Denver Business Journal – Tri-State Generation and Transmission Co., Colorado’s second-largest power utility, said Friday it will shift its focus from building more coal-fired power plants to natural gas, renewable energy and efficiency.

If it plays out, it’s a major change of policy for Westminster-based Tri-State, which supplies wholesale power to 18 electric-distribution cooperatives in Colorado and 26 in Wyoming, New Mexico and Nebraska. The utility’s two-year-old resource plan had called for the construction of 2,100 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants by 2012.

Critics have blamed nonprofit Tri-State for not embracing alternative energy in its future plans, the way investor-owned utility Xcel Energy has. [read more…]