Residents and businesses in Boulder have lost power six times since Aug. 20 as the city and county grapple with the threat of wildfires and an aging electrical infrastructure.
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The frequent outages are indicative of an ongoing problem throughout Xcel Energy’s electrical transmission system, and state regulators are asking tough questions about the utility’s work to grow its power base while maintaining existing infrastructure.
Carolyn Elam, Boulder’s senior manager for sustainability who monitors Xcel’s service, said the system is strained.
“We are seeing the perfect storm of age and these wildfire strategies and the chronic lack of maintenance on the system that are accelerating the end of life on our system,” Elam said. “It’s going to potentially get worse before it gets better.”
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission, which regulates Xcel and other electricity providers, has been investigating Xcel’s power outages for almost two years. Earlier this week, the PUC reported that customers continue to experience more outages now than they did between 2015 and 2023. Hotspots for the problems also include sections of Denver, Lakewood, a few mountain communities and a couple of areas in the San Luis Valley.
“In every single month of 2024, 2025 and the first half of 2026, customers have experienced an above-average number of outages,” said Nick Bongiardina, a commission staff member studying the outages. “This really reflects what customers are expressing they are experiencing.”
The PUC first noticed an increase in complaints about outages in 2024, and the commissioners ordered an investigation to find out whether those anecdotal reports were indicative of a trend.
They were.
The commission’s investigation found that outages were more frequent and lasted for longer durations in 2024 and 2025 than from 2015 to 2023. On Wednesday, the commission updated its investigation and reported that the trend has not changed, as of the first six months of 2026.
The investigation does not count outages caused by major storms that knock out power to large swaths of Xcel’s customers because those incidents are out of the company’s control. The PUC staff also did not include the preemptive power shutoffs Xcel started implementing in 2024 as a way to prevent wildfires sparked by its equipment.
“This outage data indicates that customers continue to experience kind of a high level of underlying outages under normal operating conditions,” Bongiardina said. “Major weather events are still significant, including public safety power shutoff events, but they’re not driving that day-to-day experience when we don’t have major weather affecting the system.”
The investigation did not explore the reasons behind the rise in outages.
Xcel insists that reliability is its priority, and Robert Kenney, the president of Xcel Energy Colorado, said the company has a number of strategies to ensure it can provide more reliable power to its customers.
“Some of it is on the transmission side. Some of it is through our electric resource planning process, where we are adding generation, and then we have a distribution system plan that contemplates upgrading substations, upgrading our distribution system as well,” Kenney said. “We have a really robust capital investment plan across generation, transmission and distribution to make sure that we’re providing reliable service to all of our customers.”
Wildfire prevention and other factors
The increased frequency and duration of outages coincide with Xcel’s plan to use public safety power shutoffs to prevent wildfires. The PUC decided on Wednesday to create rules about how Xcel uses them.
The company has also implemented enhanced powerline safety settings, another wildfire mitigation tool, in which specialized circuit breakers may trip but do not allow power to come back if they detect a fault.
While the PUC did not blame outages on those prevention efforts, Elam and others believe they are putting a strain on aging equipment. The enhanced safety settings are illustrating how the equipment has underlying issues because they shut off power any time there is a fault in the line, she noted.
“There’s been ongoing faults and they’re just getting worse,” Elam said. “That’s why we are seeing the failures of the system. They often happen when there’s no wind. We’re pretty sure they are indicative of chronic issues on Xcel’s system.”
The criticism over outages comes after Xcel received state approval in August for a rate increase that will cause residential electricity charges to rise by an average of $5 per month and commercial costs go up by an average of $7.29 a month.
Xcel was sued this month by a real estate developer who claimed the utility’s delays in providing electrical service to a construction site forced a project into foreclosure. That lawsuit added to a growing list of complaints from developers who say they, too, are running into delays in getting new electricity to projects, including a Coca-Cola bottling company that relocated its new plant to Colorado Springs after Xcel could not deliver electricity in a timely manner at its preferred site near Denver International Airport.
However, those who use and monitor Xcel’s power supply suspect there are other factors involved in the unreliability beyond just the aging infrastructure, including the growing demand for energy and pressure from investors for the publicly traded company to increase profits. Routine maintenance has come as a sacrifice to boost those profit margins, they say.
The three PUC commissioners expressed concern about the trend and even questioned whether they could enforce financial penalties against Xcel for the frequent outages. The PUC staff said they were looking into that possibility and whether the commission has the authority to do so.
“I wonder where the line is in terms of not living up to your end of the bargain,” Commissioner Tom Plant said.
Bongiardina said the commissioners could include financial compensation for customers in an upcoming rulemaking for Xcel’s public safety power shutoffs.
Commissioner Megan Gilman said Xcel has a social license to operate and questioned whether the utility’s rapidly expanding investments are causing more outages for longtime customers.
“I would have loved to see improved performance,” she said.
