Colorado Energy Office Executive Director Will Toor joined a group of “renewable” energy advocates on a press call recently, arguing that Congress should retain Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for wind, solar, and grid-scale batteries, rather than reallocating the funds to other technologies, including nuclear power, which President Trump has set as a priority.

Underpinning that argument is that wind, solar and batteries are the “fastest and most affordable way for utilities to meet this demand.”

That’s not what a April 2025 report, commissioned by the energy office itself, has found.

On the contrary, the report from Ascend Analytics, “Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in Colorado’s Electric Sector by 2040,” places the wind, solar and battery scenario as the most expensive of seven emissions reduction options.

The seven scenarios in the Colorado Energy Office’s Pathways report begin with a baseline $43.1 billion scenario for “zero carbon” power by 2040. The scenarios range from $51.6 billion for the “OT100” scenario, which the report said “is the most efficient pathway to a carbon free grid in 2040″; to $54.1 billion for a hydrogen-limited scenario; to $54.7 billion for a scenario involving geothermal energy; to $56.1 billion for a “distribution system level focus” scenario; to $60.8 billion for a small modular reactor scenario; and, finally, $61 billion for a wind, solar and battery only scenario.

Trump has ordered a halt on federal grant funding for various renewable energy projects in January, but those orders were swiftly appealed and most of the 2024 grants were restored.

Cuts are still possible if bills before Congress pass and the president signs them.

“For our consumers, the really big effects of a repeal would be making energy more expensive and less reliable,” Toor said at the press  conference. “As utilities need to expand generation and transmission and distribution infrastructure, adding wind, solar and batteries is the fastest and most affordable way for utilities to meet this demand.”

When pressed about his statement that wind, solar, and batteries are “the fastest and most affordable way for utilities to meet this demand,” while the Pathways report shows it as the most expensive option, Toor did not directly address the discrepancy.

Instead, Toor responded, “I think from our perspective, we think that all clean energy sources are important and we think that the structure and the Inflation Reduction Act, that created a really technology neutral clean energy tax credit that could support wind, solar, storage, geothermal, advanced nuclear, those are all important.”

“In the near term, the investments that we see on the ground are certainly wind, solar, and batteries, but we think all of these advanced technologies are important to the future of our country and support continuing tax credits for all of them,” Toor added.

Advocate: Cost of Colorado’s zero carbon goal is much more expensive than advertised 

Amy Cooke, board chair of Always On Energy Research, a non-profit energy research organization that provides cost and reliability energy modeling, said Colorado energy officials have chosen the most expensive alternative to achieving the state’s climate goals and are falsely claiming that wind, solar and batteries are the most affordable choice.

Using federal tax credits to socialize the costs of expensive renewable energy projects in Colorado across the entire national economy, Cooke said, forces people who get no benefit from Colorado projects to pay for costly programs that still increase the cost of electricity for Colorado consumers, not reduce it.

“The thing that news outlets around Colorado are saying, is that without these tax credits, the cost of electricity in Colorado will rise,” said Cooke. “It’s not that the cost will go up because tax credits don’t necessarily decrease the cost. They don’t make electricity cheaper. They just disguise who pays for it.”

She added: “So every dollar of subsidy granted to Colorado’s utilities is a dollar pulled from taxpayers somewhere else. So, why should working families in Mississippi or Maine or New Mexico be forced to subsidize high-cost energy policy decisions that are made in Colorado?”

Cooke said that if the tax credits end, Coloradans will quickly face the real costs of the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Roadmap and likely would object to the expense.

“Toor and Polis perpetuate this narrative and it’s based on a misleading and frankly a lazy metric of the levelized cost of energy, the LCOE,” said Cooke in an interview with The Denver Gazette. “And it doesn’t take into account the total system cost. The Colorado Energy Office’s own report says the single most expensive way to decarbonize the state is wind, solar, and batteries, and it barely meets reliability standards.”

