HB19-1313

HB19-1313

COSSA is officially neutral on HB19-1313 “Electric Utility Plans To Further Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions.”

As introduced, COSSA had real concerns. However, after working with Xcel, we reached an agreement to deal with our concerns.

The agreement is:

• RESA will continue to be split 50/50 (1% for taking carbon generation offline and 1% for DG programs, as agreed to previously in the Colorado Energy Plan). 
• Ensuring Best Value Employment Metrics do not apply to distributed generation.
• Multiple statements by Xcel before the Committee that the replacement of carbon generation will be open to competitive bidding from all sources and that the goal in the legislation is solely a goal and not a backdoor carve out for Xcel. This should open up multiple gigawatts of capacity to COSSA’s large-scale developers.
• A side letter agreement from Xcel to COSSA saying that they believe NEM and interconnection outside their programs are law and they will honor it. This should protect all COSSA members in the distributed generation space for at least a decade (note: rates can still change, but the current framework won’t).
• The right for all Coloradans to “generate, consume, store and export electricity produced from eligible energy resources to the electric grid through the use of customer-sided retail distributed generation.”