This week, Xcel Energy told Colorado regulators it wants to keep all four of its coal units running until 2030 — plants that were supposed to start closing last year. Comanche 2 in Pueblo was slated to shut down at the end of 2025. The Hayden units were supposed to close in 2027 and 2028. Now Xcel is asking to run every one of them for four more years.
The utility buried the lead in regulatory language about “a confluence of events including increasing peak demand growth” and “supply chain and geopolitical issues.” They overbuilt renewables on cheap-money signals, didn’t build enough dispatchable generation, and now they’re short. Demand in Xcel’s territory has grown 200 MW over the past five years. They’re projecting a 445 MW shortfall in 2027. And 318 MW of new data center load is coming on top of that.
If Xcel had been building gas-fired combined cycle plants instead of over-indexing on renewables backed by market-distorting subsidies, they wouldn’t need to extend the life of much dirtier coal plants. A modern combined cycle gas plant produces roughly 60% fewer emissions than coal. The subsidy-driven overbuild of intermittent generation didn’t just fail to replace baseload — it actively delayed the construction of cleaner dispatchable alternatives. The result? More coal, not less.
This isn’t unique to Xcel. The DOE has issued emergency orders to keep coal plants running in four states. The Trump administration’s July executive order explicitly labeled wind and solar subsidies as “market distorting” and moved to end them. The market was already short baseload generation before AI demand showed up. Add electrification, data centers, and reshoring of manufacturing, and you’re looking at the early stages of a gas generation supercycle that will take a decade to play out.
