Residents and business owners whose neighborhood along South Broadway became an emblem last year of power outages striking pockets of Xcel Energy’s system are encouraged by a new state report showing that the time customers lost power doubled last year compared to historic trends.
“We feel validated that their findings were what we’ve been telling them, that this particular corridor was more adversely affected than other surrounding areas,” said Caitlin Braun, a business person in the West Washington Park neighborhood.
But Braun said random power outages are continuing in a multi-block stretch of 178 businesses and households bordered by South Broadway, Lincoln Street, West Third and West Bayaud avenues. Restaurants and bars are still losing business and food when the electricity goes off with no word of when it will come back on.
And Braun said the people affected don’t know if they can recoup losses caused by the outages and aren’t sure how the situation will be improved.
“Thanks for confirming. It’s good to have that information from a third party,” Braun said. “But it’s like, OK, what do we do?”
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission seemed to be wrestling with the same questions last week when the staff presented one report showing a dramatic jump in the time Xcel customers didn’t have power and another highlighting problems with the utility’s quality of customer service.
The PUC opened an investigation last year into the power outages after getting numerous complaints from the Front Range to the Western Slope. The PUC staff began looking into Xcel Energy’s customer service when the agency’s consumer affairs department reported getting a number of complaints.
The staff reported that in 2024, the average customer experienced 350 minutes, or nearly six hours, without electricity compared to the trend of 166 minutes from 2015 to 2023. Outage minutes per customer in 2024 were above the historical trend in six of Xcel’s nine regions.
The length of power outages has trended up from 2015 through 2023.
The staff’s investigation found that customers on the 15 worst performing feeders, which distribute power from a substation, experienced 18% of the outage minutes in 2024. The 15 feeders make up 2% of the total.
Seven of the worst feeders were in Boulder; two were in the San Luis Valley; three were in metro Denver; and three were in other spots along the Front Range.
Staffers recommended requiring Xcel Energy to provide more detailed locations of outages and more information in its logs of outages.
Erin O’Neill, deputy director of fixed utilities, said Xcel’s customer support staffing levels dropped roughly 20% from 2022 to 2024. The customer contact center’s budget was 5% lower in 2024 than in 2020.
Over the same time period, Xcel Energy’s electric rates rose 30%, according to the report. The rate of complaints surged 100% from 2022 to 2024.
Acting in the public interest?
Commission members reacted with exasperation after hearing key points from the reports.
“This is a regulated monopoly operating in a legally defined service territory where competition is prohibited. In return for that privilege of operating as a monopoly, they shouldn’t be driving profit increases at the expense of customers,” PUC Chairman Eric Blank said. “Aren’t they obligated to act in the public interest and answer the phone, and bill customers, and avoid and respond to outages?”
The PUC staff said there was a 58% increase in customers not receiving their bills in 2024 compared with 2023 and a 240% jump from 2020 to 2024. Overall customer satisfaction with calls to Xcel declined 17% from 2020 to 2024, the staff found.
Xcel Energy, which files quality of service plans with the PUC, was assessed $6.5 million in penalties based on its performance.
Blank said the PUC needs to hear from Xcel, the various parties involved and the public and asked the staff “to get this dialogue moving.” The staff recommended considering rules to further define expectations for customer service.
Xcel Energy said in a statement that it works to provide customers “reliable, affordable, sustainable, and safe electric service, every day,” but recognizes it doesn’t always deliver to the level it has set for itself.
However, using several different metrics, including the length of outages and the average frequency of interruptions systemwide, Xcel said customers received reliable electric service 99.9% of the time. The utility added that 2024 was a challenging year “due to several extreme weather events.”
Roughly 55,000 customers along the Front Range lost power in April 2024 when fierce winds battered the area, knocking out power and leading Xcel to cut power to reduce the risk of wind-whipped electrical equipment sparking wildfires.
The company said other outages reported last year in metro Denver and beyond were caused by several factors: a fault in a cable; blown fuses; a line damaged by construction; bad weather; problems with conductors; repair and replacement of equipment; and troublesome squirrels. Some causes were unknown.
Xcel said over the past several months, it has been testing the performance of feeders, replacing cables and assessing substations. Customers who’ve experienced frequent outages will automatically receive a bill credit in July, the company said.
Steps to improve customer service include increasing the number of agents handling calls from 250 in March 2022 to the current 300. Xcel said it has boosted the 2025 budget for customer service support.
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Bryant said during times of high-call volumes, Xcel had prioritized callers with emergencies or life-threatening situations. People were encouraged to call back later. About 2% of last year’s approximately 5 million calls were disconnected, Bryant said.
A fix in the works
Blake Davis, who lives in the outage-prone area along South Broadway and Lincoln Street, has no big complaints about how his calls to the customer service center have been handled. But he has been frustrated that despite his letters and calls, he had not heard from Xcel.
Until Tuesday. That’s when Davis received a letter from an Xcel consumer advocate analyst saying a plan is in the works to rebuild some of the infrastructure in his neighborhood with an emphasis on making it squirrel-proof. The work is expected to be completed in a month.
“We’ve heard rumors they were planning to do something, but we never had communication,” Davis said. “It would be good if they let the rest of the 178 customers know as well.”
Davis, who lives in a condominium building on Lincoln, was among the hundreds of people who wrote letters and made calls to Xcel, the PUC and others. Denver City Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez, whose district includes the area, spoke out for the neighborhood.
The PUC staff report included a case study of the South Broadway-Lincoln Street area. The report said although the feeder serving the neighborhood wasn’t one of the 15 worst, customers experienced comparable outage times.
The area had 13 outages in 2024, the staff report said. Braun, a member of the Lincoln/Broadway neighborhood organization and employee of Players Pub, said at least five more occurred after the PUC gathered the information.
So far this year, at least seven have been logged. Braun said it’s tough for businesses because they don’t know when or if the lights will come back on so many times they have to close.
Braun said Players Pub was forced to close a couple of times this year on a Saturday night. “It’s typically our busiest night of the week. We have to shut down and we lose out on all that money.”
Some key points of state reports:
The time that customers on Xcel Energy’s system lost power doubled in 2024 compared to historic trends. Fifteen of Xcel’s more than 800 feeders distributing electricity accounted for 18% of the outage minutes. Customer complaints rose 100% from 2022 to 2024. Overall satisfaction with Xcel’s customer support dropped 17% from 2020 to 2024Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.
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