Colorado’s Power Pathway to Nowhere yet Somewhere—in the Name of Climate

What if a state, er the ratepayers, spent billions of dollars building infrastructure that didn’t actually do anything—unless the right chain of speculative events happened afterward in an absolute best-case scenario?

What if, even such a best-case scenario, such infrastructure moved the state, national, and global climate needle by a fractions of a percent, but still raised electricity costs and fueled landowner backlash across rural communities?

That’s the story of Xcel Energy’s Power Pathway Project or as they love to label Colorado’s Power Pathway Project because it’s apparently as one imbecile mayor from another climate hysteria mecca loves to say “for all of us.”

Pathway, for short, is a 550-mile, $1.7 billion double-circuit steel pole transmission project currently being built in Colorado’s eastern and mostly rural counties. It’s meant to connect a slew of not-yet-built renewables projects out of sight and out of mind of the urbanist Church of Carbon residents of the Front Range.

Pathway won’t reduce carbon emissions directly. In fact, with all the steel poles, thousands of miles of large diameter steel and aluminum wire and all the diesel-powered machinery required to install it all will likely be carbon negative for some time to come, but it will enable the possibility of decarbonization some day in the future. (Disclaimer, the author’s professional career squarely falls in utility line design. Sorry, can’t go into any juicy details.)

Pathway Map | Xcel Energy

And even if everything goes exactly as planned—if wind and solar developers flood the eastern plains, and if those projects get built, and if they perform reliably to capacity—the impact on global carbon levels would still be negligible.

In other words: Colorado ratepayers are being asked to fund a symbolic gesture—one that comes with very real economic, environmental, and political costs.

Speculation, Mandates, and Carbon Napkin Math

Pathway, contrary to the marketing fluff, is not being built to serve existing demand or improve grid reliability.

It’s a speculative backbone, constructed in hopes that renewable developers with pockets full of freshly printed fiat money (now under threat in the current Presidential Administration) will come to help usher in a green utopia.

Yet, per Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection ,”Only ~20% of projects (14% of capacity),” which they note is roughly 95% wind and solar projects, “requesting interconnection from 2000-2018 reached commercial operations by the end of 2023.”

Colorado's legislature paved the way with laws like HB19-1261 and SB19-236, mandating drastic emissions cuts and utility compliance. Xcel's Clean Energy Plan relies on Pathway to meet those goals.

Colorado supposedly contributes ~135.6 million metric tons equivalent of CO₂ (MMT CO₂eq) annually per the state’s latest tally published in the Colorado Greenhouse Gas Metrics Dashboard.

The electric power sector consists of 21% of that or 29.688 MMT CO₂eq.

Source: CO Greenhouse Gas Emissions Metrics Dashboard

In that same year, 2020 a lower year than typical due to the economic downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US was estimated to have emitted 4,585 MMT CO₂eq, making Colorado’s share only 2.96% of the total, or for the state’s electricity sector alone only 0.22%.

On a global scale, it obviously gets even smaller.

According to the IEA, global CO₂ emissions in 2020 totaled approximately 34.8 billion metric tons. That makes Colorado’s electricity sector responsible for just 0.085% of global CO₂ emissions.

Even if Pathway helped eliminate all emissions from electricity, Colorado’s global share of CO₂ emissions would drop from roughly 0.085% to 0.0009%—less than one one-thousandth of a percent.

More realistically, Pathway might offset a fraction of that—perhaps a 0.01–0.015% global impact.

There are probably other ways to math this out with more or even less favorable figures. (

David Thielen

, perhaps you should take a stab at it.)

Who Pays, Who Profits

Xcel’s ratepayers fund Pathways directly, along with with non Xcel taxpayers via federal subsidies and state incentives. And inflationary monetary policy—money printing—makes it all appear affordable, though it isn’t.

Meanwhile a large part of Xcel’s profits, like with any other monopoly publicly regulated utility comes from the guaranteed rate of return on capital investment. Under cost-of-service regulation, the more it builds, the more it earns.

As

The Electric Grandma

(Meredith Angwin) wrote in her book Shorting the Grid:

“The utility is not rewarded for making the grid reliable. It is rewarded for spending money.”

