“It already seems as if people are being conditioned to expect talk of rolling blackouts whenever the weather outside seems frightful,” writes Jon Sanders, director of the Center for Food, Power, and Life at the John Locke Foundation. “To be very clear: rolling blackouts are not now, nor have they been, normal in the U.S. Therefore, having to expect rolling blackouts going forward would be abnormal.”
Sanders is right, and Colorado is quietly normalizing what should never become normal.
Several weeks ago, Xcel Energy preemptively cut power to thousands of Coloradans ahead of a wind event, yet tens of thousands still lost power along the Front Range. It’s not a contradiction. It is the predictable outcome of a distribution system that is predominantly overhead, only lightly hardened, politically constrained on vegetation management, and increasingly managed through a legal-and-regulatory risk lens rather than an engineering-and-operations lens.
Colorado politicos are doing what they do best when constituents demand answers. They write strongly worded letters, claim the outages are unacceptable, and tell utilities they must do better, all the while quietly supporting policies that encourage future shutoffs. What they don’t do is have the uncomfortable conversation with Coloradans about tradeoffs.
Why Xcel shuts off power before wind
When wind, dry fuels, and overhead distribution coincide — especially in or near the WUI (the Wildland–Urban Interface, where homes and communities meet flammable vegetation) — the utility’s risk calculus changes. A broken crossarm, a tree strike, or debris blown into equipment can cause an ignition. When the downside includes catastrophic wildfire claims and nine-figure settlements, “de-energize first” becomes a rational corporate response, even if it is an inferior reliability strategy.
A preemptive shutoff is a legal strategy dressed up as a safety strategy.
California institutionalized this logic after repeated catastrophic fires. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) formally adopted “de-energization” guidelines. The California model matters because it shows what happens when utilities are pushed into an environment where the least costly way to reduce wildfire exposure is to shut off customers rather than modernize the system.
Power shutoffs and limiting liability
A Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) is a preemptive, utility-implemented power outage, like the late December outage. Power restoration doesn’t begin until weather conditions improve and crews can inspect lines for damage. It shifts risk from utilities to customers, particularly to users of life-saving medical equipment, water systems, and small businesses.
Last year, the Colorado Wildfire Matters Review Committee considered Draft Bill 5 titled “Utility Wildfire Mitigation Plans.” That bill, which didn’t make it out of the committee, is a clear signal that lawmakers, utilities, and others know the state and its utilities can’t risk another Marshall Fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 structures, including homes and commercial buildings, and killed two people in late December 2021. Xcel and other defendants recently settled a massive lawsuit for $640 million just ahead of what would have been an enormous trial. In the settlement, none of the defendants claimed fault.
The bill’s fiscal note was blunt. An electric utility with an approved wildfire mitigation plan would be deemed not liable for wildfire-related damages so long as it complied with that plan, with strict limits on economic, non-economic, and punitive damages.
The committee and stakeholders are justified in their concern. Utilities should plan, map risk, and mitigate ignition hazards. The bill would allow regulated utilities to socialize costs to all ratepayers, regardless of whether they are in a high-risk WUI.
Just ahead of our current dry and windy winter season, the committee acknowledged in a public letter that it’s well aware of significant unresolved issues and could not secure agreement among utilities, insurers, and regulators on how to address them.
Agreement or not, the issue is what often follows in practice: paper compliance becomes the shield, and PSPS becomes the operational release valve. Write a plan, check the boxes, absorb the public criticism, and keep doing what reduces legal exposure fastest: shutting customers off when the wind blows.
Vegetation and overhead
Colorado’s distribution grid, particularly along the Front Range, remains heavily overhead and, in many corridors, lightly hardened. That leaves reliability vulnerable to high winds, tree limbs, tumbleweeds, and debris.
When utilities attempt to address the root cause through aggressive vegetation management, wider clearances, and faster removal cycles, they encounter a longstanding Colorado characteristic: organized opposition and procedural friction.
Homeowners fight trimming. Local governments resist “ugly” removals. Environmental NGOs object to clearing in habitat corridors and riparian areas, while permitting, public process, and litigation threats impede routine maintenance. The result is a system in which the path of least resistance isn’t robust maintenance and hardening, but public-theater hearings followed by quiet operational shutdowns.
