Colorado PUC Flags Xcel Energy's Rising Outage Frequency

Eighty-nine minutes. That is the average time a single customer in Xcel Energy’s service area spent without power during the first six months of 2026. For context, the average between 2015 and 2023 was 95 minutes for a full year. We are nearly at the ten-year baseline by July, with six months of outage minutes still to come.

The obvious take is that the grid is failing because of extreme weather. Hurricane-force winds, major winter storms, and wildfires get the headlines. But Nick Bongiardina, a staffer for the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC), told the commission on Sept. 23 that major events are not the main driver of this uptick. It is the frequency. Outages are happening more often, even if they last a shorter time on average.

Bongiardina noted that in every single month of 2024, 2025, and the first half of 2026, customers experienced an above-average number of outages. He said this reflects what customers are actually reporting: the lights go off, come back on, and then go off again. It is a grinding attrition of reliability rather than a single catastrophic failure.

Let’s do the math on the money flowing into this system. Xcel Energy is investing $17.6 billion in Colorado through 2030. That is a staggering sum for any regional utility, and it dwarfs the budgets of most local governments in our valley. PUC Chairman Eric Blank pointed out that Xcel has tripled its capital spending from 2021 to 2025. He also noted that the company has increased its earnings by hundreds of millions of dollars over that same period.

Blank asked a pointed question during the review: Is this becoming “an unacceptable new normal”? He suggested that despite tripling capital spending and boosting earnings, the utility seems to be struggling to provide basic customer service. That is a sharp critique of a company that holds a monopoly on electricity for 1.6 million customers in the state.

Xcel Energy responded with a standard corporate statement, saying it is working to verify the commission’s findings. The company cited aging infrastructure, new demands for electricity, and climate risks as the challenges facing the grid. In practice, that translates to a promise of future fixes while acknowledging current failures.

Erin O’Neill, the PUC’s deputy director of fixed utilities, offered a slightly more nuanced view. She said she was “somewhat disappointed” that improvement has not yet been visible, but noted that this may not be a long period of time for maintenance on a system of Xcel’s size. She emphasized that more analysis is needed to get to the root causes.

The PUC directed Xcel to file monthly outage reports after a wave of complaints in 2024. That year, 90,000 customers experienced a ten-year record of six or more outages. The data from those reports is what Bongiardina used to paint the picture of 2026. The commission is watching closely, and the numbers are not trending in a direction that suggests relief anytime soon.

For neighbors on the Western Slope, this means your property taxes and utility bills are funding a $17.6 billion infrastructure overhaul that is not yet showing results in your living room. If you have experienced six or more outages, an outage of 18 hours or more, or live in a certain area, you may be eligible for specific protections under the new reporting framework. The grid is getting more expensive to maintain, and it is getting less reliable in the meantime.