cel Energy customers are facing the risk of their electricity rates doubling or even tripling as the company launches an unprecedented spending plan to build new generation and transmission and feed power-hungry data centers.

The company, the state’s largest electricity provider with 1.6 million customers, is set to invest $22.3 billion in Colorado by 2032. That is more than in any of the seven other states in which it operates. 

The investments will raise its electric assets in the state, the so-called rate base upon which rates are set, from $8 billion in 2021 to $36 billion in 2029 and more than $44.6 billion in 2032, according to company filings.

“I can’t get comfortable approving anything like the level of resource need and investment the company is seeking,” Colorado Public Utilities Commission Chairman Eric Blank said at a meeting earlier this month. “That just seems like an enormous increase.”

Xcel Energy makes money building plants and transmission lines and then getting a return, set by the PUC, on those capital investments. The more they build the more they earn.

Read more from Mark Jaffe at ColoradoSun.com.

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