The city of Boulder has asserted that routine maintenance has come as a sacrifice to boost profit margins, Elam said.
“You’ll hear Xcel talking about keeping bills low and having the lowest bills in the country,” Elam said. “If you keep bills low while growing profits for investors and bringing in cash, something has to give.”
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Kenney disagreed with that premise.
“We’re not sacrificing reliability for shareholder profits, and so that’s my starting point,” he said. “We think about our customers first and foremost, and we put our customers at the center of everything that we do. And so, our investment plan is designed to make sure that we’re providing reliable service to our customers. For every dollar that we’re investing in our communities, our customers are receiving significant benefit for those investments.”
A string of Boulder power outages
But Elam believes there is a chronic lack of investment in Boulder’s aging power grid. The streak of outages since Aug. 20 is evidence to her.
The first outage came when a wildfire erupted in Boulder Canyon near Eben G. Fine Park on the west side of town. There were evacuation warnings and about 4,000 people, businesses and government offices lost power, Elam said. It remains unclear whether the electrical system caused the fire or went out because of the fire, she said.
Then people on the south end of the city lost power Aug. 21 when a fire broke out underground near Kohler Reservoir. That fire, Elam said, was a result of the power outage the day before.
“To get power back up, Xcel had rerouted power to that area, and that added load that evening on that feeder caused a splice to fail,” she said.
Power was restored once those lines were repaired, she said.
Traffic lights went out during rush hour and grocery stores lost power during outages on Sept. 10 and 11, Elam said, citing those problems as examples of what happens when electricity is unreliable.
Then last weekend, downtown Boulder and the West Pearl neighborhood went dark after an underground cable failed, she said. Power was out for about an hour, but it caused uncertainty on a busy night for restaurants trying to keep customers fed.
“That was hugely impactful on our restaurant industry,” she said. “They weren’t sure how long the outage would be and they were having to cancel reservations.”
Then another outage happened Sunday night in the University Hill neighborhood. Elam’s office heard from angry customers over the weekend and on Monday.
“The uncertainty around how long the outages are going to be is a contributing factor,” she said.
The PUC’s original report determined that in 2024 the average customer experienced 350 minutes, or nearly six hours, without electricity compared to an average of 166 minutes between 2015 and 2023. Outage minutes per customer in 2024 were above the historical trend in six of Xcel’s nine regions.
The staff’s investigation also found that customers on the 15 worst-performing feeders, which distribute power from substations, experienced 33% of the outage minutes in 2025, Bongiardina said. The 15 feeders make up 2% of the total system.
Seven of the worst feeders were in Boulder. The others were three in metro Denver, three in other spots along the Front Range and two in the San Luis Valley.
For its update on the first six months of the year, the staff investigation found outage minutes remain above historical averages and the frequency of outages is up, contributing to the total amount of time customers are without power.
The solution, Elam said, is for Xcel to focus on repairing its aging system, and that costs money.
“It’s proactive replacement and that’s going to come from ratepayers,” she said.
Sydney Isenberg, an Xcel spokeswoman, said reliability is the foundation of the company’s business. Xcel is working to verify the PUC’s findings.
“As we review the commission’s analysis, it is important to consider how the electric system has evolved over time,” Isenberg said. “The way customers use electricity continues to change, while growing demand, aging infrastructure and increasing climate risks are creating new challenges for the grid. We are actively investing to meet these changing needs, including plans to invest $17.6 billion in Colorado through 2030 to expand and modernize the electric grid and add new energy resources.”
‘We raised a ruckus’
Those experiencing frequent outages hope public pressure kicks Xcel’s efforts into high gear.
Residents and businesses along the Lincoln Street/South Broadway corridor in Denver complained about outages for about a year before problems were addressed. Their campaign included frequent letters and phone calls to Xcel and letters and appearances before the PUC.
Marlene Nuechterlein, who lives on Lincoln Street, said frequent outages jeopardized her and her husband’s health because both use CPAP machines at night to manage sleep apnea. She also uses oxygen.
“They wouldn’t be like outages for 10 minutes. They would be outages for six or eight hours,” Nuechterlein said. “If the power went out at nighttime, I couldn’t sleep because I literally couldn’t breathe.”
She and her husband spent $900 to buy a rechargeable battery as a backup, and even then it didn’t have enough juice to also support her oxygen supply.
After extensive documentation on the outages, including their dates and duration, the neighborhood appealed to the PUC and to Xcel. In late 2025, Xcel began replacing poles and other equipment.
The six-block corridor has not had an outage since, she said.
“It’s really frustrating for them to continually turn around and ask for rate increases when it doesn’t appear to me they are doing anything to upkeep the equipment that already is in place and do the maintenance correctly,” Nuechterlein said. “We raised a ruckus. It’s maddening that that’s how it has to be.”
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Denver Post staff writer Robert Tann contributed to this report.
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