After Bowerbank told the collection of people who work for clean technology and energy companies in Colorado about Ontario’s successes, a panel of Colorado experts discussed the possibilities here and what lessons Colorado can learn from Ontario.

Paula Connelly, a lawyer for Xcel Energy, said she doesn’t believe a statewide feed-in-tariff program would work in Colorado.

Xcel Energy is the largest utility company in the state and serves almost every resident except in those communities that have publicly-held utilities.

The state legislature has capped the amount of money the utility company can spend on promoting renewable energy development in Colorado to 2 percent of energy premiums, she said.

“We take that 2 percent and go to the market and say, ‘this is how much power we want to buy,’ and then we take the best deals,” she said.

The company ends up getting the clean power significantly cheaper than the 80 cents per kilowatt-hour that Ontario is paying to property owners. She said Xcel spends 17 to 33 cents per kilowatt-hour on solar power and about 4.5 cents for wind.

“In our opinion, a feed-in-tariff is not the way to go,” Connelly said. “It doesn’t ask consumers to be creative.”

She said a feed-in-tariff prescribes a certain technology to the community and promotes it to the exclusion of others.

She said that despite the lack of a feed-in-tariff program, Colorado is on track to meet one of the most aggressive renewable energy portfolio requirements in the country. The state voted last year to require that 30 percent of the state’s power comes from renewable sources by 2020.

The portfolio standard was first passed in 2004 and has been raised twice sine then, she said.

“Our legislature wanted to keep challenging us, and we kept rising to the challenge,” she said.

Story continues here.

Pictured: One of Xcel's Colorado coal plants, courtesy of Colorado Energy News.