SmartGridCity Letters: the good, the bad and the ugly
Does Xcel deserve praise or further scrutiny ? Turns out that Xcel's effort at cost recovery for SmartGridCity's $44.5 million bill, triple its initial estimates, is something of the proverbial Rorschach card, drawing a wide spectrum of reader responses. You're aware that I find it disconcerting that a publicly owned company would attempt to stick ratepayers with such a massive cost overrun or that the Colorado Public Utilities Commission's (CPUC) administrative law judge would find those overruns "prudent." The construct is inherently flawed: If you think you'll recover your costs from a diffuse base of 1.4 million people rather than your shareholders who have the power to hurt you, where's the incentive to manage costs?
Recent columns you may find valuable for context: "SmartGridCity Redux: Who Will Challenge Xcel?" "Reactions to SmartGridCity's $44.5 million bill" and "Ratepayers on Hook for Xcel's $44.5 million SmartGridCity."
Recently I received a letter from a former Boulder city councilman, three letters were filed last week with the CPUC and two people commented on yesterday's column. I find the value here is in the discussion of how we approach these issues, rather than simple glee that zingers are flying. (Right now our policy is to discuss letters without attribution, as some wish to be identified and some don't. And I edit for concision.)
The former Boulder city councilman wrote : "Xcel's SmartGridCity (SGC) happened because Xcel wanted to keep Boulder from becoming a municipal utility. Clearly SGC was ill-planned, mismanaged and premature, given the lack of standards and Xcel's total lack of experience.
"SGC was too big. Why do an experiment of this type when you had no experience in the field and try to cover a city of 45,000+ meters, 100,000+ residents and nearly 100,000 employees? (Boulder has a huge in-commuting population.) That was clearly nuts. [Building] a dedicated fiber optics network was total overkill. And the user interface on their Web site [offers] no real time data and no way to download data to do an analysis.
