“We’re All Scrambling”: More Wind, Power Outages Leave Colorado in the Dark

Thousands of Colorado residents encountered pitch-black neighborhoods on their drive home from work Wednesday night. Now they’re getting used to seeing refrigerated trucks, gas-powered generators and extension cords running across the street.

“I grew up in Boulder, and we didn’t shut the power off every time the wind blew,” says Dave Query, the founder of Big Red F Restaurant Group. “We’re all scrambling. There’s been almost no communication, no understanding of when it’s going to be turned back on. One side of the block has power, one doesn’t.”

Much of Colorado’s Front Range experienced extreme winds on December 17, with some gusts topping 100 miles per hour. Through both preventative and unplanned shutdowns by Xcel Energy, the state’s largest power provider, as many as 100,000 customers were without power. Winds had died down by the next morning, but over 70,000 Xcel customers were without power at 9 a.m. on December 18, and nearly 21,000 were still powerless by 4 p.m.

And with severe weather expected again today, December 19 — the National Weather Service has issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation alert (PDS) — Xcel is implementing another Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) today, December 19, starting at 5 a.m. It’s expected to impact about 69,000 customers in Boulder, Clear Creek, Gilpin, Jefferson, Larimer and Weld counties.

The damage from the first round of wind stretched far from the Front Range. At least three separate fires sprang up in Yuma County around the same time that downed power lines and high winds were reported in the area on Wednesday night. Two of the fires were contained, but one was still burning as of late December 18, with 13,000 acres burned between the three blazes.

Some customers may not have their power back on until December 22, according to an Xcel announcement issued late Thursday. So far, Boulder and Jefferson counties have been the areas most affected by the blackouts, but there have been outages in Denver, Adams, Arapahoe, Clear Creek, Eagle, Larimer and Weld counties as well.

According to Query, all five of Big Red F’s restaurants in Boulder — Centro Mexican Kitchen, Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar, the Post, Velvet Elk Lounge and West End Tavern — and his home near downtown Boulder lost power on December 17, and they remained without electricity until yesterday morning, Now they’re expected to lose power again at 5 a.m.

Query and others in the restaurant industry are relying on mobile fridges, generators and a general sense of living one day at a time.

“We’re all hustling around trying to find refrigerated trucks, and it’s just right in the middle of the holiday season, so we’re having to cancel parties,” Query says, adding that his restaurants risk losing “tens of thousands of dollars” in spoiled food and canceled parties from the power outages.

Its indiscernible to customers how Xcel choses to shut off certain buildings, Query adds, as one block of businesses and homes has lights on, while the next does not. His frustration with Xcel is mounting after the utility provider executed another round of power outages in April 2024 that affected 155,000 homes and businesses, with much less communication. However, the bumpy road has also helped people along the Front Range learn how to work through the lack of power with help their neighbors.

“Boulder’s so good. People are running extensions across the road to power things for their neighbors.” Query says. “I’m on a text thread with about thirty other business owners, and it’s a bunch of ‘Who needs what?’ and ‘I have room in this truck.’ Everybody shows up.”

Adam Dunlap, the general manager at Verde, a Mexican restaurant on Pearl Street in Boulder, says his restaurant lost power Wednesday evening. The staff secured a generator to power Verde’s walk-in freezer, but the machine requires gas once every five hours, so Dunlap slept at the restaurant to feed it fuel. By early Thursday, the power was back on.

“Forecast said the wind would show up at ten o’clock, and it got to 11 and still didn’t show. I didn’t know if would happen, so so we decided to send it, and we opened up at noon. We were packed because so many places didn’t open,” Dunlap says.

But when the wind arrived at 1 p.m., “it came hard,” he admits.

Dunlap is grateful that Verde had a generator and running power through Thursday, but he’s expecting another outage today. The generator and extra space in Verde’s Louisville location have allowed him to save the restaurant’s supplies and store food for others, such as burger patties from the Dark Horse.

