Attachment A - Draft letter from Boulder City Council to Xcel Energy

DRAFT: 1/13/2025 Robert Kenney President Xcel Energy – Colorado

Dear Mr. Kenney, 2025 marked the fifth anniversary of your Franchise Agreement with the City of Boulder. As envisioned by the Franchise, this was an important opportunity for us, the Boulder City Council, and the entire Boulder community, to review whether the expectations set forth in the Franchise are being met, and whether we are realizing the vision set forth by the companion Energy Partnership Agreement. It is fair to say that we had and continue to have major concerns in both regards. First, we note that Xcel failed to meet both the 2022 and 2024 emission milestones. Foundational to our community’s decision to pause municipalization and pursue the partnership with Xcel is meeting the milestones set forth in the Franchise and working in partnership to go beyond those milestones to close the gap towards our community’s goal of emissions-free electricity by 2030. Two missed milestones out of two is not a positive start, especially when we have a mere five years remaining to achieve that goal. Second, while the Energy Partnership has not been without success, the speed and scale are far from what we had expected when we embarked on this journey in 2021. We appreciate it can take some time to launch new ventures, but we also hear the frustration from our Community Advisory Panel about the absence of projects demonstrating material emissions reductions and from our city staff about some of the challenges they faced with, for example, the fleet charging infrastructure and streetlight acquisition projects. Third, while we understand that readying the utility system to meet the needs of this century and our evolving climate does not come without cost, energy affordability is an acute concern for our residents and businesses. It is imperative that the financial benefits of the clean energy transition are shared with Xcel’s customers and steps are taken to address the insecurities many in our community feel as they face continually rising utility bills. Finally, we must address our community’s ongoing experience with electric reliability. We appreciate and support the steps Xcel has taken to reduce wildfire risk, and we recognize that decisions such as implementing a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) can be appropriate under extreme conditions. However, Xcel has repeatedly fallen short as a partner in how these actions are planned, communicated, executed and reversed. Our community has now been subjected to three PSPS events, and each time the city experienced inadequate coordination, unusable or overly broad outage maps, insufficient details to support emergency preparedness, and extended outages impacting critical facilities, businesses, and residents. These events resulted in widespread disruption, heightened public anxiety, and real damage and losses to residents and businesses. It is simply not acceptable to turn off the power with the flick of a switch and then take four days to turn it back on. Change is needed, and we look to you for approaches and programs that will protect our homes and businesses, without depriving large portions of the

DRAFT: 1/13/2025 community from the electrical power that is essential to public health, safety and economic vitality. While we acknowledge there were improvements between the inaugural PSPS in 2024 and the most recent events, those improvements are far from what is necessary to support your customers and our community. And to be clear, our concerns are not just with PSPS events. Recent years have seen frequent, long-duration and repeat outages due to changes to system safety settings and deteriorating infrastructure. Residents and businesses have struggled to obtain timely, accurate information and faced long waiting times and call disconnections when attempting to contact customer service. Electric service interruptions threaten public safety, disrupt essential services, and impose significant economic costs. They occur too frequently, and it is unacceptable when outages recur or are prolonged due to ineffective planning, communication, or restoration efforts. We acknowledge that there have been some successes such as our work together at the legislature and Public Utilities Commission. And we have begun to see the progress of infrastructure investments that will make our community safer. Xcel has fully delivered on the Settlement and Franchise commitments for 1% undergrounding projects. And we are excited to see the progress unfolding at Chautauqua and appreciate the completed projects along North Broadway, 19th Street and East Arapahoe. Yet cumulatively, these efforts do not match the scale of the problem and the danger to our community. What is needed is an expedited program to improve system resiliency and reliability, including accelerated and expanded undergrounding. During 2025, we spent many months speaking with you and your team, exploring options with our city staff, and hearing from our community. We concluded that it was not the time to pursue a different path and, instead, we should use the opportunity to set expectations going forward so that we can successfully realize the promise of the Franchise and our partnership together. However, we must acknowledge the worsening dissatisfaction on the part of the community with the conduct of Xcel and its approach to these critical issues. In particular, many residents feel the increasing instances of power outages when we have high winds, which are the result of multiple decisions you are responsible for, including public safety power shutoff (PSPS) events and enhanced power safety settings (EPSS), as being a consequence of prioritizing litigation avoidance ahead of protecting our community. You have eroded the trust of your customers and that is a substantial concern. As you are aware, this council and our community will have multiple opportunities over the next five years to exit our Franchise if we are not satisfied that we are on the right course. This includes this year where we can decide about the missed emissions milestones, and likely again in the following years depending on publication of the final verification of the 2024 emissions by the Climate Registry. We also have the 2027 milestone and then the 10-year franchise anniversary. In addition to addressing PSPS and system reliability, these future decision points will be informed by meaningful progress in other areas of concern to our community, which we have laid out in the attachment to this letter. Again, we do value our partnership with you and your team, despite the reservations we have expressed here. However, we are requesting the following from Xcel

