I’ve lived in Colorado since 1970. And you know what Colorado had back in 1970? High winds blowing down the Front Range.

I moved to Boulder in 1984 and have been there ever since. And you know what Boulder has had all that time? A freakin’ lot of high winds.

I remember as a college kid walking around the CU campus after windstorms, stepping around uprooted trees and massive broken branches that made the sidewalks impassable.

I’ve seen rooftop shingles go flying off Boulder buildings, signs ripped down, and semi-trucks overturned.

All of which is to say that for the last 55 years I have personally witnessed a crap-ton of high winds in our mountain state.

But only in the last few months have I witnessed our power utilities preemptively turning off electricity during high winds to “prevent fires.”

Behavior modification

Apparently the windstorms of the last few months must be the worst in Colorado history. Because this is the first time anyone has decided the solution is to turn off grandma’s lights.

Is Colorado suddenly windier than it has been during my entire life? Unless our eyes have been lying to us, the answer is comfortably: no.

Yet, I type this under an official warning that my power might be turned off because of another rather normal day of high winds.

Is it too tinfoil-hat to wonder if this is really about preventing fires?

Is it too “QAnon” to think they might be conditioning us for Colorado’s future of intermittent electricity?

Are these power shutoffs more about behavior modification than fire prevention?

I mean, why now?

For half a century windstorms were something you complained about while chasing your patio furniture down the street. Now they apparently require turning off the state.

Bureaucracy understands that behavior modification must be incremental.

Some 20 years ago, the City of Boulder changed its ordinances to remove the term “pet owner” and replace it with “pet guardian.” A silly, laughable change meant to modify our speech — and therefore our thinking — about property rights and animals.

And today there is proposed legislation to outlaw the sale of dogs and cats in pet stores statewide, those modern-day slave auction houses. Incremental.

The Transportation Security Administration is the grandmaster of incremental behavior modification.

They make airport security lines so long and inefficient that you’re willing to pay them — your airport captors — to get into the shorter “PreCheck” line.

Of course it’s not the cash that costs the most. It’s your autonomy and privacy.

Join TSA PreCheck and you essentially grant the government a detailed record of every flight you’ve ever taken or plan it take. No troublesome judge-approved warrant or subpoena needed.

They’ve trained you to trade sacred privacy for 10 minutes of convenience before getting groped by a stranger in blue gloves. (Which some of us just call “Saturday night.”) That’s behavior modification.

Energy math not adding up

Colorado’s energy elite understands the math.

They know sizable power disruptions are in our future — because they ordered them. So, they’d better start getting YOU used to it.

Currently about two-thirds of Colorado’s electricity comes from fossil fuels. And already our power is becoming less reliable and more intermittent.

Thanks to state mandates, by 2050 — and the legislature is already flirting with moving that deadline up to 2040 — none of our power can come from fossil fuels.

This isn’t optimism. It’s fantasy.

Now add the fact that electricity demand will likely triple by then thanks to data centers and the forced conversion of appliances from natural gas to electricity. So: fantasy squared.

Remember how Denver Mayor Hickenlooper promised we would permanently end homelessness in 10 years? How Barack Obama promised if you liked your health care plan, you could keep it?

“All renewable energy in 15 years” belongs in the same museum of political fairy tales.

But the power outages as we stumble toward their fantasy — those are a lock.

Backup generators and home battery systems aren’t new. But have you noticed the explosion of interest in buying them? Have you noticed the flood of advertisements?

That’s not a coincidence. It’s a growth market.

Our leaders — and the corporate energy leeches who feed off them — know they need to prepare you for wildly intermittent, Third World energy.

So they normalize the outages. Welcome to the future.

Please keep a flashlight handy.

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tan in Denver.