Monument, Woodmoor, Gleneagle and Black Forest lie in the territory of Mountain View Electric Association; Palmer Lake buys its electricity from CORE Electric Cooperative. Both co-ops’ standard residential rates now charge for a home’s busiest hour, and on the question of a single wholesale supplier they have made opposite choices.
Palmer Lake had an electric company before it had electricity. In February 1887 W. Finley Thompson, the dentist who founded the town, set up the Palmer Lake Water and Electric Light and Power Company with $75,000 of capital stock. A water company he headed laid three miles of main that year. The electric side took longer. Eben Smith installed Palmer Lake’s first acetylene lighting system at Estemere in 1899. Electricity reached the town in 1932, according to Daniel Edwards, whose histories of Palmer Lake are published by the Palmer Lake Historical Society. Two years later a book review was held in the Chautauqua auditorium to raise money for electric lights. The town council agreed to pay the building’s light bill for 60 days but would not pay for the poles.
Ninety-four years on, Palmer Lake’s power comes from CORE Electric Cooperative, a member-owned utility based in Sedalia. Monument, Woodmoor, Gleneagle and Black Forest lie in the territory of Mountain View Electric Association (MVEA), a co-op with offices in Falcon and Limon. Both co-ops raised rates this year, and the standard residential rate at each now includes a charge for a home’s heaviest hour of use. On the question of supply, they have gone opposite ways. CORE stopped buying most of its power from Xcel Energy at the end of 2025 and now assembles its own supply. MVEA has signed on with its wholesaler, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, under a contract that runs to the end of 2066.
Where the line runs
CORE’s published service boundary takes in 99 percent of Palmer Lake’s land area and none of Monument, Woodmoor, Gleneagle or Black Forest, according to the Independent’s comparison of that boundary with the Census Bureau’s. That is a share of land, not of customers. MVEA publishes no comparable boundary file; the federal government’s map of utility territories places the center of each of the other four communities in MVEA’s. Across the county line, Larkspur and Perry Park are CORE territory too. Colorado Springs is served by its city-owned utility, Colorado Springs Utilities. Patrick Davidson, Palmer Lake’s town administrator, wrote in a Sept. 25 memo to trustees that he tries to meet “the Town’s electric provider” once a quarter.
The two co-ops differ in size. CORE had 182,993 active services in 2025 and calls itself the largest electric distribution cooperative in Colorado, serving nearly 400,000 people in parts of 11 counties. MVEA reported 65,946 customers to the federal government for 2025 and counts more than 58,500 members across a 5,000-square-mile territory in parts of eight counties. Its rate book includes a schedule named for Schriever Space Force Base.
Each co-op’s rates are set by its elected board. MVEA published notice of its October rate changes on July 8 and a revised notice on Aug. 26; each gave members 20 days to file written comments and left the board free to hold a hearing.
How the line got there
MVEA began as a do-it-yourself project. In December 1940 about 150 people gathered at the Black Forest Community Center “to see about getting electricity to the areas beyond Colorado Springs,” in the co-op’s account of its founding. They incorporated in 1941 and borrowed to build an electric system. Membership cost $5, and members were expected to help build the lines to their own houses. The new co-op started by buying the Commonwealth Electric Company and its generator in Limon, along with the power lines running down Highway 24 to Falcon.
CORE is three years older. Known until Aug. 30, 2021, as the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, or IREA, it was founded in 1938 by residents of the Bailey area.
Monument had an electric main before either co-op existed. In 1934 the Forest Service, which ran a tree nursery a mile west of the town, listed among its needs a power line “from the light main at Monument.” One was built in 1937, from the town to the nursery’s Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Forest Service records quoted in Edwards’s history of the nursery show an agreement in August 1943 between the Pike National Forest and “the Electric Association.” A memo from February 1957 then records that Mountain View Electric Association had “purchased this service area from the IREA in 1951.” The co-op’s general superintendent, identified only as Feddern, said it planned to rebuild its 2,300-volt line there to 7,200 volts.
What it costs
Across their whole territories, the two co-ops charge about what Colorado Springs Utilities and Xcel Energy charge per kilowatt-hour. Their households use more electricity.
| Utility (residential averages, 2025) | Customers | Price per kWh | Use per month | Monthly bill |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mountain View Electric Association | 61,343 | 15.65¢ | 877 kWh | $137.24 |
| CORE Electric Cooperative | 168,587 | 15.62¢ | 843 kWh | $131.72 |
| Colorado Springs Utilities | 220,059 | 15.43¢ | 602 kWh | $92.91 |
| Xcel Energy (Public Service Co. of Colorado) | 1,379,910 | 15.90¢ | 584 kWh | $92.91 |
The four prices sit within half a cent of each other. The difference is at the meter. MVEA’s average residential customer used 877 kilowatt-hours a month in 2025, 46 percent more than the average Colorado Springs Utilities customer, and paid about $44 a month more. The federal figures are averages across each utility’s whole territory, which for MVEA extends onto the Eastern Plains, and they do not say why co-op homes use more.