Xcel incentivized to build, not maintain
Colorado’s regulatory model heavily rewards capital building relative to mundane but essential operations and maintenance. When Xcel faces rising wildfire liability and public expectations to “do something,” the system nudges it toward visible capital projects that increase its asset base and risk-managed operations, instead of toward the tedious work of distribution hardening.
To its credit, Xcel has been expanding its wildfire mitigation work along the Front Range. However, it’s a work in progress on aging infrastructure that relies on decades-old wooden poles and overhead equipment linked to increased wildfire and outage risk. In its recently approved 2025-2027 Wildfire Mitigation Plan, the utility has committed to burying about 50 miles of lines and reducing ignition risk. Nevertheless, PSPS will remain a significant component of liability risk mitigation.
Colorado politics completes the loop. Elected officials publicly criticize Xcel because voters hate outages, while simultaneously backing policies that make real mitigation impossible or more expensive. The criticism becomes political theater while the operational incentives remain.
Decarbonization means fragility at scale
At the same time Colorado is struggling to keep the lights on in a windstorm, it is racing toward full electrification and renewable-only mandates.
Governor Polis’s push to decarbonize all sectors, including vehicles, buildings, and industry, will substantially increase electricity demand. It will also require the construction and maintenance of hundreds of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines from remote wind and solar fields to the Front Range and mountain communities.
This results in greater overhead infrastructure in fire-prone terrain, more complex system operations, higher system costs, and substantially greater exposure when the wind blows.
A grid that cannot reliably serve today’s load is now being asked to shoulder tomorrow’s electrified economy across longer distances with more weather-exposed assets and less dispatchable generation.
The Wyoming contrast: same wind, different exposure
Wyoming routinely experiences stronger, more sustained wind than Colorado, yet it does not produce the same pattern of preemptive de-energization and wildfire-liability panic.
Why?
First, lower WUI density and different fuel-interface realities. Wyoming has WUI, but the Front Range’s dense subdivisions pressed against continuous fuels create a uniquely litigation-prone ignition geography.
Second, a different liability and litigation environment. Wyoming recently moved to limit utility wildfire-liability exposure under defined conditions, reflecting an explicit policy choice not to treat utilities as default insurers for natural disasters. When utilities are not presumptive payers for wind-driven fire outcomes, they are less likely to substitute shutoffs for engineering investment.
Third, and most importantly, a more candid tradeoff culture. Wyoming accepts that keeping the lights on in rugged country requires pragmatic maintenance, including aggressive clearing. Colorado tries to wish away tradeoffs: no trimming controversy, no rate impacts, no visible infrastructure, and no outages.
Colorado appears to be drifting toward a framework in which utilities manage catastrophic downside through operational shutoffs. At the same time, regulators and legislators demand plans and reports rather than outcomes, stakeholder opposition constrains vegetation management and routing upgrades, and the public is offered performative outrage in place of a realistic reliability agenda.
California shows the endpoint. Colorado should read that as a warning.
Honesty a better pathway
If Colorado wants fewer shutoffs and fewer wind-storm outages, the answer is not another glossy mitigation binder. It is a reliability-first program built on four fundamentals: distribution hardening, less politicized vegetation management, prioritization of routine maintenance work, and an honest conversation about tradeoffs.
If communities want the aesthetic of dense vegetation along fence lines, they should be prepared to pay for undergrounding and to accept a share of the wildfire liability associated with that choice. You cannot block clearance, oppose undergrounding, externalize risk to statewide ratepayers, and then demand outage-free service when the wind blows.
As Colorado accelerates forced electrification, policymakers owe Coloradans the truth that it brings higher wildfire exposure and a greater risk of blackouts. Replacing buried natural gas systems with dependence on weather-exposed overhead electric distribution inevitably makes communities more vulnerable to wind events and preemptive shutoffs.
Colorado can have a safer and more reliable grid, but only if it stops conflating liability management with reliability engineering. Whatever bill emerges from the legislature will either lay the groundwork for a reliability renaissance or codify a culture of blackout normalization. My bet is the latter, fulfilling Sanders’s warning that Colorado is learning to treat the abnormal as normal.
Amy Cooke is the co-host of the Independence Institute podcast Power Gab and the president of Always On Energy Research.
