Dive Brief:
- The city of Boulder, Colo., has filed a supplemental application to form a municipal utility, addressing previous concerns related to a plan to take over assets owned by Xcel Energy outside the city, the Daily Camera reports.
- The Daily Camera reports Boulder's new proposal includes $267 million in construction and to condemn assets, but it does not include provisions to serve customers outside the city.
- The new application follows a regulatory decision to reject portions of its original application last year, determining that the city's plan to take over Xcel Energy's infrastructure in unincorporated areas violated the principles of monopoly operation and could not move ahead.
Dive Insight:
Over the summer, Boulder officials said they were pursuing "parallel paths" towards formation of a municipally-owned utility—on the one hand, seeking a way to move forward that dealt with a rejection of portions of its previous plan while still negotiating with the utility for more clean energy.
The city is five years into a push to form a municipal utility but has been forced to negotiate with Xcel over how it will move forward, after regulators rejected some portions of a previous application.
"Boulder is not seeking the transfer of generation assets or transmission assets nor is Boulder seeking to acquire assets used exclusively to serve PSCo customers," the city wrote in its filing.
The city said its request includes only the distribution facilities and real property interests "necessary for the new electric utility to serve its customers located within the City Limits." While Boulder conceded some of the property that is necessary to serve customers within the city is located outside the city limits, it stressed that "these are not facilities or real property interests that PSCo will use to serve PSCo customers who are located outside the City once the two distribution systems are separate."
While the city's muni proposal is a significant departure from its past filing, officials say it does not impact the ongoing negotiations, but no tidy resolution is in sight.
