Northern Front Range electric cooperative United Power is moving forward with its renewable energy growth plan, despite a sweeping anti-clean energy campaign by the Trump administration, signing a deal for a 150-megawatt solar farm near Brush.
The agreement with utility Aypa Power also calls for the creation of a parallel 600 megawatt-hour battery storage facility next to the solar farm, allowing the power plant to provide “available” electricity when the sun is not shining and helping to stabilize energy supplies. Aypa Power, an affiliate of private equity firm Blackstone, will build and operate the Fortress project in Morgan County, and United Power has a deal to buy all the power when it comes online in 2027.
United Power is “on a journey to diversify and localize the electricity we buy and deliver to our members,” said Mark Gabriel, president and CEO of the Brighton-based cooperative with 300,000 customers. United Power calls it a “hyper-localized power system” and is betting on local deals as “the future of power generation,” Gabriel said in an interview.
The cooperative currently records electricity consumption of 680 MW on peak summer days, with demand increasing by 30 to 50 MW per year even without the major attractions of the Internet and AI data centers. Two data centers are planned for the United Power site, “if not more,” said Gabriel.
“We need all the capacity we can get,” he said.
United Power's customers include the Coal Creek and Golden Gate canyons in the foothills, extending northeast to fast-growing communities in the Interstate 25 and Interstate 76 corridors, including Longmont, Brighton, Erie, Firestone and Frederick. The cooperative in 2024 left the umbrella cooperative Tri-State Generation and Transmission in a pause to accelerate the transition to renewable energy for United Power customers and guarantee local energy sources with predictable prices.
Falling prices to build utility-scale solar and storage facilities have allowed cooperatives to break away from larger providers that often operate coal or natural gas power plants in other states. United Power also believed that, as Tri-State's largest member at the time, it had to bear more than its share of the entire group's overhead costs.
It is Aypa Power's job to align its projects to receive the remaining federal tax credits before they expire under the terms of Congress' One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Gabriel said. “That’s not really our driver,” Gabriel said. “We buy the electricity and they have to chase it.”