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Recent Articles from Allen Best
Forget the handicap
Renewable energy – stand on your own legs or leave center stage. Natural gas, the limelight is all on you. That’s the perspective of several panelists who will speak at […]
Research rock star: Smart grid star
If you look at the houses in a typical neighborhood, few have roofs facing directly south. Even when they do, dormers in the house or nearby trees may block the […]
Research rock star: Efficiency star
To ensure that electricity is available when we want it, we currently require a complex array of generating technologies. We put on costly peaking power plants to meet peak demands, […]
Lake Mead’s decline: Not just a Vegas problem
The day we visited Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, the reservoir was at 42 percent of capacity and dropping, as it has been for most of the last 10 years. Vegas is a gambling town, and the house knows the odds. That's why Pat Mulroy, who heads the Southern Nevada Water Authority, surely calculated the c...
Flowing uphill: Aurora’s Prairie Waters project
If you ever tried to walk up a trail with 1,000 feet of vertical gain, then you have an idea of what Aurora's new water supply must do. To defy gravity, the Prairie Waters system requires energy - lots of it.
King Coal, politics and the new energy economy
Comanche 3 began generating electricity July 6 on the prairie just outside Pueblo. "The monster has risen," read a sign deep within the bowels of the power plant, Colorado's largest, when I visited in August. The project employed as many as 2,400 workers, including pipe fitters and boilermakers fro...
state of the state: transportation
Tom R. Skancke comes across like somebody trying to sell snow tires in Florida. Earnest, crisp and well-rehearsed, he has you fingering your credit card. But do you really need […]
Gerald Gallegos: an empire built one house at a time
The life of Gerald Gallegos was not quite rags to riches, but it was close. Gallegos, who founded one what has become one of the nation’s largest masonry companies, died […]
Telluride’s treasure trove
The Telluride Mountainfilm festival has expanded significantly in the 21 years of my acquaintance. There are more films, more speakers, more themes. Galleries in Telluride have been pressed into service, […]
Telluride’s festival of surprises
(Editor’s note: This is the first of two parts) Wildly irresponsible though this may be, I nonetheless nominate Greg Mortenson as the speaker who best exemplifies Telluride Mountainfilm, the annual […]
Shorter winters, hotter summers
Colorado’s Western Slope at mid-century will become hotter. Crops such as corn and alfalfa will need more water. Winters will likely become shorter, runoff will occur earlier in the year, […]
Taking it to the bridge
If politics makes for strange bedfellows, check out what the elixir of surprisingly abundant supplies of natural gas has done. Environmental organizations and natural gas drillers have gotten almost gooey-eyed with visions of gas backing up renewables and displacing coal in electrical generation. T...
