Colorado voters said much the same thing when they
approved, over the vehement objections of most energy companies, a proposal
mandating that 10 percent of the state's electricity must come from wind and
solar power by 2015. The law, Amendment 37, makes Colorado the 18th state
with an environmentally friendly energy standard, but the first one to have
bypassed the Legislature and put the rule into place through referendum. An
energy bill similar to the one the voters approved was defeated by Colorado's
Legislature three times in the last three years. "Because it's a
conservative Western state with a strong fossil-fuel industry, as well as the
first one passed by a popular referendum, Colorado represents something of a
breakthrough," said Alan Nogee, the energy program director at the Union of
Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit research and advocacy group based in
Cambridge, Mass.