Colorado Law Creates Transparency at Rural Electric Co-ops
Originally published at ILSR.org
After moving to Colorado, Joe Smyth found he was barred from participating in his generation and transmission cooperative — despite a Colorado law promoting co-op transparency.
For this episode of the Local Energy Rules Podcast, host John Farrell speaks with Joe Smyth, researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute and author of CleanCooperative.com. Farrell and Smyth discuss barriers to democratic participation in rural electric cooperative decision-making and how to promote transparency at all electric co-ops.
Listen to the full episode and explore more resources below — including a transcript and summary of the conversation.
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Reforming the Rural Electric Cooperative
Joe Smyth has a history of environmental activism and clean energy advocacy, but did not take an interest in electric cooperatives until he was served by one. At a board meeting for his cooperative, Smyth watched as the co-op leaders grappled with the declining costs of solar energy.
In his view, the cooperative had two choices: treat solar energy as a threat and clamp down on net metering, or embrace the transition and support members as they go solar. He soon realized, however, that their decision was not that simple. Distribution cooperatives like his get their power from a larger wholesale power provider: the generation and transmission cooperative.
Rural electric cooperatives are a product of the New Deal era. Since it was not profitable to electrify sparsely-populated areas, rural America was left in the dark. The Rural Electrification Act of 1936 established hundreds of electric cooperatives which, with no shareholders or profit motive, could serve these areas with less overhead cost. Because electric co-ops are not-for-profit and owned by the customers, they are often unregulated by state agencies. Without that oversight, many cooperatives are falling behind as the electricity sector undergoes a rapid transition.
Customer-Owners Face Participation Barriers
In the absence of state law, electric cooperatives can set their own rules — including whether co-op members can attend board meetings. They can also decide what information they will publish and what to withhold. Without access to information, it is difficult for member-owners to have any input and influence over their cooperative.
We see some coops making decisions really behind closed doors, not informing their members about why they made decisions of where the electric cooperative is going as we transition away from coal
Colorado has long had a law ensuring cooperative transparency and access to board meetings. However, that transparency and access did not apply to the generation and transmission cooperative Tri-State. Since Tri-State’s decisions have “huge implications” for the coops they serve, says Smyth, there was a call for those decisions to be made in a public forum. A 2021 bill enacted by the Colorado General Assembly enforces that public forum.
We can’t have a democratically run utility unless there’s transparency and accountability.
Distribution Cooperatives Break Free of their Contracts
Prior to the 2021 bill, two electric co-ops successfully left Tri-State’s umbrella: Kit Carson Electric in New Mexico and Delta Montrose Electric Association in Colorado. These distribution cooperatives found that they could get cheaper wholesale rates elsewhere. The two co-ops, bound by the principle “concern for community,” also wanted to satisfy the local demand for renewable energy capacity.
Both Kit Carson and Delta Montrose faced multi-year processes to get out of their contracts with Tri-State. As the two broke away, the other distribution co-ops supplied by Tri-State watched carefully. Tri-State does not want to lose any more members, especially its largest customers. Because of this threat, says Smyth, Tri-State may now be willing to offer more flexibility to its remaining members.
Listen to our 2018 interview with Kit Carson General Manager Luis Reyes and our 2016 interview with Delta Montrose former Board Member Ed Marston.
Does Tri-State Have a Future?
To have any future at all, says Smyth, Tri-State needs to transition away from coal — it’s just too expensive. He hopes in that transition away from coal, Tri-State will also empower members to participate in decision making. Co-ops don’t just want affordable, clean energy, says Smyth. They want to provide input and support their communities.
What’s clear is that Tri-State now understands that they have to transition away from their uneconomic coal plants, both to keep their member co-ops and to comply with the rules that Colorado and New Mexico have … but whether they do that in a way that just reinforces the fairly centralized, top-down decision-making processes that they’ve historically operated under, or that more empowers their electric cooperative members, the distribution utilities, to do what makes sense for their communities, that’s not clear yet.
Episode Notes
See these resources for more behind the story:
For concrete examples of how towns and cities can take action toward gaining more control over their clean energy future, explore ILSR’s Community Power Toolkit.
Explore local and state policies and programs that help advance clean energy goals across the country, using ILSR’s interactive Community Power Map.
This is the 139th episode of Local Energy Rules, an ILSR podcast with Energy Democracy Director John Farrell, which shares powerful stories of successful local renewable energy and exposes the policy and practical barriers to its expansion.
