Coloradans vote to embrace alternative sources of energy [View All]

Coloradans Vote to Embrace Alternative Sources of Energy
By KIRK JOHNSON

FORT COLLINS, Colo. - Colorado utilities will have to sell a lot more electricity from wind power in years to come under a statewide ballot initiative approved by voters on Nov. 2, and if they want some pointers they might talk to Adam T. Kremers, a 19-year-old sophomore at Colorado State University here. He has been there and done that.

Mr. Kremers sold wind power to the occupants of individual dormitory rooms this fall, under an agreement between the university and the local utility that environmentalists describe as one of the first such programs in the nation.

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Colorado voters said much the same thing when they approved, over the vehement objections of most energy companies, a proposal mandating that 10 percent of the state's electricity must come from wind and solar power by 2015.

The law, Amendment 37, makes Colorado the 18th state with an environmentally friendly energy standard, but the first one to have bypassed the Legislature and put the rule into place through referendum. An energy bill similar to the one the voters approved was defeated by Colorado's Legislature three times in the last three years.

"Because it's a conservative Western state with a strong fossil-fuel industry, as well as the first one passed by a popular referendum, Colorado represents something of a breakthrough," said Alan Nogee, the energy program director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit research and advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass.

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