

A controversial plan to drill up to 166 oil and gas wells near Aurora Reservoir was approved by the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission on Wednesday with the caveat that the operator, Crestone Resources, electrify its operations.

The requirement to electrify the company’s drilling and production operations would cut down on air emissions and noise — two concerns raised by area residents — making the plan “much more approvable from a comprehensive cumulative impacts perspective,” ECMC Chairman Jeff Robbins said.

Crestone, which is a subsidiary of Denver-based Civitas Resources, had submitted a so-called comprehensive area plan, or CAP, for 166 wells on 32,000 acres, including the state-owned Lowry Ranch.

CAPs were added to the state regulations to allow for regional planning and better assessment, and coordination and management of cumulative impacts from large-scale drilling plans.

The Lowry Ranch plan, however, drew strong local opposition. A May commission hearing at the Arapahoe County fairgrounds drew about 300 residents, who gave more than three hours of testimony — almost all in opposition.

When Crestone received an oil and gas lease from the Colorado State Land Board for Lowry Ranch’s 26,000 acres in 2012, there were hardly any homes in the area. Now, there are an estimated 12,000 homes.

Crestone has already drilled and fracked 17 horizontal wells on the ranch and plans to drill the new wells from two existing pads and eight new ones by 2029.

A group of more than 500 residents formed Save the Aurora Reservoir. The group was granted the right to participate in the commission’s hearings as an “affected person” and hired an attorney to make a presentation and question Crestone witnesses.

Jaime Jost, Crestone’s attorney, called STAR “an activist group trying to stop oil and gas drilling in Colorado.”

STAR argued, using expert witnesses, that gaps in the plan left residents unprotected and that it did not properly calculate the cumulative impacts of all the drilling, wells, truck traffic and ongoing operations.

“We are devastated by the commission’s decision,” Marsha Goldsmith Kamin, STAR’s president, said. “This is without doubt the wrong decision for the health, safety and environment of our community.”

Despite STAR’s challenge, the commission found Crestone had substantially complied with the CAP requirements, even as commissioners expressed frustrations with gaps in the plan.

“I still do think that it does meet our rules and is approvable,” Commissioner Mike Cross said. “I hope it would be clear to the operator doing this, that minimum checking the boxes is not what we are looking for.”

Commissioner John Messner disagreed, saying that “on many fronts” the plan lacked the “commitments and evidence” to show that it avoided, mitigated or minimized potential cumulative impacts.

In July, Julie Murphy, the commission’s director, had recommended approval of the drilling plan saying it had met “all applicable requirements.”

Commissioner Brett Akerman voiced concerns about gaps in the plan. “Make no mistake about it, I do think there is an approvable CAP, if not immediately, before us nearby,” he said. Ackerman proposed sending the plan back to Crestone for more work.

Robbins, however, said that the commission could not send the plan — which substantially complied with the state and local regulations — back to Crestone unless it could give the operator detailed guidance on what additions would be required.

Akerman said that one of his concerns was that the proposed line of pad developments — even though well beyond the state’s required 2,000-foot setback — remained “very close to residences.”

The comprehensive area plans are not a final approval, Robbins said. For each well pad Crestone will have to seek approval of an oil and gas development plan, OGDP, and that would be the appropriate time to take up pad location, as well as other issues raised in the hearing, including noise mitigation, fire safety and wildlife protections.

“At this point we are feeling the ECMC is going to scrutinize every one of the OGDPs so we are not giving up,” STAR’s Goldsmith Kamin said. “We are going to keep pushing.”

The Stone Canyon fire that destroyed five structures and is linked to one death is 100% contained, leaving investigators to scour the blackened area near Lyons to figure out what caused the blaze. 

Federal investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were looking into the fire alongside Boulder County authorities, the agency said on X. The federal law enforcement agency investigates acts of arson, as well as terrorism and illegal storage of explosives.

The cause of the fire is so far unknown, but the involvement of the ATF indicates authorities suspect it was human-caused.

