When extreme winds tore across Colorado’s Front Range in December 2025, Xcel Energy did something that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: it deliberately cut power to thousands of homes and businesses before the gusts could turn its own power lines into ignition sources. The shutoffs worked as intended, keeping energized wires away from tinder-dry grass and brush. But for the customers left in the dark, many of them for far longer than the wind event itself, the experience raised a pointed question: how much disruption is acceptable in the name of wildfire prevention?
Neither Xcel nor the Colorado Public Utilities Commission has published a precise count of how many customers lost power during the December 2025 event, how long individual outages lasted, or which specific circuits were de-energized. News reports have consistently described the scope as “thousands,” but that figure is approximate and shifts with each activation because the circuits targeted depend on where fire risk concentrates during a given storm. Without official numbers, the scale and duration of the December shutoff remain only loosely documented in the public record.
That uncertainty is now layered on top of a regulatory framework that will govern Xcel’s Public Safety Power Shutoff program through 2027. As of spring 2026, the utility and Colorado regulators are still working to close gaps exposed by the program’s early activations, and residents across the Front Range are bracing for another high-wind season with no guarantee that the next planned outage will go more smoothly than the last.
How the shutoff program works
Xcel Energy alone decides when to activate a PSPS event. According to the City of Boulder’s guidance for residents, the utility weighs sustained wind speeds, humidity levels, and localized fire risk before ordering crews to de-energize specific circuits. The goal is to eliminate the chance that a downed or arcing power line sparks a wildfire during the most dangerous conditions.
The tradeoff comes on the back end. Once winds subside, Xcel cannot simply flip a switch. Every de-energized line must be physically inspected and cleared before crews restore power. Xcel Energy-Colorado President Robert Kenney acknowledged the constraint publicly after hurricane-force winds downed lines and fanned wildfires across the state in late 2025. In remarks reported by the Associated Press (no direct link to the AP story is available in the sourced material), Kenney said inspections must happen before service returns. The City of Boulder’s FAQ puts it bluntly: restoration “can take hours or days.”
The number of customers affected varies with each event. Xcel has not published a fixed count of households in PSPS-eligible zones, because the circuits targeted for de-energization shift depending on where the highest fire risk concentrates during a given storm. The description “thousands” appears consistently in news coverage but should be understood as an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a verified total for any single event.
What regulators now require
Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved a settlement agreement for Xcel’s 2025 through 2027 Wildfire Mitigation Plan under Proceeding No. 24A-0296E. The plan locks in several binding commitments tied to the PSPS program: integration with the incident command structures used by fire agencies, a dedicated PSPS “Playbook” governing operational decisions, identification of critical customers and facilities for priority treatment, and stronger communications and restoration protocols.
Those requirements grew directly out of problems. After a PSPS event in April 2024, the PUC investigated and issued interim recommendations to shore up consumer protections. The commission found gaps in coordination with emergency responders, inadequate outreach to customers who rely on electrically powered medical devices, and weak mapping tools that left people unsure whether their address was in a shutoff zone. The available public record does not detail the specific operational failures during the April 2024 event itself, such as how many customers were affected or how long outages lasted, only that the investigation identified systemic shortcomings serious enough to warrant interim corrective orders. The approved 2025 through 2027 plan folds those interim fixes into a longer-term framework.
In its public overview of the plan, the PUC highlights the PSPS Playbook, expanded vegetation management, and tighter coordination with public safety agencies as the core tools for reducing ignition risk. Regulators describe the goal as balancing fire prevention with “safe, reliable, and reasonable” service, language that signals they view extended outages as a serious cost, not just an inconvenience.
How Colorado’s program compares to California’s
Readers familiar with wildfire-driven shutoffs may wonder how Xcel’s PSPS program compares to the large-scale events carried out by Pacific Gas & Electric and other California utilities. The available sourced material for this article does not include a direct comparison of the two states’ programs, their relative scale, or their regulatory structures. What can be said is that Colorado’s program is newer and has so far operated at a smaller geographic scale than California’s, which at its peak affected millions of customers across vast rural and suburban territories. A meaningful comparison would require data on customer counts, outage durations, restoration timelines, and ratepayer costs from both states, none of which is present in the public documents reviewed here.
Similarly, the sourced material does not include figures on what Xcel’s wildfire mitigation efforts cost ratepayers or how those costs are allocated across customer classes. The PUC’s settlement approval governs the scope of the mitigation plan, but publicly available summaries do not break out the dollar amounts customers will pay for PSPS-related infrastructure, vegetation management, or grid hardening.
Gaps the plan has not closed
For all the new requirements on paper, several critical questions remain unanswered heading into the 2026 fire-weather season.
Restoration equity. No public data from Xcel or the PUC shows whether rural communities with fewer monitoring assets and longer line distances receive the same restoration speed as urban corridors closer to crew staging areas. The April 2024 investigation flagged this concern, but neither the utility nor the commission has published measurable outcomes from the interim improvements that followed.
Outage duration tracking. Neither Xcel nor the PUC has released a comparative analysis of restoration timelines across different PSPS events. Without average or median outage durations broken down by geography or customer type, there is no way for the public to judge whether the new plan is producing faster recoveries or whether some neighborhoods consistently end up waiting longest.
Backup resources during extended outages. The settlement requires Xcel to coordinate with emergency managers and identify critical facilities, but available public records do not detail how many heating centers, phone-charging stations, or backup-powered shelters will actually be operational during a PSPS. They also do not address how far residents in high-risk zones may need to travel to reach those resources, or how people without vehicles or with mobility challenges will be supported during multi-day power losses.
Trigger transparency. Xcel’s PSPS Playbook governs the specific weather thresholds that prompt a shutoff, but the full document has not been published in a publicly accessible format. Customers who want to understand exactly when a forecasted wind event might cross the line into a planned outage are directed to the PUC’s E-Filings system, a technical regulatory database that most people will never navigate.
What Colorado residents should do before the next shutoff
The practical reality for households in fire-prone parts of the Front Range is that PSPS events will continue, and outages may stretch well beyond the hours when winds are at their worst. The PUC’s consumer protection measures now require Xcel to identify and flag customers who depend on electrically powered medical equipment as critical, but that process depends on customers making sure the utility has their information. Residents who use oxygen concentrators, home dialysis machines, or other life-sustaining devices should contact Xcel directly to confirm their critical-customer status.
Beyond medical needs, families in PSPS-eligible areas should plan for the basics: how to keep phones charged, how to manage refrigerated medications and food, and how to maintain safe temperatures in a home without electric heat or air conditioning for 24 hours or longer. The City of Boulder’s FAQ offers a starting checklist, and local emergency management offices can point residents toward community resources.
Regulators have tightened the rules, and Xcel has formalized its procedures. But the data that would show whether those changes are translating into fairer, faster recoveries on the ground does not yet exist in the public record. As more PSPS events occur under the 2025 through 2027 plan, the answers to who loses power, for how long, and with what support will determine whether Colorado’s approach to wildfire risk is actually working for the people it is supposed to protect.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