Both co-ops raised rates at the start of 2026. Tri-State raised its wholesale rate 7.5 percent for 2026, citing tariffs, a turbulent regulatory environment and higher market prices; it says its increases over the previous decade averaged about 1 percent a year. Wholesale power is about 62 percent of MVEA’s operating expenses. MVEA’s board followed with an 8.5 percent increase across all rate classes, about $11.90 a month for a home using 900 kilowatt-hours. CORE raised its rates by about 5 percent in September 2025 and by an average of 6.7 percent in January.
Paying for the busiest hour
CORE already bills homes by their peak. Its residential members pay a $20 monthly service charge, 11.55 cents a kilowatt-hour plus a quarterly power-cost adjustment (0.379 cents for the last quarter of 2026), and $5.47 for each kilowatt of their highest one-hour use between 4 and 8 p.m. CORE’s website works an example. Cook a roast while the dryer runs, and an 8-kilowatt peak produces a demand charge of $43.76. Wait until the dryer finishes, and the same roast and the same laundry carry a demand charge of $21.88.
MVEA’s version took effect on Oct. 1, and residential members see it first on November’s bills. The monthly grid-access charge stays at $39.50. The energy charge falls from 12.475 cents to 11.269 cents a kilowatt-hour, and a new demand charge of $2 a kilowatt applies to the home’s single busiest hour of the month, at any time of day on weekdays, six holidays excepted. Members could instead pick a time-of-day rate, with power at 34.5 cents a kilowatt-hour from 5 to 9 p.m. on weekdays, the same holidays excepted, and 8.625 cents the rest of the time. In July, MVEA told members about a third option, a flat rate with no demand charge, which its legal notice priced at 14.455 cents. The board deleted the flat rate on Aug. 18, six weeks before it would have taken effect.
Worked through for one household, the change is modest. A home using 900 kilowatt-hours a month, the figure MVEA cites as average, paid $151.78 under the rate in force from January through September. On the demand rate it pays $140.92 plus $2 for each kilowatt of its busiest hour. A peak of 4 kilowatts brings the bill to $148.92, a little less than before. The two rates break even at about 5.4 kilowatts. A home whose busiest hour reaches 12 kilowatts would pay $164.92. The loads MVEA tells members to stagger are electric-vehicle chargers, clothes dryers, ovens, air conditioners, water heaters, hot tubs, well pumps and electric resistance heat. The co-op expects about 80 percent of residential members to see little or no change. Solar owners face a particular one. On the default demand rate, their banked credits still offset energy charges but cannot be applied to the demand charge, and existing net-metering customers were not grandfathered.
Where the power comes from
MVEA buys its power from Tri-State, a Westminster-based wholesaler owned by about 40 member utilities in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming. On June 5, 2025, MVEA was one of 32 members to sign a revised contract that runs until Dec. 31, 2066, and continues after that until one side gives five years’ notice. Federal regulators accepted the contracts in August 2025 and on May 26, 2026, approved a settlement of the issues left open. A member may still leave early, on two years’ notice and a termination payment. Tri-State’s policy lets a member supply up to 20 percent of its own needs from local or renewable sources it owns or controls; the 2026 settlement revised the rules for such projects on the Eastern Interconnection, one of the country’s two main power grids.
Leaving is possible, and expensive. United Power, the Brighton-based co-op, left Tri-State in May 2024 after four years of argument before federal regulators, who set the formula that produced an exit fee of $627 million. Tri-State had first sought $1.6 billion. Its chief executive said the departure would raise United Power’s rates 9.5 percent. “It is the price of freedom,” he told the Colorado Sun.