Local authorities announced Sunday night after completing aerial surveys that the fire was fully contained and that all evacuations and road closures were lifted. It burned 1,557 acres and had not grown in the prior four days. 

“People are just so relieved and grateful,” said Hollie Rogin, mayor of Lyons. “Everyone is hoping to get a little sleep. Of course we are devastated about the loss of homes and the loss of life.”

Rogin and her husband, Patrick, evacuated their home in Lyons last Tuesday after receiving an alert via phone. She grabbed her passport and their two dogs, Pearl and Poncho, and dropped them off at Updog Daycare in Boulder. 

“We found what I think was the last hotel room in Longmont,” Rogin said. 

The mayor said she was touched by the small town’s generosity during the fire, including when the city put out a call for batteries and other donations for the fire crews, who had come from as far as Pennsylvania. Within three hours, there were three pickup trucks full of donated supplies, she said. 

“We really know how to come together when times get tough,” Rogin said. “We saw that during the flood. We saw that during the height of COVID.” 

“At one point we had 250 firefighters in our little tiny town of 2,200 people.” 

The mayor said she expects an extra-large turnout at Wednesday night’s regularly scheduled summer concert series, when people gather to hear music at Sandstone Park. People are filled with relief and gratitude and will want to celebrate, she said. 

“This fire is contained and we are so grateful,” she said, “but I am personally going to be on pins and needles until it snows. I would encourage everyone to have two takeaways — adhere to fire ban rules and be prepared. Have your go-bag ready.”

Meanwhile, fire crews continued to battle two other fires in the Front Range, including the 10,000-acre Alexander Mountain fire in Larimer County, which was 54% contained as of Sunday afternoon. They were also making progress on the Quarry fire, in Jefferson County. 

Rain fell around Denver on Sunday night, bringing some relief to firefighting operations and clearing smoke from the air.

The fires that started last week forced thousands of people from their homes and burned a combined 52 homes and outbuildings. 

In Jefferson County, authorities said the Quarry fire was human caused, but they are not sure yet whether it was accidental or intentional. 

Jefferson County authorities also said Monday afternoon that they were “so close” to allowing evacuated residents to return to their homes but did not want to give a timeline.

“We are very optimistic that we are well on our way to getting people back in their homes safely so they will not have to evacuate again,” said Karlyn Tilley, a spokesperson for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department. “We are very excited that this is going faster than we even thought it was going to.” 

Fire crews worked through the night on a controlled burn that began on the southwest side of the fire and then turned the corner heading north. They were using bulldozers and chainsaws to remove the fire’s fuel  “so that the fire has nothing to eat,” she said. “It’s blowing in the right direction and it’s burning the right things. We are very excited about that.” 

Sunday night’s rain was welcomed by firefighters, but they were hoping for a more soaking rain Monday night, which would speed up the process of allowing residents to return home, Tilley said. Fire crews have been working 24-7 and could use “help from Mother Nature,” she said.

“It’s steep. It’s grueling. It’s hot. They are staying overnight extra hours because they want to get the residents back into their homes.” 

Residents will be allowed to return 48 hours ahead of the people who want to hike on trails in the canyon or drive through the burned area, she said. “We just want to give them a moment to breathe,” Tilley said. 

The fire has burned 527 acres and is at 45% containment. “There will be firefighters throughout this area for weeks to come,” she said. “It is a long, arduous process to make sure there aren’t any flare-ups.”

Colorado is a wildfire state.

There are the notable ones — the Cameron Peak fire, a 208,000-acre inferno, and the Marshall fire, which burned about 6,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of houses and businesses. And there are the smaller ones, such as the Devil’s Thumb fire that burned 81 acres in 2023. 

As fires explode around the Front Range, we wanted to map out where they were in relation to each other. But taking it further, we stepped away from the minute-by-minute updates to take a historical view of fires and where they burn. 

