In Colorado, we are focused on saving people money and cutting costs for everyday items — from groceries to electricity bills. The cost of energy is top of mind for many Americans, and in a recent national poll, more than half of Americans said they were worried about being able to pay their electricity bills. To best serve Coloradans, improve reliability, and keep costs down, we will continue to expand low-cost clean energy resources no matter what politicians in Washington, D.C., do.
Colorado is ranked in the top 10 nationally for the lowest household energy costs, including electricity. Both current data and modeling for the future show that low-cost clean energy, combined with embracing common-sense reform to build infrastructure, can keep costs down, lower monthly bill volatility, and improve Colorado’s air quality.
Our state’s utility policies are focused on three pillars: affordability, reliability and reducing greenhouse gas pollution. Individual utilities propose the resources and technologies they think are most effective at achieving these goals. The vast majority of utilities have found that the lowest cost path to meeting all three goals is retiring old, high-cost coal plants and replacing them with lower-cost wind and solar, backed up by batteries and gas.
At the federal level, the Trump administration is limiting the energy choices available to utilities and consumers, playing politics with the free market by picking winners and losers.
Recent analyses by the Rhodium Group and Energy Innovation found that removing federal clean energy tax credits could increase energy costs in Colorado by 6%, and could cost consumers nationwide as much as $25 billion per year. President Trump’s tariffs will certainly drive up the costs of new wind, solar and batteries, as well as the costs of all cars, including electric vehicles.
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3:05 AM MDT on Apr 13, 20257:39 PM MDT on Apr 12, 2025The tariffs also will make it more expensive to expand pipelines, do new drilling for oil and gas, or install new powerplants and electric equipment. As an example, many batteries used to store power for the electric grid could see tariffs boosting their costs by 65%-80% — essentially a tax paid by all utility customers.
President Trump has further meddled in the energy market by signing an executive order invoking emergency powers to try to order utilities to extend the lives of retiring coal plants — even though these plants are generally retiring because they simply can’t compete with lower cost natural gas and renewable generation. To make matters even worse, the administration has also created an email hotline to allow polluters, including coal plants, to request waivers from air pollution standards that protect public health. The net effect is to push for power that is both dirtier and more expensive to consumers.
Elsewhere, the federal government seems determined to move us backward with higher costs, putting new obstacles in place to permit abundant and lower-cost solutions such as wind power or regional electric transmission lines.
Despite this, here in Colorado we remain focused on delivering low-cost, reliable clean energy to Coloradans.
Working with utilities and under the leadership of Gov. Jared Polis, we are taking a nation-leading approach rooted in market competition to acquire and build low-cost energy resources. Over the last few decades, the costs of clean energy technologies have come down by huge factors.
For example, the cost of lithium-ion batteries, used to store renewable energy, have dropped by 97% over the past three decades. The costs of solar panels are down 90%. As a result, driven largely by these lower costs, 40% of Colorado’s electricity comes from renewable resources — and we are on track to reach nearly 80% by 2030.
This transition saves consumers money and helps to protect Coloradans from the volatile price swings of natural gas.
In Colorado, we are also working to expand transmission capacity to meet the state’s forecasted demand for electricity, achieve the state’s emission reduction goals, improve the flow of electricity on the transmission system, and improve reliability of the electric grid.
We need a wide variety of resources, not just wind and solar. That is why Gov. Polis signed a bipartisan law this year to clarify that nuclear energy can be part of Colorado’s future clean energy mix. We have taken action to support other emerging technologies such as carbon capture, advanced geothermal and clean hydrogen, to ensure that all of these can play a role, allowing different energy sources to compete so that Coloradans can benefit from the lowest cost mix of resources that can provide clean and reliable energy to meet our needs.
Electric vehicles, heat pumps and industrial innovation to reduce emissions — including efforts in the oil and gas sector — will continue to drive significant growth in power demand in Colorado over the coming decades, and will save people money on fuel costs for driving and for heating their homes.
In Colorado, we will continue to lead the way with low-cost, abundant energy resources that save consumers money and protect from the high costs of coal power and the volatile price swings of natural gas, while protecting our air. It’s time the federal government embraces this approach and lets the market work.
Will Toor of Boulder was named the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office in January 2019 by Gov. Jared Polis.
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