CORE took the other road. It bought much of its members’ power from Xcel’s Public Service Company of Colorado from the early 1990s until December 2025, it told state air regulators in a March 31 letter. Since January it has supplied its members from a portfolio of its own, though it still pays Xcel to carry that power over Xcel’s transmission lines. The plan has changed along the way. CORE had signed contracts with two wind farms totaling 349 megawatts and a solar plant with 200 megawatts of panels and 100 megawatts of batteries. All three depended on Xcel’s transmission network, waited years for a connection, and, once federal support for renewable projects changed, were “no longer viable,” the letter says. CORE has since contracted for 75 megawatts of solar and 100 megawatts of batteries connected directly to its own system, due to start operating in 2026 and 2027. It told the state it expects to exceed the emissions targets in its own clean-energy plan for both years. It has also signed up gas: the 120-megawatt Arapahoe plant from this year, the 300-megawatt Spindle Hill peaking plant from spring 2027, and a new 156-megawatt peaker, Canyon Peak Power, on which construction began in 2025. CORE left Xcel’s contract. It has not left Xcel’s coal plant: it owns 25.33 percent of Comanche Unit 3 in Pueblo, which Xcel operates and which is due to close no later than Jan. 1, 2031.
Xcel’s own expansion has reached El Paso County, though the county has no Xcel customers. Its Power Pathway, a 550-mile, 345-kilovolt transmission loop, needed a 45-mile segment across the county. County commissioners denied the permits on July 24, 2025, citing among other concerns the risk that the lines would start wildfires. Xcel asked the state Public Utilities Commission to overrule them. By late April 2026 KOAA reported that the commission had done so, and that construction was underway along the Lincoln–El Paso county line.
Wind, wires and fire
Both co-ops publish reliability figures that look excellent. MVEA’s annual report gives an average of 29.94 minutes without power per customer in 2025, “well below the national average.” CORE reports “99.99% service availability.” Both are consistent with what the co-ops reported to the federal government with “major event days” left out, an exclusion the industry’s reliability standard allows. With those days counted, MVEA’s 2025 average was 130 minutes and CORE’s was 381. Colorado Springs Utilities, which reported no major event days, recorded 41 minutes, and Xcel 360.
Wind is the old problem. On April 10, 1948, a windstorm blew down the line serving the Monument nursery and burned out a motor in its cold-storage plant. Wildfire prevention now shapes how both co-ops run their lines. MVEA inspects its roughly 94,000 wood poles on a 10-year cycle and trims trees on a five-year rotation. On Red Flag days it may switch parts of its system into what it calls one-shot mode, which disables the automatic re-energizing that normally restores a line after a branch brushes it. A line that trips in one-shot mode stays dark until crews have inspected every mile of it. During an April 2024 windstorm, CORE used comparable “alternate relay settings” at its substations rather than cutting power in advance, as Xcel did to 55,000 customers. A CORE executive told Denver7 that a preemptive shutoff remained part of its program, as a last resort.
The next big load
The newest question for both co-ops is data centers. Asked in its own published answers whether it can choose whether to serve one, CORE replies that it has “an obligation to serve customers within our certificated service territory,” though the timing depends on available capacity. Developers pay for the substations and lines their projects need, it says. By CORE’s count, data centers took less than 2.1 percent of its retail sales in 2025, and one project in development would reach 7 to 8 percent of its load once fully built; CORE does not say where. To its own question of whether Colorado has enough electric capacity to support unlimited growth, it answers, “Typically, no.”
Palmer Lake has already acted. On Sept. 10 its trustees voted 4-0, with three of the seven absent, for a six-month moratorium on data-center applications, which runs until March 10, 2027. Of the three studies the resolution requires, one is consultation with CORE on capacity, upgrades, lead times and “whether costs could be shifted to existing customers.” Two weeks later Davidson told trustees that CORE had confirmed that for development, data centers included, “the developer/business is responsible for expansion of the grid.” Near Monument, a data center on unincorporated land could fall to either co-op, depending on the site. CORE’s boundary touches the town’s northwest corner; due west, it begins three to four and a half miles beyond the town limits. Elsewhere around Monument the federal map shows MVEA’s territory, where the power would come from Tri-State, as the Independent reported in June.