We looked through the National Interagency Fire Center’s records on fires since 2009 and plotted them on a map — all 10,849 of them. What resulted was a galaxy of blazes, but one with a clear message: Reported fires tend to happen most often where people live. 

Take a look for yourself. You can search this map by fire name or by year. Fires from this year are shown in red.

Distressed patients are more and more frequently making the same panicked demand of Dr. David Beuther, a pulmonologist at National Jewish Health, as Front Range air bakes into choking stew of ozone and wildfire smoke. 

“Where am I going to live?” 

They take their medicine, they follow the expert advice of National Jewish, they put HEPA filters into their air conditioners. They thought Denver’s dry climate was a hedge against some allergens and irritants. And yet, with Front Range cities hitting 100 degrees this week and the foothills of Larimer and Boulder counties on fire, their asthma hits on more days each summer. Their chronic cough gets worse. Smoke particles inflame their sinus disease. 

“What I see in clinic is kind of an increasing despair, just ‘where am I going to live?’ On Monday, I had probably four or five patients describe, ‘Oh, this is happening again. I basically have to suffer through more symptoms, not able to go outside, not able to do the things I want,’” Beuther said. “For several months every summer.”

“And they seriously think, well, maybe I should move somewhere else. But as we go through it, where are you going to move? There are problems with many other choices. There really seems to be nowhere to go.” 

Denver Health pulmonologist Dr. Anuj Mehta is telling patients the same thing: Expect increasing ozone and particulate alert days each year as the Front Range climate heats up, and wildfires from drying parts of the Pacific Northwest add to the volatile mix above metro Denver. 

“This is not anything that’s going away. Every year we’re going to be dealing with some difficult air quality, both from a wildfire perspective and an ozone perspective. Potentially, it’s only going to get worse,” Mehta said. Ever more important then, Mehta added, is “having plans and establishing plans, if you’re somebody with asthma, if you’re somebody with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).” 

Here are some answers to frequent questions for top Front Range heart and lung doctors: 

Should my children stay indoors instead of playing outside? 

Children in metro Denver’s most vulnerable neighborhoods disproportionately impacted by historic pollution already suffer from higher rates of asthma and other illnesses. Parents who are getting ozone alerts in all neighborhoods on the Front Range wonder about the trade-offs. 

It’s not just smoke particles and ozone that make afternoons dangerous, Mehta said — 100 degrees and a sunburn can hurt kids as well. 

“I think it’s hard to keep young kids inside. We want them to be outside and playing, and not sitting in the house in front of screens. We know that’s healthy. So try and really think about the earlier morning hours when it’s cooler,” Mehta said. 

The first step to making these decisions, Beuther said, is having good medical care, knowing your family’s health status, and for those established as having a chronic condition, following the plan. 

“When our patients have an underlying condition that makes them more vulnerable, those are people that, when it gets into the orange and particularly the red zone, we start talking about staying indoors,” Beuther said. (On the AirNow.gov air quality gauge calibrated for any ZIP code, the orange warning zone is 100 to 150 air quality indexI, and above 150 is the red danger zone.) 

For a vulnerable person seeing the AQI creep into the orange, Beuther advised, “windows and doors shut, HEPA filter on your furnace, running the air conditioning, keeping your rescue medications close and trying to limit your exposure to the outside as much as possible.”

If I’m healthy, should I still avoid exercising in the worst part of the day? 

Don’t stop breathin’, don’t stop believin’, pulmonologists say — if you’re a super athlete or just an Olympics-season dreamer, keep on running. But do it early in the morning if you can, or late after dinner if it’s safe, when temperatures are cooler and air quality indices are lower. 

“What I would tell an active healthy person in Colorado during these kind of orange, moderately bad air quality days, is that it’s probably safe for you to go and exercise at any time in the middle of the day if you want to, but I would probably try to avoid it. Is it going to hurt you? Probably not. If you feel bad, obviously that’s a signal,” Beuther said. 

