Free Republic

Over the past few months, we’ve asked Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU) questions about how they spend ratepayer dollars on advertising and sponsorships. Stay tuned for a future Springs Taxpayers United article about sponsorships. Right now, we’ll focus exclusively on the CSU advertising budget. We wondered why a monopoly utility needs to advertise at all. No one in their service area has a choice on which utility to use. The local advertising company Vladmir Jones handles the advertising account for CSU. Through a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request, we asked for all of the 2022 advertising expenditures. Vladmir Jones invoices...

Late last summer, and with great fanfare, Xcel Energy announced its proposal to close the Comanche I & II power units in Pueblo a decade ahead of schedule. They offered as replacement the euphemistically titled “Colorado Energy Plan” , a massive $2.5 billion fuel-switching scheme to move its Colorado customers away from baseload, reliable hydrocarbons in favor of intermittent renewables. ... the Minneapolis-based monopoly utility will force captive ratepayers to cough up at least another $287 million. That’s on top of the modeling errors we already found in their accounting, and Xcel acknowledged. In other words, ratepayers will pay higher...

New Hampshire utility ratepayers will pay a Taiwanese company $1.22 million to build the state’s largest solar installation so that a small town can save about $500,000 in power costs over the life of the project. Taiwan’s Walsin Lihwa, parent company of Borrego Solar, will use Chinese-made solar panels in the 3.5-acre project, which is supposed to be finished in July. It will supply power to several municipal buildings in the area but only some of the time: the town of Peterborough (population: 6,284) gets only 197 sunny days per year. “What a great project,” deadpanned David Kreutzer, a senior...