On April 11, 2016, former Colorado Governor, Bill Ritter, spoke to Colorado Public Radio host Ryan Warner about renewable energy and energy costs in Colorado.

Warner pressed Ritter on the issue of costs, saying:

Cost is central, central to the debate that is raging in the courts right now, in the state legislature, over the CPP… Do you think people would be willing to pay more for clean energy?

Ritter downplayed the cost concerns by proclaiming that voters want clean energy and are willing to pay for it:

We had those same conversations back in 2007, it was about cost and it was about reliability, and we’re able to manage that now, and actually quite frankly, if you produce natural gas in the right way…you can still have reliability and you have a much cleaner energy portfolio.

After a follow-up by Warner, Ritter bizarrely claimed that clean energy mandates have had a negligible impact on Coloradans, despite calculations and analyses revealing skyrocketing rates across all of Colorado’s energy sectors:

…Voters in MT, WY, CO, NM, UT, so some pretty conservative states… they want more clean energy on the wires and yes, they would be willing to pay more… It wasn’t necessary to look to the voters and say ‘you’re going to pay more’ … XCEL just filed something saying the person who is kind of the average user in Colorado is only paying 5 cents more a month, 60 cents a year on average to get that kind of a clean portfolio.

This report was written Sarah Huisman, an Independence Institute Future Leader.