“What I tend to tell my athlete-type patients is, as this air quality gets from moderate to severe, or even in the moderate, that’s probably not the day you want to do your long, extended exertion, because this is about irritant exposure. It’s not just the intensity of it, it’s also the duration. If I have to go run 10 miles sometime this week, I’m going to look at when the air quality is the best or make sure that that one’s in the morning. If I have to run a quick 3 miles in the middle of the day, I’m not going to worry about it if I’m healthy.”

What should vulnerable elderly residents or their caregivers do?

Take a moment to consider the living situation of elderly family and friends, Mehta said. 

“For people that don’t have air conditioning, right now is a really difficult time,” he said. “The cycle of heat can affect people’s breathing, even more so the elderly, they’re more likely to get dehydrated. And all of those are kind of like a vicious cycle. If you’re dehydrated, your breathing can get worse, and then you’re probably not going to be reaching for water.” 

“It’s important that we check on our neighbors, check on our friends, check on our family, make sure they’re doing OK,” Mehta added. “If they need a fan to be brought to them, or if you want to bring them over to your house, to give them a break in air conditioning, if you have it. I think that kind of societal caring for each other is really important in these difficult times.”

Opening windows to cool the house down is tricky, Mehta said. It’s certainly not helpful to the lungs to sit right next to a window opening onto wildfire smoke and gaseous ozone, which permeates the Front Range on bad days. 

“But a lot of people rely on opening the windows to cool the house down. When air quality is really bad, it might be better to keep some of those windows closed, open ones in rooms that you’re not in, and just keep those fans going to circulate the air,” he said. 

Should I wear a mask on the worst days? 

The loose, fairly cheap masks that became ubiquitous as handouts during COVID do not protect from either ozone or PM2.5 particles, one of the hazards carried by wildfire smoke, Beuther said. A better-built mask rated as N95 or KN95 will block a lot of PM2.5 if worn properly, tightly around the nose and mouth, scientists say. 

Particulate pollution can be extra dangerous, Beuther said, because it doesn’t just impact the lungs, it’s also been shown to cause a more general inflammation inside the body that can exacerbate heart conditions. “It has been associated, at least on a population basis, with heart disease and ER visits for heart attacks and other things,” he said. 

Ozone, on the other hand, does not respect even good masks, Beuther said. 

“Ozone is kind of like this blob from Fort Collins down to Colorado Springs. You really can’t avoid it without going far away,  and it can really get through the masks,” he said. “So just because you have an N95 doesn’t mean you can be a superhero and spend all day outside with bad lung disease and expect to be fine.” 

Doctors who are listening to their patients, Beuther added, need to take their increasing anxiety as a prod to work on protecting them in a broader, societal way. 

“This directly affects our quality of life, and as the air quality gets worse, it’s not just an aesthetic thing for healthy people. When healthy people also start to get the chronic cough, the scratchy throat, the itchy eyes, that isn’t necessarily chronic disease yet, but we know on a population basis, the population will be less healthy because of the worsening air quality,” he said. “It’s directly in opposition to the goals of why we all came to live here in Colorado, for the beautiful outdoor scenery and activity.”

Colorado has been doing some “heavy work” to improve things, Beuther said, but progress has been in part reversed by global temperature increases that broaden the allergy season and promote more wildfires. 

“So we really ought to do more,” he said. “And this is something that is increasingly visible to national and international pulmonary and respiratory groups, that we need to be more vocal, because we’re seeing a direct effect in our patients.”

Arapahoe County residents who live near Aurora Reservoir on Tuesday won the right to intervene in state hearings and challenge a plan to drill 166 oil and gas wells on the nearby, state-owned Lowry Ranch.

The Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission unanimously voted to permit Save the Aurora Reservoir, a grass-roots group, to participate in the hearing over the objections of the oil and gas operator Crestone Peak Resources.

The ECMC granted “affected person” status to the group. It is the first time the commission has granted that status to residents in an approval hearing for an oil and gas comprehensive area plan or CAP.

The affected-person status is primarily for people living within 2,000-foot state setback for drilling operations or those demonstrating a unique impact from the proposed oil and gas  operation.