DRAFT: 1/13/2025 • • •

A plan that will reduce the number and impact of PSPS events Make substantial progress on hardening our infrastructure, whether through undergrounding or otherwise Properly compensate those who have suffered monetary damage.

Our desire is to continue to work cooperatively with Xcel in addressing these issues, but it is not satisfactory to require the citizens of Boulder to bear the full impact of Xcel’s current policies. We collectively need to do better. and we await Xcel’s response to the matters we have raised. We look forward to working with you on this most important set of issues. Sincerely, Boulder City Council

DRAFT: 1/13/2025

DRAFT: 1/13/2025 Franchise and Partnership Expectations Over the next five years there are multiple points at which the Boulder City Council and Boulder community will have the opportunity to consider whether continuing in franchise with Xcel Energy remains in the community’s best interest. Future decisions will be informed by the degree to which Xcel rises to the challenge of advancing the community’s climate goals and corrects PSPS, reliability and other deficiencies. To support future evaluation and discussion, the following priorities have been established: •

Wildfire Mitigation While Maintaining Reliability: Xcel must accelerate its efforts to harden the system to dramatically reduce wildfire threats while maintaining grid reliability and minimizing outages during high winds, with consideration of Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) events, Enhanced Power Safety Settings (EPSS), and weatherrelated impacts. There must be meaningful and measurable reduction of risk to the community and our city infrastructure in 2026 and in the years following. o Comprehensive Mitigation Plan: This year (2026), Xcel must deliver to the community a comprehensive plan that demonstrates immediate and continued improvements to reduce the need for PSPS and EPSS while increasing their precision and minimizing impacts when such tools are necessary. This includes reducing the number of customers impacted by outage (whether through proactive shutoff measures, adjustments to sensor settings, damage to equipment, or otherwise), accelerating the restoration of service when outages do occur, and providing programming to mitigate losses such as backup power and temporary refrigeration solutions. o PSPS: Xcel must work collaboratively with the city and our Office of Disaster Management to better prepare for future PSPS events. Xcel must improve its communications to customers and its PSPS and outage maps. We must not have another PSPS event made chaotic by inadequate and inaccurate information. o Outage transparency: Xcel must improve transparency around outages in two ways. First, Xcel must improve the fidelity and accuracy and real-time information during outages. During outages in December 2025, residents widely reported inaccurate and unreliable information about the status of their outages and time to resolution. Second, Xcel must provide useful public reporting about performance trends on overall outage times, with an ability for the public to understand in one easy place the outage times associated with PSPS, EPSS, major events and other sources of failure, as well as the cumulative outages rolled-up into a single measure. o WMP Settlement: Xcel must deliver on all the items called for within its settlement in the Wildfire Mitigation Plan proceeding. This includes executing the infrastructure hardening projects, coordinating closely with our city and county staff, and delivering on customer service expectations. o Compensation and Supportive Programming: Xcel must provide solutions for and compensation to residents and businesses that are disproportionately impacted by extended outages. This includes providing backup power solutions for customers dependent on medical equipment, supporting creation of resiliency hubs, providing solutions to our restaurants and food service providers, and financial

DRAFT: 1/13/2025 resources to offset the impacts of lost food, medicine and revenues for those most vulnerable. •

Reliability and Readying our Grid for the Electric Future: We will be closely monitoring progress of other distribution system investments, including the replacement of aged infrastructure and expansion of system capacity. Xcel must deliver solutions that modernize and enhance the reliability and resilience of our grid, ensure service quality is comparable to or better than that experienced by other municipalities in our region, and ready the system to meet our community’s future needs. These efforts must be made cost effectively and in a way that preserves affordability for ratepayers, and it will be essential that work in our community proceeds through strong collaboration with the city and its stakeholders.

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Transmission Line Reconstruction (9216): It will be imperative that as Xcel rebuilds the transmission line that runs through the mountain areas to our west, along Sunshine Canyon, through our Mount Sanitas Open Space and through the heart of our community, that you deliver successful outcomes for those that will be immediately impacted by the construction. Strong community engagement will be essential. Such reconstruction must also assure that the infrastructure is capable of withstanding winds and other environmental hazards, while maintaining reliable delivery of power to our and surrounding communities.

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Affordability: While it is appropriate within the utility construct that Xcel and its investors are able to profit from the investments made in the system, and we also understand that substantial investments are necessary to mitigate wildfire risk, improve our distribution and transmissions systems and deliver on our clean energy future, energy affordability remains a paramount value of our community. At the same time, our residents expect Boulder’s energy provider is making investments in electrification and renewables that will lead to leveling off and reducing residents’ energy costs while providing households and neighborhoods greater control and ability to innovate with how they use energy. Therefore, we will look to actions that prioritize customer benefits over profit and that ensure those most vulnerable in our community are protected from the impacts of rising utility costs. Through partnership with the city, Xcel must work to accelerate the adoption of renewables and electrification in ways to achieve emissions reductions targets, while also providing benefit and empowerment to customers. We will look for support and programmatic solutions that help households, businesses, and neighborhoods advance their energy security, foster innovation, and modernize how customers produce, use, share and manage their energy. We will also look for appropriate proportionality between the benefits accruing to Boulder residents vs Xcel’s investors.

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Progress on Grid Emissions: We will be closely monitoring progress towards the 2027 and 2030 emissions milestones. We have expectation that, irrespective of federal pressures, Xcel will stand by its commitment to our community and the state to retire all of its coal plants as scheduled or sooner, and that you will remain on track to exceed state-mandated emissions reduction goals consistent with your 2021 Clean Energy Plan.

DRAFT: 1/13/2025 Further, progress must be made in partnering with the city on closing the gap to the community’s goal of emissions free electricity by 2030. •

Valmont Coal Remediation and Ash Cleanup: Irrespective of any changes at the federal or state level, we expect Xcel to progress expeditiously in monitoring for and remediating water contamination and cleaning up the coal ash at the Valmont site, and to do so with the utmost care and assurance that there is no airborne migration of coal ash outside of your property boundary. Xcel must commit to funding adequate air quality monitoring in conjunction with the coal ash remediation, regardless of whether APCD requires air quality monitoring as part of the permit process. This monitoring should be provided by a third party supervised by a local public agency to ensure the public can have confidence in the remediation efforts. Adequate air quality monitoring throughout the remediation must include real-time monitoring of particulate matter (at least including PM2.5), periodic analysis of heavy metals (at least including lead, mercury, arsenic, chromium, cadmium selenium), silica, and monitoring of radioactive elements (at least including radium-226). Additionally, baseline monitoring must occur prior to onset of the coal ash remediation.

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Gas Infrastructure: We are enthusiastic about the opportunity to support our businesses and residents along historic Pearl Street in transitioning to clean electric solutions. Xcel must bring forward its best efforts to deliver this outcome. This project can only be successful with robust community engagement and close collaboration with our city staff and downtown business partners. We also look to see additional opportunities identified and acted upon as part of the Gas Planning Communities Pilot Program. Additionally, we look to Xcel to ensure there is an easy, accessible process for residents and businesses community-wide who want their gas meter removed to be able to do so, with a streamlined, user-friendly and expeditious path.

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Local Distributed Energy Resources: Xcel must be a transparent, proactive, and supportive partner as the community explores and seeks to develop carbon-free energy systems and new business models for distributed energy resources. This includes exploration and development of neighborhood scale microgrids and thermal networks, resilience centers, community solar and storage gardens, bi-directional electric vehicle charging, virtual power plants, and other innovations that aim to help our community better meet its energy, equity, resilience and economic development goals.