DRAFT City Council Letter to Xcel

DRAFT: 12/23/2025 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 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 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 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, and executed. 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 risks to health, safety, and economic activity. 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.

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Compounding these challenges was a lack of transparency and proactive communication regarding changes to system safety settings implemented in 2024 and 2025, which have contributed to frequent and extended outages many on days and impacting areas that are not reasonably considered high risk. Residents and businesses have struggled to obtain timely, accurate information and faced long wait times and call disconnections when attempting to contact customer service. In 2025, Boulder also experienced additional widespread outages unrelated to wildfire mitigation, further eroding confidence in system reliability. 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 would be remiss, however, in not also elevating the positives. Xcel has fully delivered on the Settlement and Franchise commitments for 1% undergrounding projects. We are excited to see the progress unfolding at Chautauqua and appreciate the completed projects along North Broadway, 19th Street and East Arapahoe. We have had success together at the legislature in expanding access to solar. We worked together at the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to accelerate the retirement of coal. And we have begun to see the progress of infrastructure investments that will make our community safer, as well as some positive steps to work more collaboratively in planning and executing PSPS events, that, together, will, hopefully, help to restore our community’s trust in Xcel as a reliable service provider. 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. As we look forward to these next five years, we expect to see accelerated progress toward our shared goals. Towards that end, we would like to set some clear expectations for the next few years that will be material for the decision making of our council and the community. Specifically, criteria we will look to next year and in future decision years include: •

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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. 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. Progress on Grid Emissions: We will be closely monitoring progress towards the 2027 and 2030 emissions milestones. We have expectation that, irrespective of federal

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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. 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. Wildfire Mitigation: 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 in the event a PSPS becomes necessary. We must not have another PSPS event made chaotic by inadequate and inaccurate information. 9216 Reconstruction: It will be imperative that as Xcel rebuilds this transmission line through our community and our open space lands that you deliver successful outcomes for those that will be immediately impacted by the construction. Strong community engagement will be essential. 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. Reliability and Readying our Grid for the Electric Future: We will be closely monitoring progress of the planned 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. 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. 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

DRAFT: 12/23/2025 third party supervised by a local public agency to ensure the public can have confidence in the remediation efforts. 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. Again, we do value our partnership with you and your team. While there have been some bumps in the road over these last five years, we are tremendously optimistic about the recent progress and opportunities on our horizon. Sincerely, Boulder City Council