“I believe courts look at standing more from the perspective to allow standing if there are allegations of injury,” ECMC Chairman Jeff Robbins said. “I would allow STAR.” The three other commissioners agreed.

In its petition, 12 STAR families outline their concerns about the impacts of the proposed oil and gas plan on air quality, the use of the reservoir and surrounding area for recreation and their children who go to school within the drilling area.

“A list of concerns does not equal standing,” Jamie Jost, an attorney for Crestone, told the commission. “None of the listed STAR members is within 2,000 feet. … None of them are even within 3,000 feet.”

Mike Foote, STAR’s attorney, said that the petitioners all live and recreate in the area, with some having children and jobs in the CAP.

“There is something that is not right about it,” Foote said, referring to the CAP. “It is not protective.”

Crestone Resources, a subsidiary of Denver-based Civitas Resources, one of state’s largest oil and gas producers, is proposing a comprehensive area plan to drill up to 166 horizontal wells on 32,000 acres of state and private land.

The CAPs were added to the commission’s revised rules as a way to better assess, coordinate and manage the cumulative impacts of large-scale drilling plans.

As part of the Lowry Ranch CAP, Crestone has committed to using a suite of “best management practices” to reduce emission and wastes and lessen impacts on the surrounding areas.

Julie Murphy, the ECMC director, has recommended that the commission approve the CAP.

About 26,000 acres of the 32,000 acres in the Crestone CAP are state holdings overseen by the Colorado State Land Board.

In a presentation to the commission, Christel Koranda, the land board’s minerals director, said that Lowry Ranch was the single biggest generator of revenues among the board’s holdings having already yielded more than $200 million in payments and is projected to provide another $300 million in the coming years.

There are more than a dozen different leases on the ranch already including ones for agriculture, solar energy and oil and gas drilling. Crestone already operates 17 wells on the ranch and has paid $73 million in royalties and $137 million in bonuses, according to the land board.

The hearing, which began Tuesday, is scheduled to conclude during a second session on Friday.

Colorado agencies were awarded $328 million in grants by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to launch a host of programs to cut greenhouse gas emissions from homes, commercial buildings, landfills, mines and the transportation sector.

The Denver Regional Council of Governments will receive $199.7 million and the Colorado Energy Office was granted $129 million.

“Our guiding mission is ensuring all people in Colorado have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and the opportunity to live healthy lives. These grants — unprecedented in their funding — bring us and Coloradans closer to achieving these goals,” EPA Regional Administrator KC Becker said in a statement.

Colorado has a statutory goal and a roadmap to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% in 2030 and 90% by 2050 compared to 2005 levels.

Becker, who served as speaker of the state House of Representatives, was the prime sponsor of the 2019 legislation mandating the greenhouse gas reductions.

The Colorado Energy Office programs will seek to reduce emissions from landfills, coal mines, and large commercial buildings and transportation.

One key element will be to deploy advanced methane monitoring to improve emission regulations for coal mines and landfills. Some of the money will be used for a competitive grant program to help large commercial buildings cut emissions and some will go to local government initiatives.

“Local and Tribal government actions are crucial to this effort, and this funding will ensure that they can adopt and implement key policies to help us achieve net-zero emissions by 2050,” Will Toor, executive director of the Colora Energy Office, said in a statement.

“This money will also help large building owners reduce their energy usage and associated emissions,” Toor said.

Between 2025 and 2030 the state energy office programs are projected to cut the equivalent of 4.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas and a total reduction of 25 tons by 2050.

DRCOG’s “Zero Emission Building Initiative” will focus on, according to the council’s grant application, “residential and commercial building sectors and increase energy and resource efficiency, with an emphasis on low-income and disadvantaged communities. “

The program will provide free home retrofits and upgrade services for low-income and disadvantaged populations and free energy advising to residential, multifamily and commercial building owners.

