Colorado’s Renewable Energy Milestone Looks Different When Coal Outages Are Counted

By Sarah Montalbano | Independence Institute

On July 9, 2026, I wrote an article for the Independence Institute breaking down the math behind Colorado’s renewable energy milestone in Q1 2026 and explaining why it is largely driven by the Comanche 3 coal outage, rather than a surge in wind and solar generation.

For Coloradans, it’s worth checking if milestones like these are real, because figures like these are cited as proof that the state can shed its remaining coal and natural gas without consequences for reliability and affordability. The article’s main point, which was supported with EIA generation data, was that Colorado produced less in-state electricity in Q1 2026, and therefore the share of electricity generated by wind and solar looked larger because total generation — the denominator of this fraction — was smaller than before. Had coal-fired generation been running at its prior level, renewables (including wind, solar, and hydropower) would’ve only hit 42.9 percent, not a majority share. Strip out coal outages, and it would have barely budged from the prior year, when renewables actually generated 41.6 percent of Colorado’s in-state electricity.

One critic noted that the piece neglects to mention Comanche 2, whose retirement was postponed by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) from the end of 2025 to the end of 2026. Ergo, because one coal-fired plant kept running when another was down on outage, Colorado just swapped one coal unit for another.

That makes a catchy soundbite, but it doesn’t stand up to either intuition or data. Comanche 2 is already in the 2025 and 2026 baselines because it was generating throughout 2025 and unexpectedly continued running into 2026. As a result, it cannot account for the drop in total generation between them. Furthermore, it could not have been a one-to-one substitution because it is a much smaller power plant. Even in a universe in which Comanche 2 was not online in 2025 but did come online in 2026, Comanche 2’s nameplate capacity, its theoretical maximum output, is only about half that of Comanche

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE