MONTROSE – Two years ago I attended the annual meeting of the Delta-Montrose Electric Association. What a gaudy sight it was. Uncle Sam himself greeted me at the gate. Inside, I saw more red, white and blue bunting than I had seen in decades. I kept waiting for the “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The music never played, but I did hear the outline of a vision. That vision then was deeply unconventional. Call it a marriage of unlikely partners, one of the Sierra Club with a Chamber of Commerce shop-at-home campaign. That’s the future I heard DMEA speakers lay out that day in June 2007. They perceived a different path moving forward, one that emphasized locally generated electricity – such as the plans announced in late September to harness the energy of fast-flowing irrigation ditches – instead of investment in far-off power plants.

At the time, DMEA was deep in controversy – and, in a way, still is. Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the wholesale supplier for DMEA and 43 other electrical co-ops, proposed to have primary ownership in two new big coal-fired power plants in southwestern Kansas. To secure favorable financing, Tri-State wanted proof of demand. As such, it asked DMEA and other co-ops for 10-year contract extensions to the year 2050.

DMEA’s directors saw this reliance on coal at mid-century as risky. Coal prices have been rising briskly. Then there’s the increasing likelihood of some sort of tax on coal, a major cause for accumulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Too, memories lingered of the bankruptcy of Colorado Ute, a wholesale electrical supplier that had built too many expensive power plants in the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s, demand had flattened.

In somewhat similar fashion, Tri-State has always focused on expanding supply. That was the foundation for its creation in the 1950s by a handful of co-ops on the Great Plains. They needed a greater expertise in handling the transmission of the electricity.

But Tri-State has devoted very little attention to what is called demand-side management. The idea, espoused by Old Snowmass-based energy analyst Amory Lovins for decades, is that demand that is clipped can be just as good as expanding supply. You don’t care how your beer is chilled, he has said, only that it gets chilled. If it can be chilled more efficiently, then that’s money saved.

DMEA had started working to reduce demand in 1998. The co-op established a subsidiary that focuses on encouraging adoption of geo-exchange technology, which taps the nearly constant 56-degree heat of the earth found 10 feet underground. To date, about 500 homes in the DMEA service area have been outfitted with geoexchange heating and cooling units, reducing demand for electricity to cool homes in summer and during winter reducing demand for both electricity and gas.

DMEA and another co-op, Carson Electric out of Taos, N.M., refused to hitch their wagons to coal beyond 2040. The other 42 co-operatives in the Tri-State “family” went along with the request.

Then, in October 2006, utilities across the country were jolted to learn that Tri-State’s plans in Kansas had been vetoed by Kathleen Sebelius, then the state’s governor. Her administration rejected a crucial air quality permit, the first time that emissions of greenhouse gases had been cited as grounds for rejecting a power plant.

“Kansas must take advantage of renewable energy and conservation as we progress

through this century,” said Sebelius, who is now secretary of health, education and welfare in the Obama administration. “These additional coal plants would have moved us in the wrong direction.”

Ed Marston, a director of DMEA since 1983, sees the Sebelius veto as pivotal. That veto stopped Tri-State in its tracks, and then the world changed. A carbon tax was being talked about then, but only as an abstraction. Now, it’s being actively debated by Congress, if in what many regard as a watered-down cap-and-trade regime.

Marston credits Tri-State with great change in the last year or two. It is, of course, pursing renewable energy projects, if for no other reason than state mandates. But he and other observers also detect a shifted mentality.

Marston favors a changed relationship altogether. As he sees it, co-ops need more autonomy. The co-ops created Tri-State. But at some point, Tri-State came to dominate the co-ops. The co-ops just became the retailers, almost like local franchises of a regional brand.

“I want more of a partnership with Tri-State instead of a top-down relationship, the way it is now,” says Marston.

He believes technological change favors regained power for the co-ops. Until recently, the bigger the new coal-fired plant was, the lower the cost of electricity. Now, however, both plants and transmission lines have become very expensive. Locally generated electricity– whether renewable or from natural gas – looks more and more competitive.

The yoking of electricity from the fast-moving waters of the Gunnison Tunnel represents part of that new effort to generate electricity locally. As well, DMEA has investigated whether it might be able to get methane from the coal mines at Somerset, near Paonia, to create electricity. Biomass remains another consideration.

There’s danger in over-simplifying this. Renewables are not easy. Up-front costs are high, and production of many sources – including wind and solar – does not necessarily coincide with demand. Storage of electricity can be done, but only at extreme expense.

The long and short is that we don’t have great alternatives to coal in the short term. Instructively, even Aspen’s representative on the board of Holy Cross Energy – the Glenwood Springs-based co-op that is also considered among the progressives – in 2004 voted for investing in a new coal-fired power plant at Pueblo.

A representative of the Colorado Rural Electric Association made this point at the DMEA meeting I attended in 2007. He seemed grumpy, and I imagined him thinking that all this talk of local renewable generation was frivolous. Coal, he said, will be with us for a long time.

He was probably right. But in climbing tall mountains, you have to start at the bottom, taking one step at a time. That’s where I see DMEA, redefining patriotism and economic development.