It will also offer rebates and incentives to accelerate the adoption of energy efficiency and electrification measures, and create a building policy collaborative to advance ambitious building policies at the local level.

Among the initiative’s goals are electrifying weatherproofing more than Front Range 60,000 buildings and addressing workforce gaps by providing job training for 3,800 new workers and upgrading skills for 1,000 existing workers.

The program is projected to cut the equivalent of 6.9 million tons of carbon dioxide between 2025 and 2030 and a total of 148.2 million metric tons by 2050,

“This federal grant will enable us to take bold, visionary steps to reduce climate pollution and protect the health and well-being of our residents,” Jeff Baker, an Arapahoe County commissioner and DRCOG board chairman, said in a statement.

The Colorado awards were among 25 awards totaling $4.3 billion the EPA made through its Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, which was created under the Inflation Reduction Act.

The largest single grant — $450 million — was made to a coalition of five New England states for a “heat pump accelerator” to put heat pumps in 500,000 single- and multi-family residences in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine. 

The price tag on Xcel Energy’s $12 billion Clean Energy Plan — which is facing supply chain problems and uncertainty over tariffs — may have to rise, the company said in a Colorado Public Utilities Commission filing.

The utility asked the PUC for a 75-day delay in submitting a key solicitation for a clean energy project to “address material changes” in projects included in its state-mandated Clean Energy Plan.

The commissioners granted the extension, but voiced concerns over what the delay portends.

“It looks like they are contemplating price and cost increases, which causes me a lot of concern,” PUC Chairman Eric Blank said. “I am really nervous about what is going on here. … This filing causes me a lot of angst.”

While it is not clear how much costs could increase, a 10% rise would lead to customers paying an added $1.2 billion in rates, Joseph Pereira, deputy director of the Colorado Office of Utility Consumer Advocate, said in an interview.

“This is another example of a long, long string where the company takes a bid or proposes something and then we see massive cost overruns,” Pereira said. The UCA represents residential and small commercial customers at the PUC.

Xcel Energy, in a statement to The Colorado Sun, said it is working with developers of utility-scale solar projects to determine if project bidders need to increase their prices or change their proposed operating dates.

“We are doing everything possible to minimize project costs for customers while working with stakeholders to shorten delays to meet our clean energy goals,” the company said.

Under a 2023 state law, utilities have to create a clean energy plan that shows how they will cut their greenhouse gas emissions 80% from 2005 levels by 2030.

Xcel Energy submitted a $15 billion plan in December 2023, proposing 7,100 megawatts of new generation and storage, to achieve its targets. That plan was almost double in cost of the one the utility initially proposed in 2021.

The PUC, concerned about the price and whether the utility could manage all the projects in it, trimmed the proposal, approving  a $12 billion plan witn 5,800 megawatts of new resources.

“The imperative to decarbonization is an excuse for any costs,” Pereira said. “We have to say you must decarbonize affordably.”

In its request for the added time, Xcel Energy cited supply chain problems, an April petition by U.S. solar manufacturers to extend tariffs to Southeast Asian solar cell makers and a May directive from the Biden administration to increase tariffs on China.

“We’re experiencing both delays and cost challenges implementing the approved Clean Energy Plan portfolio,” Xcel Energy said.

“Global supply chain issues are delaying the delivery of critical equipment like transformers, high demand for construction labor is driving up the project’s costs and two recent trade actions by the U.S. International Trade Commission have impacted the development of new solar and storage projects,” the company said.

This isn’t just an Xcel problem

The U.S. is facing an unprecedented shortage of transformers with delivery wait times of up to two years, according to a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

“Utilities needing to add or replace them are currently facing high prices and long wait times due to supply chain shortages,” Killian McKenna, a NREL researcher, said in a statement. “This has the potential to affect energy accessibility, reliability, affordability — everything.”

Another concern is the repeated delays in moving ahead with the Clean Energy Plan and  impact that is having on prices and contracts, according to the Colorado Solar and Storage Association, or COSSA, a trade group.

