LPEA’s board is meeting on June 15 to consider a 40-year blanket waiver to give Tri State Generation and Transmission, our power provider, the right to be the primary negotiator of all our renewable energy projects going forward. And, given Tri State’s reliance on coal, given how it is stonewalling affordable solar and other renewables, and given the laughable price for produced energy it offered a biomass project in Pagosa Springs (58 percent of what LPEA was willing to offer), then with this four decades waiver, renewables are dead in the water.

Please, contact LPEA board members immediately and let them know your opinion of locking us into a fossilized way of thinking, or go to the June 15 meeting. Renewables such as solar are already cheaper than coal and even natural gas and will become ever more important in the next decade as energy storage rapidly improves. Don’t lock us away with the dinosaurs. Call LPEA at (970) 247-2674.

Doug Walker

Durango