HB09-1345 requires, among other things, that the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) confer with all owners and operators of transmission facilities in Colorado and with affected stakeholders and prepare a report to the General Assembly on the integrated intermediate-term and long-term plans for improving transmission infrastructure in Colorado and the region.
On February 18, 2006 Xcel Energy initiated rolling blackouts due to a power supply shortfall of nearly 400 megawatts on its electric power system. More than 371,000 Colorado electric service customers lost power for an average of more than 41 minutes. The Public Utilities Commission (PUC) asked Xcel Energy for a report on the cause of the outages, the length of time of the outages, and the poor communications the company provided to the people who called to report outages.