Killing coal in Colorado with solar+wind+storage by 2025

Per an analysis by Vibrant Clean Energy, it’ll take approximately 2.8 GW of solar power, 8 GW of wind and 765 MW / 3 GWh of energy storage to allow Colorado to shut down its 4 GW of coal by 2025, while also lowering electric rates by 5%. On Friday, NextEra’s CEO said that solar+wind+storage was going to be “massively disruptive to the conventional fleet“. Robo suggested that wind would cost 2-2.5¢/kWh and solar would be 2.5-3¢/kWh with four hours of storage adding 0.5-1¢/kWh. And proving that Robo puts his money where his mouth his, these numbers closely aligned with the bids found in the industry-shaking Xcel request for bids (RFP) from late 2017, where we saw energy storage add 0.65¢/kWh to wind and solar bids a as low as 1.81¢/kWh and 2.9¢/kWh, respectively.