When Xcel Energy started condemning Elbert County ranchland for its $1.7 billion, 550-mile Power Pathway transmission line, it hadn’t yet bothered to secure local permits. The monopoly utility filed condemnation actions against landowners while holding signed easement agreements on just 27 of the 48 properties it needed to access. Even Colorado Public Utilities Commissioner Tom Plant called the conduct “disrespectful to the people of the community.”
On April 10, 2026, the PUC, including Plant, ruled 3-0 to override Elbert County’s denial of a permit anyway. Neighboring El Paso County joined Elbert County in denying Xcel’s permits and is next on the PUC’s chopping block. Elbert County will ask the PUC to reconsider the decision.
Elbert County commissioners denied the permits in June 2025 after protests from constituents, who cited decreased property values, disrupted wildlife migration, and elevated wildfire risk. As Complete Colorado has reported, Elbert County found that Xcel’s applications were “incomplete and inaccurate,” and the line will run as close as 80 feet to residential homes. The county is not served by Xcel as an energy provider, and neither is El Paso.
Xcel sued both counties, then went straight to the PUC to skip the public hearings and invoke a state statute granting the commission authority to “balance the local government interest with the statewide interest.” The statute has been used only three times in the past 21 years. Governor Polis’s Colorado Energy Office backed Xcel’s request, and the commission delivered.
The Power Pathway is a 550-mile loop designed to bring Eastern Plains wind and solar to the Front Range. Xcel says the “timely completion” of the line is necessary for “meeting 2030 carbon emission reduction targets,” which require Xcel to reduce emissions by 80% by 2030. Without Colorado’s emissions-reduction mandates, utilities might build new dispatchable generation near Front Range load rather than stretching hundreds of miles of transmission lines, over counties that don’t want it, to bring intermittent energy from elsewhere.
The commission ordered Xcel to pay Elbert County a $2.5 million impact fee. With a population of roughly 29,000, that works out to about $86 per resident for a $1.7 billion project cutting 48 miles through their county. It’s not clear yet how the $2.5 million will be recovered, but ratepayers will be funding the line as a whole through the Transmission Cost Adjustment rider.
If an elected county commission can deny permits on legitimate grounds, and a state commission can override that denial because the project serves “statewide interest” created only by emissions targets, then what exactly is local land use authority for? The statute was designed to be a rarely used override button, but expect Colorado’s energy policy to turn it into a routine workaround.
