If you are afraid of your utility bill, you’re not alone.
Since 2020, Xcel Energy — Colorado’s largest utility — doubled its residential gas rate per unit piped to customers and hiked its electric rate 50%.
Late last year, Xcel filed two new rate hike requests — nearly 10% for electricity and 11.4% for gas.
Energy bills are complex, but there’s a simple reason prices are soaring: natural gas. Gas makes energy more expensive through volatile commodity prices, soaring delivery charges and worsening climate change.
First, U.S. gas prices rose 63% from 2024 to 2025 and could jump another 30% by 2027. This hurts the 70% of Coloradans primarily relying on gas for heat. It also increases electricity prices — while Colorado has passed 40% clean electricity, gas-fired power plants still contribute 26%.
The U.S. produces more natural gas than ever, but we’re also exporting more of it than ever. Corporations now sell 19% of the gas produced here to other countries — up from 6% in 2015 and rising fast.
Forget domestic energy security — corporations ship America’s fuel off to foreign markets that pay higher prices for gas, exposing consumers to price spikes from geopolitical shocks like Russia invading Ukraine.
Second, maintaining our aging gas pipelines keeps getting more expensive. Xcel’s gas delivery charge tripled since 2019 and now composes half of its per-unit gas price.
Xcel profits by keeping us hooked on pipelines. While Xcel charges customers at cost for gas, it earns a 9%-11% return for infrastructure investments — far above 5.5%-6.5% statewide mortgage rates and 4% savings account interest rates. As a monopoly, Xcel recovers revenue from a captive customer base — our families and businesses.
Xcel disguises its effort to pump money into an increasingly obsolete system, calling gas “a preferred heating and cooking source” in customer notices for its most recent rate increase, ignoring how it makes gas the default option. Xcel also touts “a strong natural gas system” while talking about Colorado’s net-zero emissions goals, which is like saying smoking helps cancer patients.
Keeping customers hooked on gas also ignores how advanced electric appliances have become. Cold-climate heat pumps, heat pump water heaters and induction stoves — a far cry from the electric coil stoves you grew up with — are more efficient than gas appliances, and they protect families from gas price spikes and toxic indoor air pollution.
Nationwide, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces for four years running, and installations in Colorado more than doubled last year. This means Xcel is spending on gas infrastructure right when customers are ditching that expensive system for cheaper heating options, which pushes gas bills even higher.
Third, gas is dirty. Burning it worsens Colorado’s uniquely bad smog and emits substantial climate pollution — leaked gas has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
Fossil-fuel impacts on energy bills and reliable power are clear in Xcel’s high gas price warnings from January’s winter storm or its “public safety power shut-offs” to keep winds from sparking another Marshall fire.
With gas prices soaring — and gas prices driving electric bills — what do we do? The best bet is helping families and businesses install electric appliances while replacing expensive fossil fuel power plants with renewables that generate free power once built.
This strategy is cheaper than ever because clean energy and battery costs have plummeted.
Colorado’s legislators and utility regulators are doing their part, directing Xcel to reach 100% clean energy by 2050, and zero gas system pollution by 2050, including 41% reduction by 2035.
Regulators call Colorado’s Clean Heat Plan “a directional tool rather than a rigid obligation that would compel costly steps,” giving Xcel options to keep customer bills low and invest in affordable ways to cut pollution without pouring money into outdated fossil-fuel infrastructure.
But we also need state legislators and regulators to ensure Xcel offers customers clean electrification options instead of hyping gas’ importance, hiding gas system profits, or inflating clean energy and electric appliance costs.
Families and businesses can protect themselves from volatile costs and utility profiteering by tapping state, regional and utility incentives to install electric appliances. Both of us switched to electric heat pumps that cool our homes in the summer and warm them in the winter, and we’ve cut our energy bills by cutting out volatile gas.
Gas prices will do less damage to electricity rates the faster we clean up our grid. And while the Trump administration repealed federal incentives for clean power, Coloradans can still lock in stable electricity prices through rooftop solar and batteries, often without a down payment.
We don’t need to depend on a gas network with rising fuel costs, delivery charges and climate pollution. Legislators and regulators must protect against utility efforts to dump investment into pipelines and hold Xcel to its clean energy targets.
That’s how we get off the fossil fuel roller coaster.
Silvio Marcacci, of Denver, is senior director of communications at nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation and a board advisor to the International Council on Clean Transportation and Carbon Business Council.
Dan Esposito, of Denver, is manager of the fuels and chemicals program at Energy Innovation who has briefed federal and state officials on utility decarbonization policy.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
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