During the press conference, Toor said the Clean Energy tax credits and the Inflation Reduction Act have been helping utilities meet rising demand, while “keeping electric rates affordable, helping consumers save money at the pump by switching to EVs and improving their homes energy, energy efficiency, and bringing new manufacturing investments to our state.”

The energy official said at least 77 projects have been completed, are under construction or announced in Colorado, supported by the credits, with about $3 billion in investment to date and over $7 billion in future investment that would be at risk if the credits are repealed.

“These are diverse investments — it’s battery, solar and wind, carbon capture and clean energy manufacturing,” Toor continued. “The consumer facing credits are also important. For example, more than 60,000 Coloradans were able to ditch their gasoline bills with the help of federal EV credits last year.”

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) “refers to the estimated revenue required to build and operate a generator over a specified cost recovery period.”

But that only accounts for the costs of the generator itself, measured at the point at which the electricity leaves the generator and goes into the grid.

What’s missing from that number, according to experts, are all the other costs associated with getting that electricity to the grid and from the grid to customers, which includes building high-voltage transmission lines to the far-flung wind turbines and solar fields and then on to the customers, as well as overbuilding capacity and backup generation to meet reliability requirements.

Xcel Energy, for example, is constructing a $1.7 billion “Power Pathway” project in eastern Colorado to facilitate power transfer from wind turbines and solar fields, as well as to increase grid capacity and resiliency.

Another problem is that the LCOE does not accurately reflect the true costs of variable and unpredictable renewable energy, experts said. 

‘Not really an apples to apples comparison’

In his dissertation written as a graduate fellow at the Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, economist Robert Idel pointed out that the variability and unpredictability of renewable sources drastically increases the actual cost of electricity. He called the true metric the “Levelized Full-System Cost of Electricity.

The problem, Idel said in an interview, is that people want electricity provided when it’s needed, where it’s needed, in the amount that’s needed, something that wind and solar cannot always provide.

“They want electrons at a certain time, at a certain place and the right amount,” said Idel. “It’s not really an apples to apples comparison to compare the levelized cost of electricity from wind and solar to the levelized cost of electricity for gas. Because gas is dispatchable — it can be turned on and off on your behalf — whereas solar and wind is intermittent and can’t do it by themselves. They need storage.”

That means installing grid-scale batteries capable of carrying the entire grid load when renewables aren’t producing or having fossil-fuel backup generators standing by. Experts have said that to maintain grid stability, 80% to 90% of the theoretical maximum power of wind and solar generators has to be kept online and ready to take up the load within minutes to seconds at all times.

Previously, Toor told The Denver Gazette that his idea is that natural gas generators might run perhaps 15% of the time as backup. That means that, in 85% of the time, the investment in those generators won’t be producing income for the utility that has to build and maintain them.

Ratepayers will end up paying for them, said Cooke.

Once Idel crunched the numbers to see what it would cost to provide the needed capacity and storage in renewables, he discovered, he said, that wind and solar are much more expensive than dispatchable sources like coal, gas and nuclear power.

Idel calculated that if built in Texas, wind and solar would cost an average of $225 per megawatt/hour, while nuclear power would cost $122/MWh. By comparison, he calculated that coal would cost $90/MWh and natural gas about $40/MWh.

Cooke’s organization uses a proprietary computer program to do much the same as Idel did, and more, such as including the cost of building new transmission lines, which the Princeton Net Zero America report said would cost $2.2 trillion for a nationwide expansion that would require a 60% increase in high voltage power lines by 2030 and nearly tripling the size of the national grid by 2050, or about 400,000 miles of new transmission lines by 2050.

In a 2024 report, Americans for a Clean Energy Grid and Grid Strategies said that high-voltage transmission line additions fell to 925 miles per year on average from 2015 to 2019, and 350 miles a year from 2020 to 2023.

“The findings of this report are a wake-up call. With only 55 new miles of transmission built in 2023, we are not keeping pace with the growing demand for power,” said Christina Hayes, Executive Director of Americans for a Clean Energy Grid in the report. “The slowdown in new construction not only impacts our ability to meet future energy needs, but also risks increasing costs for consumers and reducing grid resilience.”