Colorado legislature could keep coal burning at Ray Nixon Power Plant through 2032
A bill progressing through the legislature could nearly double the remaining years that Colorado Springs Utilities can receive coal-fired power from the Ray Nixon Power Plant.
Since 1980, the plant generated up to 260 megawatts of power from its massive coal-fire generators for Colorado Springs residents. The plant is scheduled to go offline at the end of 2029 to meet the state’s timeline for all utilities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Senate Bill 182, introduced in late April by a bipartisan group including three El Paso County representatives, House Minority Leader Jarvis Caldwell and Democrats Sen. Marc Snyder and Rep. Amy Paschal, would allow municipal-owned utilities to adjust their clean-energy plan if they can show evidence they cannot meet the state’s emission reduction goals for 2030. If the bill passes, utilities can submit a plan that moves the deadline to stop burning coal back to Dec. 31, 2032. Colorado Springs Utilities is the largest and potentially only utility statewide to qualify for this exception.
The bill passed through the Senate 32-3 on Monday and is being pushed through to get approval before the legislative session is scheduled to end May 13. It’s the second attempt this year at a bill that would extend the deadline for closing Ray Nixon.
Utilities CEO Travas Deal said in April, weeks before the bill was officially introduced, that the utility was working on a compromise with Gov. Jared Polis, state regulators and environmental groups.
“They’re trying to balance a very aggressive stakeholder group that wants to see one thing and we’re trying to see another. So I think there’s some balance there to find what we can live with, what makes the most sense for the community and what they can live with,” Deal said.
The public utility will have to submit annual updated plans to the state and must try to enact other methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the stakeholder groups Deal alluded to is the Sierra Club, an environmental nonprofit. The Sierra Club has supported Colorado’s efforts to close the remaining coal power plants. A recent string of actions by the federal government and the Colorado Public Utilities Commission to temporarily keep the plants online concerned the group about the state’s clean-energy goals.
In a statement Monday, Sierra Club’s state chapter director, Margaret Kran-Annexstein, said the hard deadline and the additional mitigation goals Utilities would have to meet were an improvement from the first proposed bill.
“We’ll be standing by at every step to ensure compliance and progress to meet these goals, as we have with every Colorado coal plant,” Kran-Annexstein said.
The bill is now being considered in the House Transportation, Housing and Local Government Committee before a potential vote by the full chamber.
Daniel Hodges, who manages legislative outreach for Colorado Springs Utilities, said the state Department of Public Health and Environment would be able to enforce the new timeline. Hodges said the utility had not planned to keep Ray Nixon operating but had been unable to find enough reliable alternatives to replace the power it generated.
“We need operational certainty, and the state needs regulatory certainty, and we think that’s appropriate. We see this as reasonable. Ray Nixon will still be coming offline after that three-year extension,” Hodges said.
Utilities previously decommissioned and demolished the Martin Drake Power Plant near downtown Colorado Springs starting in 2022 as part of the transition to renewable energy.
Nixon site tour
Utilities leaders brought reporters on a behind-the-scenes tour of Ray Nixon Power Plant on April 9 at a complex south of Fountain.
Matt Strobel is the engineer supervisor for Ray Nixon and the other Utilities power plants. Strobel explained the theory behind how the powdered coal is burned to heat water boilers and create steam, which spin turbines to generate power.
“In the real world, it’s a much more complex system. There’s a lot more heat exchangers, multiple stage turbines trying to drive as much efficiency as we can, and we also have the emissions control piece we have to deal with.”
About once a week, a train carrying coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming drops off its load at Ray Nixon. The plant burns through 100 tons of coal, or about one full train car, per hour. New coal gets added onto a coal storage pile, which holds enough fuel to keep the plant running for a month without new deliveries.
Every aspect of the power plant operates at a similar scale. When the coal is moved inside the facility, it’s stored in 80-foot-tall silos. The main boiler is around 190 feet tall and gets heated to more than 1,000 degrees F by the coal fire. Strobel said the power plant had over 5,600 filters layered to collect the slag and unburnt coal particulates.
From the upper catwalk around the power plant, a massive array of solar panels are barely visible to the east. The Pike Solar Array is the largest single source of renewable power for Colorado Springs Utilities, producing up to 175 megawatts of solar power. Strobel said that adding another solar array that could single-handedly replace the power generated by Ray Nixon would need twice as much land as the plant takes up.
The Ray Nixon complex also has two natural gas generators on the site, which create an additional 50 megawatts of power. Deal said that while the natural gas power works well for now, Utilities can’t just add more natural gas generators, because they would not meet the eventual zero-emission benchmarks for the state.
“If you’re spending $800 million to add 400 megawatts of power, but the state requires you to shut it down after 15 years, that’s not a good long-term investment. We need to know what the goals are, and the state needs to stick to what those goals are,” Deal said.
The current plan to replace Nixon’s power output will not rely on local projects. Last month, Utilities joined the Southwest Power Pool, a multistate organization of electricity providers and transmitters.
Hodges said the goal was that by the end of 2032, there would be enough new transmission power to bring in renewable energy from other parts of the country.
u003ca href=u0022https://gazettedev.gazette.com/2026/01/12/colorado-springs-lawmakers-and-epa-push-to-keep-ray-nixon-power-plant-open/u0022u003eColorado Springs lawmakers and EPA push to keep Ray Nixon Power Plant open – Colorado Springs Gazetteu003c/au003e: Colorado legislature could keep coal burning at Ray Nixon Power Plant through 2032