In February 1957 the Forest Service took stock of the line that carried MVEA’s power from the meter into the Monument nursery, which the agency owned itself. “Each wind that blows breaks either our poles or wires,” a memo said. The co-op would make repairs only for a fee, and the line “may develop into a bad fire hazard for us.” Sixty-nine years later, MVEA’s answer to that hazard on the windiest days is to leave a tripped line dark until somebody has inspected it.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: What the Garden of the Gods Data-Center Fight Means for the Tri-Lakes (June 2026; which utility a data center on county land near Monument would draw on) · I Left Xfinity for Conexon Connect’s Two-Gig Fiber (July 2026; MVEA’s fiber network) · Woodmoor, Explained (July 2026; Woodmoor’s utilities)
The co-ops: CORE, letter to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on its Clean Energy Plan (March 31, 2026) · MVEA, 2026 rate adjustment and FAQ, July 8 legal notice, Aug. 26 legal notice, Residential Demand Rate 16.01, Residential Time-of-Day Rate 16.02, Who We Are, wildfire mitigation, and the CEO’s columns in Colorado Country Life: November 2025, December 2025, May 2026 (annual report), July 2026, September 2026 · CORE, rate changes, demand charge, wholesale power cost adjustment, energy transformation, data-center FAQ, 2025 annual report, the co-op difference, service area · IREA’s 2021 rebranding announcement
Wholesale power: Tri-State, 2026 budget and rate change (Sept. 10, 2025), Form 8-K on the revised member contracts (June 5, 2025), annual report on Form 10-K for 2025 and quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2026
Federal data: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861 detailed data (2025 final, released Oct. 7, 2026) · Census Bureau, TIGERweb
Town record: Town of Palmer Lake, Board of Trustees packets for Sept. 10, 2026 (Resolution 31-2026 and the administrator’s memo on it), Sept. 24, 2026 (minutes of Sept. 10), Oct. 8, 2026 (minutes of Sept. 24, approving those minutes) and Oct. 22, 2026 (the administrator’s Sept. 25 weekly memo)
History: Daniel W. Edwards, Dr. William Finley Thompson: Dental Surgeon and Founder of Palmer Lake (2008), pp. 28, 31 · The Glen Park Companies and Their Chautauquas (Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2011), p. 53 · The Rocklands Hotel at Palmer Lake (PLHS, 2012), p. 30 · The U.S. Forest Service Monument Nursery, 1907–1965 (PLHS, 2024), pp. 11, 119, 148, 229, 260–61 · Palmer Lake Historical Society
Other reporting: Colorado Sun, Colorado’s two largest energy co-ops break from Xcel, Tri-State (April 30, 2024), Xcel asks to skip public hearings to expedite projects in Elbert, El Paso counties (Oct. 2, 2025) and Elbert County effort to block Xcel’s $1.7B Power Pathway upended by PUC (April 15, 2026) · KOAA, Xcel Energy’s ‘Power Pathways’ laying foundation near El Paso County (April 29, 2026) · Denver7, How CORE Electric’s approach differed from Xcel Energy’s during Colorado’s dangerous windstorm (April 12, 2024)
Methodology
Prices, usage, bills and outage minutes come from the Energy Information Administration’s final 2025 Form EIA-861 files, released Oct. 7, 2026. The Independent divided each utility’s reported residential revenue by its residential sales to get an average price, and by its residential customer count over 12 months to get an average bill and average use. These are averages over each utility’s whole territory, not the Tri-Lakes alone, and the revenue a utility reports may not match any one customer’s bill. Outage minutes are the System Average Interruption Duration Index under the IEEE standard, reported both with and without “major event days,” the industry’s term for days whose outages pass a statistical threshold. MVEA’s published 29.94 minutes compares with the 29.9 it reported without those days and 130.4 with them. CORE’s “99.99% service availability” allows at most about 53 minutes out of the year’s 525,600; its federal figure is 52.2 minutes without major event days (99.990 percent) and 381 with them (99.928 percent).
Which co-op serves which community comes from overlaying CORE’s Active Service Boundary, published on the co-op’s own map server, on the Census Bureau’s boundaries for Palmer Lake, Monument and Larkspur and for the Woodmoor, Gleneagle, Black Forest and Perry Park census-designated places. MVEA does not publish a downloadable boundary. Its service in those communities was checked against the federal Electric Retail Service Territories layer compiled by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which places each community’s center in MVEA’s territory. That layer is too coarse for any finer use, and in places it is plainly wrong.
The household example applies two sets of MVEA rates to a home using 900 kilowatt-hours a month, the usage MVEA cites as average. One set is the rate in force from January through September 2026, shown in the co-op’s July 8 legal notice. The other is rate schedules 16.01 and 16.02, effective Oct. 1, 2026. Taxes and franchise fees are left out. The CORE example is the co-op’s own.
The historical account rests on Edwards’s books, read in scanned form, and on the Forest Service memos and annual reports quoted in his history of the Monument nursery. Page numbers are the printed ones.
Using this reporting? Credit The Monument Independent and link to this article: https://monumentindependent.com/news/tri-lakes-electricity-who-keeps-the-lights-on/. Our guidelines are at Using Our Reporting.