Xcel Energy requested three delays in submitting the plan, filing it 80 days beyond the initial deadline, according to a PUC filing, and Wednesday was granted another 75-day delay.

“While COSSA has taken no position on this specific request, the longer these filings are delayed, the more risk this places on solar developers who are required to hold their prices,” Mike Kruger, the association’s CEO. “It is unfair to continue to put risk on solar developers when it appears the issue is with Xcel.”

Commissioner Megan Gilman also expressed concerns about the risk of a delay. “It seems to be a somewhat reasonable extension,” she said, “but I also worry that past that extension we will not get ourselves in trouble with timing” in executing the clean energy plan.

If the city of Denver is planting extra trees in your neighborhood, you might live in the worst of the metro area’s sun-blasted heat islands. 

A new map from the meteorology data-crunchers at Climate Central shows some of Denver’s most paved-over neighborhoods suffering recent (and looming) heat waves at rates 9 degrees hotter than shaded blocks just a couple of miles away. 

The door-to-door pavement and concrete-covered canyons downtown, on South Santa Fe and west of the Mousetrap absorb Denver’s 100-degree sunshine all day and can’t let go of the heat before the next high noon, said adaptation manager Lis Cohen in the city’s office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency. 

“The problem with urban heat islands is that we aren’t totally prepared for several days of extreme heat in a row. Historically, we haven’t seen this before,” Cohen said. Denver was forecast to hit 100 on multiple days over the weekend before a brief respite this week, then return to temperatures in the mid-90s next week. 

Underlining official concern about the frequency of spiking heat events, a group of attorneys general from heat-vulnerable states on Tuesday joined a growing petition asking the Federal Emergency Management Agency to add extreme heat as a qualifying natural disaster. The change could open up federal funding for local efforts such as creating more public cooling centers, adding cooling or air filtration to more schools, water distribution and health screenings. 

The proposal, backed by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, would “enhance the capacity of our jurisdictions to mitigate the impacts of extreme heat and wildfire smoke before they occur — and to respond as effectively as possible to them when they do happen,” the group said.

Some of the most heat-challenged neighborhoods in Denver are also described by state and federal environment officials as disproportionately impacted communities, those that have suffered more than area averages from historic air pollution or other environmental health hazards. Many of the hottest urban islands on the Climate Central map are relatively low income and have higher percentages of minority residents. 

Previous Denver Health studies have shown the neighborhoods to suffer from higher rates of asthma, heart conditions and other ailments exacerbated by environmental conditions such as high heat or air pollution. 

Cohen said Denver is also concerned about elderly residents in older homes on treeless lots in the middle of cooler neighborhoods, who might not have money for air conditioning or energy efficient renovations. She also worries about outdoor workers assigned to jobs in heat islands, including Denver’s own transportation and infrastructure employees laying hot asphalt that boosts ambient temperatures close to 200 degrees.

The climate office controls about $40 million in spending each year from a climate-related sales tax boost Denver voters approved in 2020. The money has gone toward electric bike rebates, assistance to businesses and homes electrifying their heating and cooling, and other projects. 

After consulting with residents at community forums, the climate office is now working to accelerate a handful of programs aimed at urban heat islands, Cohen said: 

• Targeted tree planting, now up to 1,374 new trees in north and west Denver neighborhoods with thin shade canopies. Some of the trees are paid for with a federal grant that includes community nonprofits going door to door and asking shadeless neighbors if they want a tree. 
• Assistance for purchasing and installing heat pumps or traditional air conditioning at income-qualified homes or in homes where people with underlying health conditions live. Mapping from data trackers like Climate Central, Cohen said, can reinforce the priorities set by the Denver climate office. 
• Distribution of air purifiers to some homes, whether separate from or paired with air cooling equipment. Air purifiers can remove dust and particulates from wildfires or other irritants. 

Residents and nonprofit organizations that want more input with the city on how to combat heat islands or take on other summer heat issues, Cohen said, should join the Community Heat Summit on July 26.