Surrounding this are layers of consultants, NGOs, and green lobbyists or as

Robert Bryce

calls, “the anti-industry industry” all benefit from mandates they helped craft. Groups like 350Colorado and Rocky Mountain Institute, and others write model legislation, submit regulatory comments, and shape public narratives—all while funding is channeled from philanthropic donors and federal grants.

Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC)—entirely appointed by Gov. Polis—rubber-stamps these plans. It offers little rural or working class urban representation, little engineering skepticism, and no ideological diversity.

PUC proceedings regardless of state are bureaucratic, opaque, and inaccessible to most citizens. They are conducted in legalistic jargon, weighed down with acronyms, and shaped by pre-approved stakeholders. As a result, public participation without turning it into one’s full time job, is symbolic at best.

This incentive structure turns utilities into infrastructure factories, not reliability or low-cost guarantors. Every mile of transmission line, every substation, every transformer—these become profit centers, regardless of whether they serve real demand or improve grid stability.

The result is a political economy where those who bear the costs—Colorado’s working families—have no meaningful seat at the table, while those who benefit—utilities, their shareholders, nonprofits, bureaucrats, and financiers—define the rules of the game.

Virtue Infrastructure and Green Colonialism

Pathway is more than a power line. It’s a cultural totem.

As Green Leap Forward favorite, Andy West recently wrote.

“Renewables & EVs are cultural icons more than they are power sources & useful vehicles… What matters is virtue-signaling on a grand scale.”

Support is strongest in luxury belief rich areas such Boulder, Denver area, Fort Collins and the mountain resort towns—places increasingly full of affluent, knowledge-class residents with solar panels, EVs, and the means to opt out of cost burdens. These are also contain a the most amount of citizens most likely to buy into the climate crisis narrative as a matter of moral duty and part of their secular religion, not empirical evaluation.

Lastly, the renewables and climate crisis mania is backed by regime media such as the state’s local Propaganda Public Radio outlets, the Denver Pest, and the Colorado Sun. (See

Cory Gaines

‘s Colorado Accountability Project for plenty of CO-specific media criticism.)

Opposition or skepticism does not necessarily mean rejection of human-caused climate change as

Emily Atkin

‘s HEATED or The Guardian’s truth commissars love to claim, it tends to come from the inquisitive, working class, rural landowners, and fixed-income families who bear the costs but see few benefits. For them, Pathway is just another intrusion—another elite project imposed from above. Pathway’s route and any of the land-hungry renewable projects it wood cuts through private farmland—not urban cores. It’s a modern form of extraction: low power density land use, compliance via green authoritarianism, and political silence in exchange for nothing tangible.

Green colonialism is real, and not just when it involves woke-defined sacred groups. It’s not about emissions, but control. Central planning, land-use mandates, and top-down energy transitions all reinforce the same power dynamic: elite visionaries imposing their values on communities with different priorities.

Or in other words per Decolonize Colorado - a colonized polity- one in which real Coloradans are managed by those who do not understand them.

From property rights to cultural identity, rural Coloradans are being displaced—not physically, but politically and economically—by a climate ideology they never voted for, implemented by a bureaucracy they cannot influence.

Facts and figures don’t matter in this framework. In what Andy West calls the climate religion, the narrative takes precedence over numbers, and virtue is valued more than verifiable outcomes. Whether the infrastructure reduces carbon or not is secondary—what matters is the act of believing, building, and signaling.

Real Stewardship Means Skepticism and Saying No

If climate change is as serious as the Experts™ insist it is, our response must be serious, measurable, and accountable.

Colorado’s Power Pathway fails that test—not just because it is ineffective, but because it is built upon assumptions that are rarely questioned.

We need skepticism, not just idealism.

It spends billions in pursuit of symbolic carbon reductions—reductions that rely on speculative follow-up projects and ideal grid behavior—while enriching insiders and burdening the politically voiceless. It builds nothing of lasting reliability, only financial return and narrative control.

It’s time to abandon virtue infrastructure—and build an energy future that serves people, not ideology.