It’s an interesting discussion, talking about whether the Martin Drake power plant can or should be moved from downtown Colorado Springs.

Almost as interesting as discussing whether the city should sell off the entire billion-dollar electric company it owns. How much money would be on the table after selling those assets and subtracting the utility’s liabilities is hard to figure, but it would more than cover the cost of a weekend in Calhan.

Longstanding conventional wisdom says city residents’ electric rates would soar if the nonprofit sold to an investor-owned company such as Xcel Energy. That’s because for-profit utilities must pay dividends to shareholders.

Yet Ron Binz, former chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission and a longtime consumer advocate, says the conventional wisdom doesn’t necessarily hold true.

“The name of the game in utilities is scale,” Binz said, explaining that even though Xcel pays dividends to shareholders, the fact that it operates in Colorado, Minnesota, Texas, the Dakotas, New Mexico and Wisconsin gives it economies of scale Colorado Springs Utilities can’t match.

“There’s no intrinsic reason why a municipally-owned utility would do a better job,” Binz said.

He explained that while a relatively small entity such as Springs Utilities must shop around to get slices of wind farms, Xcel can simply buy an entire wind farm and spread the cost across its massive rate base.

You may remember that the city couldn’t just sell Memorial Health System and use the proceeds for anything it wished because state law forbids it. Binz said there is no similar state law governing the sale of a municipal electric company.

In other words, money from such a sale could be used to establish a community trust and the interest from it could be spent on anything. Even if our electric rates rose a bit, we’d have money for all sorts of purposes and the electric company would be regulated by the PUC — a much more professional group of regulators than the Colorado Springs City Council.

Consider: Somehow Boulder, Denver, Pueblo, Grand Junction and many other Colorado cities subsist without owning an electric company.

As for decommissioning the coal-fired Martin Drake plant downtown, Binz said in the future, “I doubt if it’s going to be economic to retrofit it to meet new (air quality) regs.”

Indeed, Xcel came to that conclusion when it decommissioned a coal plant in downtown Denver near the end of Binz’s tenure on the PUC. That land is now being transformed as a mixed-use development.

Is it radical to sell a city electric company?

Or is it radical to own one?

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Listen to Barry Noreen on KRDO NewsRadio 105.5 FM and 1240 AM at 6:35 a.m. on Fridays and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.