Colorado Sunday | Electric gridlock

June 8, 2025 WOL

Good morning, Colorado Sunday fam. I hope you’ve been enjoying the gloriously cool spring weather and meant it last week as you repeated the official state mantra: We need the moisture.

This is the time of year that I’m often a passenger on some epic cross-country adventure, staring out the window at vast and unfamiliar prairies, hoping to catch a glimpse of some interesting plant or bird or trickle of water as we zoom from one part of the country to another. I’m often struck by the human-built connections that we encounter in these great empty spaces — giant towers that loom over our routes, looking like abstract people with high tension power lines held in their metal fists.

I have a sense of how important these intrusions on the landscape are. But until I read this week’s cover story by Mark Jaffe I had no real understanding of how precarious this grid of utility sentinels is as we demand more and more of it.

A programming note: The Flavor is taking a week off, but we’ll be back with more good ideas for living your best Colorado life next Sunday.

The U.S. electrical grid from space. (NASA image)

A satellite image of the U.S. at night shows a sparkling East and a black West. For those of us who have driven the West, we know that darkness is a sign of the mountains, forests, prairies and deserts that we celebrate.

The darkness, however, speaks to another fact: The West is the largest region in the nation without a wholesale electricity market or a regional transmission organization. As the price of electricity climbs and there is a sustained drive to add new renewable energy generation, these gaps in the system will be felt.

This is a particularly acute problem for Colorado, which has the fewest links to the rest of the Western grid and is in need of billions of dollars in grid investments if it is to meet its clean energy and greenhouse gas reduction goals.

Building new wind and solar plants does little good if they can’t get hooked up to the grid, and generating large quantities of wind power in Wyoming does little good if it can’t get to population centers.

These are the problems with which utilities across the West are struggling. But now wholesale markets and regional grid organizations are coming to the West, in what looks like a land rush with competing operators signing up utilities from Oregon to New Mexico.

READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE

Bad news unfolded last Sunday afternoon that felt intimate and personal to people who have appreciated the plaza in front of the historic Boulder County Courthouse as a safe gathering space for, well, decades. Photo journalist Eli Imadali visited the scene Wednesday during a public vigil for those injured in the firebomb attack on people who had gathered for a weekly demonstration by the Boulder chapter of Run for Their Lives, which seeks the release of Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. A second vigil was held Wednesday at the Jewish Community Center in Boulder.

Boulder County bomb squad officers stand near where people have left tributes following the June 1 attack on mostly Jewish demonstrators by a man disguised as a gardener. (Eli Imadali, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Rabbi Jacob Chatinover, education director at Congregation Bonai Shalom, and Islamic Center of Boulder Imam Nader Elmarhoumi talk after the vigil. At least 15 people were injured in the attack, including Barbara Steinmetz, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. The youngest victim was 25. (Eli Imadali, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Ed Victor of Run for Their Lives, who survived the attack on mostly Jewish demonstrators, takes a moment during the vigil. (Eli Imadali, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Pama Lodro, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, practices compassion during the gathering. “Compassion is to wish all beings be free from suffering,” he said, and hold space for the anger and grief and other emotions. (Eli Imadali, Special to The Colorado Sun)

A crowd member raises a sign that reads, “The global Intifada is here. Jewish Lives Matter. JTF 10-7,” during the vigil, referring to the U.S. joint task force convened to investigate and prosecute people who participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the Hamas leaders who planned it. (Eli Imadali, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Surrounded by Boulder police officers, Lynn Segal holds a Palestinian flag and a photo of dead children in Gaza during the vigil. Segal, who is Jewish and survived the June 1 attack, has participated in the weekly Run for Their Lives walks, hoping to bring awareness to the horrors in Gaza, too. (Eli Imadali, Special to The Colorado Sun)

EXCERPT: Alliances changed swiftly but word traveled slowly in the 17th century. Those shifting political winds drive the narrative in “Captain Kidd: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal,” the biography by Samuel Marquis of the reputed pirate who happens to be his distant relative. The treachery in this excerpt launches a detailed look at Kidd’s reputation, which turns out to be something of a mixed bag — but still filled with adventure that followed a privateer whom the author describes as closer to a U.S. Navy SEAL.

READ THE SUNLIT EXCERPT

THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: With Kidd being his ninth-great-grandfather, the familial tug of history certainly captivated Marquis, who recalls the swashbuckling figure of tales he heard while growing up. But the author, who earlier wrote a biography of the pirate Blackbeard, dug deep into the archives to produce what he considers “first and foremost a scholarly work.” Here’s a portion of his Q&A:

SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?

Marquis: My family connection to Captain Kidd and the fact that he has been badly miscast by history were the two principal reasons I had to write this book. In preparing it, I had to dig deep into the historical archives and get my hands on all the relevant primary source materials from 1689-1701, the specific period covered by my book, and it is these dusty old documents that drove the subsequent narrative.

READ THE INTERVIEW WITH SAMUEL MARQUIS

LISTEN TO A DAILY SUN-UP PODCAST WITH THE AUTHOR

A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.

Former quarterback Peyton Manning, who led the Broncos to victory in Super Bowl 50, was added to the roster of National Women’s Soccer League Denver team investors last week, but does he really know what game he’s bought into? (Drew Litton, Special to The Colorado Sun)

🌞 An exceptionally good ski season just ended, Jason Blevins reports, the third busiest on record in Colorado.

🌞 More measles cases and more details about them emerge. State public health investigators are tracking patients exposed on a flight to Denver from Istanbul or in the airport and it’s tricky, John Ingold learned.

🌞 What looks like a beauty pageant for women 60 and older turns out to be a great way to make friends. This is a significant characteristic because loneliness and lack of social connection can increase a person’s odds of mortality by 30%, Parker Yamasaki reports for our latest story in The Sun’s Aging in Colorado series.

🌞 Another translocated wolf has died, but Colorado Parks and Wildlife isn’t saying what happened to the animal that was released in January. This brings to eight the total of wolves that have been killed or died since Colorado began releasing them in December 2023.

🌞Chimney Hollow Reservoir comes by risk of uranium contamination honestly (it’s a geology problem), Jerd Smith reports. But Northern Water will keep close tabs and won’t release water from the nearly finished Larimer County reservoir to the 12 towns and cities it serves unless it is safe.

🌞 In other water news, Shannon Mullane reports on a study that estimates groundwater equivalent to the capacity of Lake Mead has disappeared in the past decade. The vast underground reservoir is shrinking less quickly in Colorado than in the rest of the Colorado River basin.

🌞 Click this story for amazing photos of a cow grazing at the foot of the Flatirons with the iconic I.M. Pei-designed NCAR building in the distance. And also to learn what Tracy Ross found out about this important, if controversial, strategy for reducing wildfire risk on Boulder’s western edge.

Thanks for hanging out with us, beautiful Colorado Sunday friends. We appreciate all that you do for us. If you know someone you think would like to join our crowd, please forward this newsletter to them or send them this link: coloradosun.com/join

— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.