Note: This post is the latest edition of Independence Institute’s annual analysis of federal electricity data distilled for Colorado. Click here to see past editions with data from 2023 and 2024.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) published its latest Electric Power Monthly report late last month. The February 2026 edition is current through December 2025, with the data being preliminary until the EIA releases its final Electric Power Annual report this October. Until that time, however, the Electric Power Monthly report offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date look at how Colorado’s electricity sector performed last year.
Here’s how Colorado’s electric grid changed in 2025.
Generation
In 2025, Colorado generated 56,847 gigawatt-hours of electricity in-state. While many states were trying to expand generation to meet the needs of data centers, generation in Colorado declined by almost 2,000 GWh, from 58,798 GWh in 2024.
Colorado’s grid relied predominantly on natural gas, which comprised 30.7 percent of utility-scale electricity generation. That’s on par with its generation last year of 30.4 percent. Natural gas was followed closely by wind, which generated 29 percent of Colorado’s utility-scale electricity in 2025. That is a slight decline from 2024, when wind provided 30 percent of in-state electricity generation.
Coal’s share of electricity generation ticked downward notably, from 28.1 percent in 2024 down to 23.7 percent in 2025. It’s likely Colorado’s decline in coal generation, and overall generation, of about 2,000 GWh is due to the breakdown of Comanche Unit 3, which has been offline since August 2025 for turbine repairs. S&P Global data shows that Comanche Unit 3 went from producing 4.7 GWh in 2023 to only 2.3 GWh in 2025. Compensating for this outage has extended the life of Comanche Unit 2 to the end of 2026 from its planned retirement date in 2025.
Solar generation picked up as a share of total generation, from eight percent to 13.2 percent. This was a production increase of 6.9 TWh to 7.8 TWh. However, this 846 GWh increase in solar generation did fully offset the decline in coal generation, suggesting that solar’s growth as a proportion of total generation is in fact due to a shrinking of the pie. Wind generation was down from 17.6 TWh to 17.1 TWh. Hydroelectric made up a small share of total generation, only 3.14 percent, and biomass continues to make up only 0.1 percent of total generation.
In total, fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) produced 54.4 percent of Colorado’s utility-scale electricity, while renewables of all forms produced 45.6 percent.
Net Summer Capacity
Colorado’s net summer capacity, defined by the EIA as the maximum output its generating resources can supply to the grid during periods of summer peak demand, increased in 2025 compared with 2024.
Colorado’s total 2025 system net summer capacity was roughly 20.9 GW, up from 19.8 gigawatts in 2024. Fossil fuels were responsible for around 10.6 GW of that capacity, while renewables and storage provided the remaining 10.3 GW.
Colorado is expected to add about 5,000 MW of new net summer capacity between 2026 and 2030. About half, or 48 percent, is expected to be solar photovoltaic, and another 26 percent is going to be battery storage. Within 2026, 133.2 MW of natural gas combustion turbines will be added to Colorado’s grid, with another 600 MW of onshore wind turbines, 560.7 MW of solar photovoltaic, and 250 MW of battery storage.
By the end of 2026, the EIA expects 762 MW of conventional steam coal to retire, with the total reaching 2,536 MW by the end of 2030. The EIA still expects that Comanche Unit 2 and Craig Unit 1 will retire by the end of 2026.
Annual Capacity Factors
An electric resource’s “capacity factor” refers to the ratio of electricity actually produced by a generating unit compared to the theoretical maximum it could have produced if it operated at continuous full power during a given period of time.
As intermittent renewable energy resources like wind and solar become increasingly responsible for Colorado’s energy supply, capacity factor data takes on a heightened role in explaining future reliability concerns with the state’s electric grid. Unlike the thermal plants (coal and gas) that have traditionally formed the backbone of the Colorado’s electric system, intermittent renewables cannot modulate their output to meet system demand. They simply produce what they can when weather conditions permit.
In 2025, Colorado’s wind fleet had an average annual capacity factor of 36.6 percent, while the state’s solar resources had an average annual capacity factor of 19.6 percent. This is slightly more than the national average capacity factor of 34.2 percent for wind, and less than the 24.4 percent capacity factor for solar photovoltaic.
Average Electricity Prices
In 2025, the average residential price of electricity delivered to Colorado customers was 15.85 cents per kilowatt hour, up about six percent from 14.92 cents per kWh paid in 2024. This differs from the
Colorado’s residential rates were lower than the national average of 17.3 cents per kWh. However, Colorado’s average retail rates were the highest of any state in the broader Mountain region, which includes Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Colorado’s residential rates were about 9.5 percent higher than the average within the Mountain region, widening the affordability gap since 2024, where the difference was only about seven percent.
