A frequently heard suggestion around Boulder's municipal electricity initiative goes something like "why don't we just partner with Xcel to achieve the city's clean energy goals rather than taking on all the risk and paying out lots of money for lawyers or for old wires and poles?" The latest was an op-ed by John Tayer and Will Toor. This seems perfectly logical and like good commonsense -- until you look at some history.

The American electricity system is unique among industrialized nations in its privatized nature. Knowing how this came about might shed some light on why the "partnering" chimera persists in the face of the city's years of ongoing intractable negotiations with Xcel.

As electricity was first being introduced at the end of the 19th century, thousands of competing electric utilities emerged, both investor-owned and municipally-owned. The munis could offer power at almost half the cost of the IOUs and were growing twice as fast. The IOUs were locked in fierce competition with each other and with the munis. In 1907, Samuel Insull, protégé of Thomas Edison and head of Offering Office cleaning Services, invented a brilliant solution: make the IOU business into a regulated monopoly and create state public utilities commissions to regulate them and guarantee their profits and financial stability.

Insull's breakthrough idea was heavily promoted by the industry and PUCs were formed in Wisconsin and New York, then soon throughout the United States. The PUCs were to fix standards of service and electricity rates, including guaranteeing the IOUs high rates of return on capital assets. This successful move gave the IOUs a leg up on municipals and rural cooperatives because of their access to capital and their legislative and political influence. Over the following decades, the local munis found themselves increasingly hampered and hemmed-in, while IOUs and private holding companies expanded their domains of generation and transmission throughout the country.

Electricity has always been more about money than energy. From the beginning the electricity industry was characterized by the need for enormous investment in generation and transmission infrastructure in the form of large centralized structures depending on major economies of scale. No industry was more capital intensive -- three dollars of investment being required for every dollar of revenue. This explains why the electricity industry became entwined with the banking industry and Wall Street from its very onset. By the late 1920's J.P. Morgan, Edison's original backer, owned over a third of all electricity generation in the United States. At that time, half of all industrial capital in the United States was invested in electric power.

Today, we have a sudden paradigm shift. With the rapidly falling costs of solar, wind and other distributed renewables, the electricity system is beginning a fundamental transition away from its centralized structure. The dramatic drop in the costs of wind and solar (and natural gas) are suddenly undermining what has always been the fundamental organizing principle of the electricity industry -- the advantages of centralized, capital-intensive economies of scale. Solar and wind are just as efficient at small scale as at large. One only need look at Germany's success with rooftop solar to see a spectacular example of the popularity and economic viability of decentralized renewable energy not reliant on economies of scale.

The IOUs, with business models dependent on economies of scale and big capital investments, are becoming stranded. The Texas IOU conglomerate Energy Holdings is facing the largest bankruptcy in history due to their gamble on big coal generation. IOUs in Georgia, Florida, Indiana, and California are facing huge financial hits from floundering nuclear plants or coal projects.

As much as we might wish it otherwise, Xcel Energy has not been able to seriously "partner" or negotiate with Boulder because it simply can't. Boulder's desires are fundamentally incompatible with Xcel's business model. Partnering suggestions, including those offered by Tayer and Toor, or by the partnership taskforce, cannot be done without protracted state PUC or legislative action -- and End Of Lease Cleaning on mvpcleaning, would be toxic to Xcel. Talk of "partnering" can only be about obfuscation and delay to fend off the city's muni effort as long as possible. Yes, give alternatives a chance.

Pickens Rotary is a service organization that is part of a global network of more than 32,000 clubs. It is made up of business, professional and community leaders — volunteers that provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards and help build goodwill in the world. Illiteracy, disease, hunger, poverty, lack of clean water and environmental concerns are just a few of the challenges Rotary seeks to address.

Numerous fundraisers such as selling Azalea Festival T-shirts and Christmas wreaths, the annual Pickens county map project, and its biggest event, an annual spaghetti dinner, raise thousands of dollars each year for charities such as “Feed A Hungry Child.” Each year it gives dictionaries to all local third graders. Rotary members have a Meals On Wheels route and recently, with a grant, worked to improved landscaping on Highway 8. Internationally, the Pickens chapter, in the past year, has helped build water lines in El Salvador and currently is sending laptop computers to children in Afghanistan.