Colorado’s energy future: The high cost of 100 percent electric home heating

Preview:

This report is the second installment in a series of three reports analyzing the costs and reliability impacts of Colorado’s climate change mitigation policies. It is a continuation of the work performed by Center of the American Experiment modeling the cost of renewable energy mandates in states throughout the country.

Key findings from the report include:

• The complete electrification of residential heating combined with Colorado Governor Jared Polis’s goal of a 100 percent renewable electricity grid by 2040 (hereafter, Polis Plan+electrification) would cost Coloradans up to $620.7 billion through 2050.
• Residential home heating electrification alone would cost approximately $302 billion through 2050.
• Colorado electricity customers (residential, commercial, and industrial) would see their average monthly electricity bills increase to $797 through 2050. They would peak at an average of $1,143 in 2040.
• The typical Colorado household would see their average monthly electricity bills increase to an average of $566 through 2050, and they would reach as high as an average of $856 in 2040.
• To meet Colorado’s present-day electricity demand as well as the additional demand created by electrifying home heating with only wind, solar, existing hydropower, and batteries, the state would need to install twelve times the generation capacity currently on the grid.
• Despite this massive increase in installed capacity, Colorado would still experience 26 hours of blackouts spread across three separate events in January and early February 2040 if electricity demand and wind and solar output are similar to 2021.
• Alternatively, Colorado could meet Governor Polis’s electric-sector and residential home heating decarbonization goals on the same timeline, without reliability issues and at less than a third of the cost, by transitioning the state’s generating assets to nuclear energy.

A full copy of the report can be viewed here.