At its Dec. 13 quarterly update on the municipalization process, the city presented financial projections from a series of modeling scenarios incorporating price data the city received from renewable energy developers in response to its “Request for Indicative Pricing.” Those prices were so low that they yielded some surprising results. For instance, a scenario in which the municipal utility begins life in 2024 by delivering electricity that is nearly 90 percent renewable would cost about one-third less than an otherwise identical scenario in which the municipal utility purchases all of its power from Xcel — power that would be only 53 percent renewable in 2024.

That’s not a fluke. It’s entirely consistent with Xcel’s most recent solicitation, which yielded astonishingly low costs for grid-ready renewable energy projects. Taken together, these solicitations demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the free market is ready, willing and able to provide ample renewable energy at highly competitive prices.

Recently, these pages have carried letters extolling Xcel’s plans to curtail coal-fired generation, to dramatically boost generation from wind and solar, to cut its carbon emissions 80 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. Many of these letters question the marginal benefit of continuing to pursue municipalization when Xcel is making such amazing strides. I do not minimize these strides. They are indeed unprecedented, and Xcel deserves praise for setting new standards in the utility industry. Given the dire climate emergency we now face, however, we must not simply accept the given solution, when a much better one may exist.

To me, the low-cost bids that both Xcel and the city received could not make it clearer: The competitive market can bring our electricity-related emissions down much further, much faster, and much cheaper than even Xcel’s exemplary goal. Unfortunately, neither individual Colorado citizens nor the vast majority of Colorado towns have access to the competitive market.

If you are served by an investor-owned utility (such as Xcel Energy or Black Hills Energy), your only option is to accept what the utility provides. If your community is served by a co-op, your power most likely comes from Tri-State Generation & Transmission, an organization that is highly dependent on coal and shows no sign of evolving. Some co-ops have become so frustrated with Tri-State’s intransigence that they’re pursuing the expensive path of buying out their contracts. Only municipal utilities in this state have the independence to shop the market for competitive electricity products that best match their communities’ values.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Utilities in over 30 states participate in regional transmission organizations. Among many other functions, RTOs organize wholesale power markets, where utilities and independent power producers bid their generation based on price, renewables content and other attributes. If Colorado were to join an existing RTO or establish its own, and give municipalities the legal right to procure power from the market in accordance with the desires of their citizens, we would all benefit from lower electricity prices and we could clean up the grid much faster than Xcel proposes. This arrangement is called community choice aggregation, and it is currently available in seven states. Those of us served by an IOU or by Tri-State would still have to pay off the legacy capital costs of generating assets rendered uneconomic by the competitive market, but given the low and declining cost of replacement renewable energy, we’d still be saving money, particularly if those assets are “securitized” so that they can be refinanced at very low interest rates.

Many Colorado communities have set goals to achieve 100 percent renewable electricity between 2025 and 2035, but current utility regulations provide no viable path to get there. Even assuming Boulder’s efforts to municipalize are successful, few towns will have the stomach to follow. Fortunately, municipalization is only one of many options for injecting competition and consumer choice into the Colorado electricity market. What we need is a state-level investigation of the options, to determine how best to address these communities’ ambitious energy goals. Such a process should engage all interested stakeholders, including the public, and should consider the experiences of other states. The Community Electricity Options project presents a more complete rationale and a strategy for this process. The time has come for policy reform at the state level that ends the archaic monopoly over electricity generation and gives communities the right to make their own energy choices.

Dan Greenberg lives in Boulder and volunteers for the group Energy Freedom Colorado, which advocates for competition in the electricity sector.