“I can’t imagine what other businesses deal with on that front. I feel like we’ve been pretty proactive, which has helped us get through this,” Dunlap says. “We’re hoping it doesn’t affect us tomorrow, but we were hoping that yesterday, too.”

Gemini, another Pearl Street restaurant, lost power at around 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday; it had a tasting with a wine rep scheduled for the evening. Michael Mehiel, who owns and runs Pearl Street restaurant with his wife, Catherine Neckes, tried wine and talked with the rep over candlelight. His home in south Boulder was without power until Thursday afternoon, and will likely be without electricity again today.

“We opened yesterday in spite of the wind, but, of course, when the power went off we shut the restaurant down to customers,” Mehiel says. “We don’t have much of a choice in the restaurant world, because all of our stuff is perishable. We iced everything, and you keep everything closed.”

The last time Boulder faced rolling blackouts, Gemini’s power stayed on, allowing it to hold 100 ice cream cakes in its freezer for neighboring Lindsay’s Boulder Deli. “I got calls from people offering to let us use their walk-ins, so the community pulls together in that way, which is nice,” Mehiel says of this latest round.

Such stories have become commonplace among residents and business owners in Colorado: Dry, windy conditions clash with old power lines, forcing people to work together in darkness, whether it be trying to save food, keeping on life-saving medical equipment, or staving off boredom and silence.

A lack of precipitation and unseasonably high temperatures have created year-round wildfire seasons in the 2020s. According to the state Division of Fire Prevention & Control, all twenty of Colorado’s largest recorded wildfires have occurred since 2001, with four of the largest five since 2020. This year has seen even more acreage burned than in 2020, with nearly 140,000 acres consumed by the Lee fire alone.

Xcel says it’s shutting off power to lessen wildfire risks in Colorado, where wildfires have caused billions in property damage in the last five years. On December 30, 2021, and into the first day of 2022, the Marshall fire in Boulder County destroyed almost 1,100 homes, businesses and other structures. According to authorities, the fire was caused by embers from a human-caused fire and a downed Xcel power line. Xcel was not charged for the incident, but faced hundreds of lawsuits from thousands of residents, business owners and insurers, eventually settling for a $640 million payout.

Query says he understands the short-term need to shut down electrical lines to avoid wildfires, but he and other business owners question why Xcel hasn’t transitioned more grids to underground power lines. He cites a $240 million investment in 2023, $100 million of which came from the United States Department of Energy, which was supposed to “reduce and mitigate the threat of wildfires and ensure the resiliency of the grid through extreme weather.”

“We do not need a major wildfire anywhere. That is a noble cause. The solution to this is burying the power lines,” Query argues. “They don’t want to spend the money. That’s my beef.”

According to Xcel, the money went toward efforts that “reduce and mitigate the threat of wildfires and ensure the resiliency of the grid through extreme weather.” The company’s announcement of the investment citedsefforts like fire-resistant coating on 6,000 poles, enhancing vegetation management, moving high-risk distribution circuits underground, AI-aided drones to inspect power lines and satellite technology to detect trees at risk of burning. “Undergrounding,” the term Xcel uses for moving lines beneath the ground, does not appear in the statement, although Xcel has performed some undergrounding this year in Boulder’s Chautauqua neighborhood.

Mehiel says there should be a way to provide power safely during extreme wind, adding that he doesn’t see why one needs to cancel out the other.

“What we were told the last round was that they were going to be more proactive shutting stuff down. Okay, I think that sounds smart,” he concedes, “but how about further investment in the infrastructure? I don’t work at the utility, but the concept that it’s a choice between safety on the one hand and having electricity on the other is, I believe, not the full story. There are ways to have power safely.”

Xcel has operated what’s called a “1 percent fund” for decades, taking 1 percent of revenue to help pay for undergrounding. According to Xcel, undergrounding is the “costliest system hardening strategy available to us and is not viable in certain terrain,” but says the company will move “some of the highest risk power lines located in the highest risk areas” beneath the ground.

