In my mind it goes like this: I see ludicrously overpaid Xcel Energy execs squinting their eyes, clenching their jaws, forming a painful frown as they peruse reports that the People’s Republic of Boulder may seize that city’s electricity business, and the day.
It makes me all warm inside running that fantasy over and over because those squinty eyes, that clenched jaw, that painful frown? That’s me every time I open my monthly power bill. Like so many of you, few things can incite a tasty case of schadenfreude as can discomfit at my local electric company.
For the past couple of years, the oddities running the city of Boulder have been flirting with the idea of kidnapping all the power lines in their odd little burg, giving Xcel Energy the finger and running a much leaner and greener power company all by themselves.
Xcel’s response to Boulder’s daydream was pretty much what it is every time they come under attack for things like high rates, arrogance and crappy service: “Huh.”
Boulder is certainly not the first city to get the shock treatment from Xcel’s Universal Sacred Nexus in Minnesota, a state that employs two comedians as elected representatives, Sen. Al Franken and Congresswoman Michele Bachman. A couple of years ago, Aurora and most metro-area cities got sideways with Xcel because officials wondered if they could provide street-lighting cheaper by servicing the lights themselves. Currently, developers must pay for new street lights, give them to Xcel Energy for free, and then Excel bills the city to change bulbs and keep the lights on. They charge a lot. For years local cities have been pushing Xcel and the Public Utilities Commission to at least estimate a flat electric rate so they can figure out whether they can save taxpayers some dough. As of this week, nobody at the city is crunching numbers on that. You can imagine what Xcel’s response has been to a few years of intense public pressure: “Huh.”
It was pretty much the same story when Xcel took a public beating about its multi-million dollar hoo-haws in Colorado spending multi-millions of your utility bill dollars on regularly using rented multi-million-dollar private Lear jets to commute back and forth from Denver to Minnefabulous. Did I mention that state once elected comic-wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor?
Anyway, the media, the public utilities commissions and the Minnesota Attorney General blew a fuse over Xcel’s private jet bill of about $6 million in 2011. Xcel was demanding a rate hike of about $170 million at the time. When consumer advocates and attorneys general wanted to know why Xcel had yet to discover conference calls or Skype, or even Travelocity, the response was a predictable: “Huh.”
So here’s what the City of Boulder figured out. The price of coal has been steady for the past several years, about $60 a short ton. The price of natural gas at the well head has gone from $6.25 per 1,000 cubic feet to $2.66 over the past five years. And your utility bill? Up, up, up. And the amount of electricity generated from “green” sources like wind and solar? Meh.
Boulder thinks it can condemn the power lines and start doing a far better, cheaper job of providing power. Cheaper, greener power means businesses will want to move there and residents will have more money to spend on businesses. How? No Lear jets. No cast of well-paid thousands running the show from Minneapolis. No profits to rake in from your wallet for stockholders and company hoo-haws. No problem. Of course you can imagine what Xcel’s response to all this was a couple of years ago when it all started out as just another weird Boulder brainstorm: “Huh.”
Now that Boulder’s serious, and everyone else in the metro area is thinking, “you mean we can save a bundle on our power bills by turning out the lights on Xcel?”
The sniggering you hear is coming from millions like me, ready to vote “yes, please” on flipping the switch on the Minnesota monopoly. And when they come asking that we give them another chance or the benefit of the doubt?
Well, huh.
Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com