Why a Big Utility Is Embracing Wind and Solar<br />Yet costs for renewable technologies are coming down so much<br />that by the time the federal subsidies expire, wind turbines and large-scale solar arrays will still be competitive in large parts of the country.<br />You read that right: In parts of the country, wind<br />and solar plants built from scratch now offer the cheapest power available, even counting old coal, which was long seen as unbeatable.<br />Xcel, Colorado’s biggest power company, has pitched a plan to regulators<br />that will involve replacing two large coal-burning units with renewable energy and possibly some natural gas.<br />The same trend is occurring all over the world, even in countries<br />that do not offer subsidies, with renewable projects routinely beating fossil-fuel projects in countries like Mexico and India.<br />It has taken a couple of decades, but we are reaching a point where the new energy technologies are<br />going to be cheap enough to drive a lot of the old coal-burning power plants off the market.<br />The bids have come in so low that the company will be able to build<br />and operate the new plants for less money than it would have to pay just to keep running its old, coal-burning power plants.<br />Xcel Energy is a utility company with millions of electric customers in the middle of the country, from Texas to Michigan.<br />In booming Colorado, the company asked for proposals to construct big power plants using wind turbines and solar panels.
