Welcome New PUC Director
Rebecca White

On May 1, 2023 the PUC welcomed a new director, Rebecca White. Rebecca is the PUC's third director in forty years. The position was last filled by Doug Dean from 2005, to his retirement in December of 2022.

White has a twenty-three-year public service background, including the Bureau of Land Management and the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, and the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT). Throughout her career, her work has ranged from drafting and implementing state and federal environmental regulations to leading National Environmental Policy Act mitigation for an environmental justice community on Colorado's largest highway construction project.

Executive Director for the Department of Regulatory Affairs Patty Salazar announced White's position and said in a statement, “Over the agency’s history, the PUC has evolved to regulate a diverse portfolio of public utilities and the transportation of freight and people - all extremely critical infrastructure to the daily lives of Coloradans," said DORA Executive Director Patty Salazar. “Comparably, Rebecca’s roots in public administration, leading large organizations and projects, coalition building, and change management prepares her to provide the important framework needed to engage with our stakeholders while mapping out a vision for the agency’s future.”

Director White comes to DORA and the PUC from CDOT where she worked for 12 years, serving most recently as the Director of the Division of Transportation Development. Her work there spanned a broad cross section of issues including, freight, transportation planning, environmental and resource protection, asset management, data, and research.

"While the work of the PUC has always been important, recent state and federal legislation sets us on a path to tackle an exciting and unprecedented set of issues including renewable energy, equity and affordability," said White. "It's an honor to have this opportunity to lead the talented and dedicated staff of the PUC at such a critical time." 

It's That Time of
the Year:
Moving Company Fraud Alert 

As parents whisk their children to or from colleges and universities, the PUC
Transportation team is issuing an alert for potential moving company scams.

Recent national data from the Federal Trade Commission shows that consumers reported losing more than $5.8 billion to fraud in 2021, an increase of more than 70 percent over the previous year.
"Being forewarned is being forearmed," says Nathan Riley, section chief
for Transportation at the PUC. "Our hope is that people will take the time, and follow some simple precautions, and not put themselves in a position to be victimized.”

Get a Contract: All intrastate household goods moving carriers must have written
estimates and contracts. Each mover must also have a Colorado Public
Utilities Commission permit number.

Confirm: If you are unsure whether a moving company is permitted by the PUC, call us to find out at: 303-894-2070, or visit our website, at puc.colorado.gov. The PUC has a permit search tool, available here. Using an unlicensed mover can potentially lead to theft and/or uninsured damage of your property.

Solution: If a mover is not permitted, they can't withhold any of your property to
force payment. Consumers can file a complaint with the PUC and there's also a
statutory arbitration process to help resolve payment disputes.

Commissioner Gilman and Staff Tour Xcel’s Trading Floor

Have you ever wondered how Xcel Energy predicts the weather?  Commissioner Gilman and  staff members learned a  lot by touring Xcel's 1800      Photo: Drew Bolin, PUC Strategic Communications
Larimer Street                     Jason Peuquet, PUC Economist, Xcel director,
Headquarters' Trading          Regulatory Administration
Floor as part of                    Bill Dalton, engineer, Energy Section, PUC                    a tour on                             Jack Ihle, Xcel regional vice-present,
May 5 and 9.                        Regulatory Policy
                                           Steve Berman, Xcel regional vice-president,
From the 10th floor,             Regulatory Policy and Pricing
trading desks, Xcel trades
in power, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Using computer models, 20 traders figure out how much electricity customers are going to use the next day, where they can get it most cheaply — and, if they can, sell some into the market.

The trading floor also operates plant operations and trading for Southwestern Public Service Company (SPS) in Texas and Northern States Power Company (NSP) in Minnesota.

The key to the market is the weather because that largely determines how much heating or cooling customers are going to use.

Trading floor staff use the relatively new DNV's weather-energy demand model to try to forecast energy needs with a margin of error of less than 10 percentage points. DNV is a company that produces monitoring equipment for forecasting.

DNV has developed an advanced tool that “uses very granular data from the past 20 years to create the equivalent of 10,000 years of plausible realities.”

The 40+ power-operations staff, who work on the trading floor, decides which power plants should run and at what capacity.

After the weather, the next biggest determinant of what happens is the daily cost of natural gas.

Then the traders look at whether they can buy power cheaper on the market than Xcel can produce itself and whether they can sell electricity for more than it costs Xcel to generate.

Xcel’s Northern States Power Co. is part of the computerized midwestern power market, so the trader in Denver puts into the system bid and asks prices to see automatically what is available. 

Colorado has no such market, but Xcel Energy began its participation on April 1^st as a member of the Western Energy Imbalance Service Market (WEIS), which is run by the Southwest Power Pool (SPP).  SPP operates its Western Energy Imbalance Service market  (WEIS) on a contract basis, centrally dispatching energy from the region’s participating resources every five minutes.

At the time of the May 5^th tour, Colorado power generation comprised of 41 percent wind power and 17 percent solar power. In fact, there was a surplus of energy that was being used to pump water uphill to the Cabin Creek Pumped Storage reservoir above Georgetown, Colorado.