A 2024 complaint to the state Public Utilities Commission alleges that Xcel only applies that 1 percent fund toward undergrounding in municipalities with franchise agreements. In areas without franchise agreements, such as unincorporated county communities, the complaint claims that 1 percent sits in a fund collecting interest for Xcel. And even in places with franchise agreements, Xcel isn’t investing in undergrounding like it’s supposed to, according to Citizens Against Utility Abuse, the watchdog group that filed the 2024 PUC complaint.

The complaint claims Denver residents may have been contributing as much as $110 million to the fund annually since the agreement took effect in 2006, but that Xcel has only approved $4 million to $6 million worth of undergrounding projects each year. In a 2024 statement to Westword, an Xcel spokesperson didn’t address the PUC complaint, but reiterated that the fund is not an additional charge on customer bills, and gives places with franchise agreements the ability to determine which distribution lines they want to go underground.

If Xcel won’t do it fast enough, Dunlap would like to see local governments, like the City of Boulder or Boulder County, put more money into undergrounding.

“They’re constructing a bike lane that no one uses outside the restaurant, on Pearl Street. We could be using that money to bury our power lines. Why aren’t we burying the ones that are exposed?” he wonders.

On top of their issues with Xcel’s long-term approach, the Boulder restaurateurs say that Xcel and local government representatives could improve short-term communication with residents and businesses before and during power outages. After the windy day of outages in April 2024 and in the wake of the Marshall fire, Xcel was flamed by a PUC investigation into the utility’s customer service, with the report finding that about 10 percent of Xcel’s 1 million customer service calls in 2024 were disconnected by Xcel before any resolution had been reached.

Going forward, Xcel pledged to alert customers earlier of outages and provide more up-to-date outage maps during grid incidents. And for the most part, the utility did improve on those fronts, alerting consumers early this week of potential outages and updating its outage map frequently. Dunlap and Mehiel say the earlier information from Xcel helped them prepare better this time around, but they’d still like more accurate information throughout the day.

Josh Riggs, co-owner of Colorado cannabis chain Social Cannabis, says the Xcel alert enabled his team to secure generators for all seven dispensaries. Only the Golden store has lost power so far, he says, although the Commerce City and Louisville locations were both within the warning and planned outage zones.

According to Riggs, his Louisville dispensary lost power last April during the high winds, and he and his staff have “parlayed that into what we’ve done here the last couple of days.” Riggs says having the generator has enabled Social Cannabis to continue operating its point-of-sale, labeling and tracking services, all of which are required for cannabis businesses in Colorado.

“We were all set up, ready to go. When they turned the power off, for the most part we were able to operate pretty smoothly. The staff kind of made a fun thing out of it, and we had a decent day of sales,” Riggs says.

Query isn’t having fun, though. Xcel has successfully lobbied the state to increase fees in 2022 and 2023, and is asking for what would amount to a 9.9 percent average rate increase in 2026. As customers pay more money, he thinks they deserve more precise information.

“It always sucks. They sent out a notice on Tuesday to everyone saying we’d have a shutdown…and once it starts to happen, you’re checking on the grid, you’re calling, and it’s always ‘please check back,'” he says. “It’s a gigantic company. It’s the same as every other gigantic company.”

According to a December 18 statement from Xcel, crews must wait until weather and wildfire risks have passed and then must inspect every power line and repair damage before turning them back on, leading to some multi-day outages.

“We are aware that Friday’s storm may include some communities impacted by Wednesday’s severe weather, so some areas could be without power for more than three days. Turning off the power is not a decision we take lightly, and we will strive to restore power as soon as it is safe to do so,” Xcel says. “We encourage customers, especially those who have medical equipment that relies on electricity, to prepare for possible outages on Friday, December 19. More tips for how to prepare for an outage are available on our website.”

But as every good business owner recognizes, preparation only gets you so far.

“The real simple answer is that this is clearly not a solution,” Mehiel says. “Shutting the power off every time the wind blows is not a plan or solution.