{"id":1318300,"date":"2020-02-18T15:24:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T22:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/guest-column-a-depressed-town-fights-back\/"},"modified":"2020-02-18T15:24:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-18T22:24:00","slug":"guest-column-a-depressed-town-fights-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/guest-column-a-depressed-town-fights-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest column: A depressed town fights back"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For nearly half a century, coal fueled the blast furnaces of the 1,410-megawatt Comanche Power Generating station in Pueblo, a city of 110,000 in southern Colorado. You can\u2019t miss Comanche, the state\u2019s largest coal-fired power plant; it dominates the flat landscape for 40 miles in each direction, just as its plume of smoke dominates the sky.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why residents shuddered in August 2017, when Xcel Energy announced that Comanche would shut down Comanche boilers 1 and 2, by 2025. Pueblo had already suffered through steel-mill layoffs and closures in the late 1970s and early 1980s, losing 8,000 of 9,000 jobs. This is a place that knows the pain of an industry cutting back. Yet what\u2019s happening in Pueblo today offers some hope to other towns experiencing the death of a fossil-fueled economy.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because a new industry has come on the scene in Pueblo. Vestas, a Danish windmill factory that employs some 900 people, makes tower bases for giant windmills. And business is booming: Wait time for a new Vestas windmill is five years, says Colorado Public Utilities Commissioner John Gavan. For Pueblo Mayor Nick Gradisar, who is focused on employment, Vestas\u2019 existence helps to ease the pain of losing Comanche\u2019s jobs. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna lose good jobs when Xcel shuts down those boilers,\u201d he says of Comanche\u2019s coming closure, \u201cbut our air will be cleaner.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does it mean when two of three boilers sit idle? Each boiler devours trainloads of coal along with millions of gallons of water bought from the town, which makes good money on the deal. Comanche used to run flat out, with coal-powered steam spinning the turbines that make electricity, but the rise of renewables means coal plants power up intermittently. \u201cCoal-fired plants are running at 54 percent these days\u2026and plants are built to run at capacity.\u201d reports Bloomberg.<\/p>\n

Frank Hilliard, who helped build the plant\u2019s third boiler, is a roll-your own cigarette-type guy who lives in Walsenburg, a busted coal mine town 50 miles south of Pueblo. Hilliard says the remaining boiler at Comanche is young and powerful, shipping out 857 megawatts. But he fears it\u2019s on the chopping block, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just built Comanche 3 and they want to shut the damn thing down,\u201d he complains. He wishes that Xcel and the other big utilities didn\u2019t hate coal. \u201cCoal created damned good work,\u201d he says, \u201cand most jobs require college now.\u201d<\/p>\n

But hate isn\u2019t the problem; it\u2019s the market. Three hundred coal plants have closed in the past 10 years, representing half of U.S. coal generating capacity, reports the research firm S&P Global. 2019 was the second-biggest year ever for coal plant closures, and utilities are pushing early shutdowns for remaining coal plants.<\/p>\n

To comply with Colorado\u2019s 2040 goals of 100 percent carbon-free electricity, the smart money predicts that Comanche 3\u2019s closure will happen sooner, perhaps much sooner.<\/p>\n

When Hilliard worked on Comanche 3, it was one of the last coal turbines built in the country. He\u2019s still proud of what he accomplished. \u201cWe built Comanche 3 with the plan that it would power Colorado until well after my kid died. These plants are really something. How can we just destroy them?\u201d<\/p>\n

It happened fast, this economic turn away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. Along with Vestas Windmills symbolizing a new economy, Xcel is building the state\u2019s largest solar installation, a 240-megawatt solar farm, which will surround the 139-year-old Pueblo steel mill, now Russian owned. Mayor Gradisar says his Slovenian immigrant grandfather worked there for 50 years making steel using coal, yet he embraces the town\u2019s new future.<\/p>\n

\u201cPueblo will be one of the first steel mills run on renewables,\u201d he says, \u201cand the Pueblo Mill is already the biggest recycler in Colorado, using nothing but scrap metal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gradisar is counting on Pueblo\u2019s grit: \u201cThis is a city built by immigrants,\u201d he says. \u201cThe mill had 40 languages going \u2014 hard work is in Pueblo\u2019s DNA.\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, Pueblo needs all the economic help it can get as it leads the state in all the wrong categories: mortality, crime, and high school drop-out rates. The rapid layoffs in the 1970s and 1980s slammed Pueblo on its back, and the town has never really recovered.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Mayor Gradisar is banking on the new economy. \u201cIf the citizens approve, we\u2019ll municipalize the electricity grid and home-grown wind power will cut our electrical bills in half,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

As for Hilliard, he continues to miss the good old days, \u201cI don\u2019t like change, but I\u2019m not gonna fight it.\u201d He says. \u201cI\u2019m too old and too broken-down to look for a new job. \u201cIt\u2019s time to move on.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Marston is a contributor to Writers on the Range.org, a private nonprofit organization dedicated to lively discussion about the West. He lives in New York and Colorado.<\/span><\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For nearly half a century, coal fueled the blast furnaces of the 1,410-megawatt Comanche Power Generating station in Pueblo, a city of 110,000 in southern Colorado. You can\u2019t miss Comanche, the state\u2019s largest coal-fired power plant; it dominates the flat landscape for 40 miles in each direction, just as its plume of smoke dominates the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1318300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-05 18:41:39","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1318300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1318300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1318300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1318300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}