My Testimony to the Colorado PUC

At the Commissioner's Weekly Meeting - 12 March 2025

PUC requires you watch on YouTube. From 32:36 - 37:34¹

Transcript

First of all, thank you for having me on here. I have not done this before. My background is that I went to CU, where I earned degrees in physics and mathematics. However, I've spent the last 50 years as a software developer, mostly at startups. I spent three and a half years on the Windows 95 team at Microsoft, and my most recent venture was a software company that my wife and I created, grew to a nice size, and sold here in Boulder. So, we're one of the success stories of the high-tech industry working here.

Back in November, I would have happily voted for "let's go all in on wind and solar," and you know, you can increase my taxes for it appropriately and so forth. But I started diving into it, first looking at just investments and so forth. Because I blogged, I started writing about it too, and what I learned is a lot different from what seems to be the conventional wisdom on this stuff. So, I ask you to look at a couple of things. Obviously, don't take my word—I'm just one person. Yes, I've written the whole thing through with the math, I put it up for peer review, and it's passed.

When it comes to wind and solar, they won't work for base load power. I personally wish they would, but they won't. Germany, Denmark, and the UK are showing what happens when you get too much of your power coming from wind and solar. To the extent that Norway is considering disconnecting from their grid because they get jerked around on those price hikes, since they're connected.

The second thing I ask you all to look at is nuclear power, not in the context of SMRs. They will come along someday, but when they do, they're going to be more expensive than either the Westinghouse or the Korean 1.4 GW plants. You know, the only way we can get that base load power effectively is through coal, which is awful, or nuclear. We need it for the inertia, we need it for the fact that it's incredibly reliable, and that it's not bouncy. I mean, solar is bouncier than I expected, and wind is just all over the place.

The third thing that I think is important is to be transparent to the ratepayers in Colorado about getting rid of coal to replace it with anything, which is costing them money. It's worth it—here's what you get, here's what it is—but I think at the same time, if it's going to be wind and solar, then you have to be transparent with them about either the incredible cost of batteries or the fact that the backup is gas, which makes more sense. But also, you have the fact that if you use single-cycle gas turbines as your backup for wind, which makes the most sense because it can go on and off, it emits more CO2 than if instead you were just running combined-cycle gas turbines 24/7.

The fourth thing I encourage you to look at is that all the road maps assume geothermal and come very close to assuming hydrogen. They at least say maybe it won't happen. The best definition I've heard of hydrogen is that it's an insult to the law of thermodynamics. And again, I have the physics background, so I can walk you through it—that's just not going to work unless electricity is free. Geothermal is coming, but again, it's unlikely to come as soon as expected.

So, basically, that's it. These are things that I think you should look into because I found an awful lot of people saying, "Well, everyone knows that wind is complementary to solar." I've looked at the data, and no, they're not. Everyone knows all these other things, and I think you need to take a serious look at what it truly means if you're going to focus very heavily on wind and solar.

Thank you.

1. They requested 5 minutes max. I accomplished that… barely.