Local Energy Rules is Produced by ILSR’s John Farrell and Maria McCoy. Audio engineering by Drew Birschbach.
This article originally posted at ilsr.org. For timely updates, follow John Farrell on Twitter, our energy work on Facebook, or sign up to get the Energy Democracy weekly update.
Featured photo credit: National Renewable Energy Lab via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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Metro Detroit is about to get a big boost of fast EV chargers, with more than 40 new ChargePoint ports set to come online across multiple sites owned by the Dabaja Brothers Development Group.
The first ultra-fast charging site just opened in Canton, Michigan. It’s owned and operated by Dabaja Brothers, who plan to follow it with additional ChargePoint-equipped locations in Dearborn and Livonia.
“We started this project because we saw a gap in our community – there was almost nowhere to charge an EV in Canton, and a similar lack of charging across metro Detroit,” said Yousef Dabaja, owner/operator at Dabaja Brothers.
Each metro Detroit site will feature ChargePoint Express Plus fast charging stations, which can deliver up to 500 kW to a single port, can fast-charge two vehicles at the same time, and are compatible with all EVs. The stations feature a proprietary cooling system to deliver peak charging speeds for sustained periods, ensuring that charging speed remains consistent.
The stations operate on the new ChargePoint Platform, which enables operators to monitor performance, adjust pricing, troubleshoot issues, and gain real-time insights to keep chargers running smoothly.
Rick Wilmer, CEO at ChargePoint, said, “This initiative will rapidly infill the ‘fast charging deserts’ across the Detroit area, allowing drivers to quickly recharge their vehicles when and where they need to.”
Read more: ChargePoint just gave its EV charging software a major AI upgrade
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Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging and Starbucks have officially opened their first DC fast charging hub together, off the I-5 in Red Bluff, California.
The 400 kW Mercedes-Benz chargers are capable of adding up to 300 miles in 10 minutes, depending on the EV, and every stall has both NACS and CCS cables – they’re fully open DC fast chargers.
Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, a joint venture between subsidiaries of Mercedes-Benz Group and renewable energy producer MN8 Energy, first announced in July 2024 that it would install DC fast chargers at Starbucks stores along Interstate 5, the main 1,400-mile north-south interstate highway on the US West Coast from Canada to Mexico. Ultimately, Mercedes plans to install fast chargers at 100 Starbucks stores across the US.
Mercedes-Benz HPC opened its first North American charging site at Mercedes-Benz USA’s headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, in November 2023 as part of an initial $1 billion charging network investment. As of the end of 2024, Mercedes had deployed over 150 operational fast chargers in the US, but it hasn’t disclosed an official number of how many chargers are currently online.
Andrew Cornelia, CEO of Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, is leaving the company at the end of the month to become global head of electrification & sustainability at Uber.
Read more: Mercedes-Benz is deploying 400 kW US-made EV fast chargers with CCS and NACS cables
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The race for autonomous driving has three fronts: software, hardware, and regulatory. For years, we’ve watched Tesla try to brute-force its way to “Full Self-Driving (FSD)” with its own custom hardware, while the rest of the automotive industry is increasingly lining up behind NVIDIA.
Now that we know Tesla’s new AI5 chip is delayed and won’t be in vehicles until 2027, it’s worth comparing the two most dominant “self-driving” chips today: Tesla’s latest Hardware 4 (AI4) and NVIDIA’s Drive Thor.
Here’s a table comparing the two chips with the best possible specs I could find. greentheonly’s teardown was particularly useful. If you find things you think are not accurate, please don’t hesitate to reach out:
| Feature / Specification | Tesla AI4 (Hardware 4.0) | NVIDIA Drive Thor (AGX / Jetson) |
|---|---|---|
| Developer / Architect | Tesla (in-house) | NVIDIA |
| Manufacturing Process | Samsung 7nm (7LPP class) | TSMC 4N (custom 5nm class) |
| Release Status | In production (shipping since 2023) | In production since 2025 |
| CPU Architecture | ARM Cortex-A72 (legacy) | ARM Neoverse V3AE (server-grade) |
| CPU Core Count | 20 cores (5× clusters of 4 cores) | 14 cores (Jetson T5000 configuration) |
| AI Performance (INT8) | ~100–150 TOPS (dual-SoC system) | 1,000 TOPS (per chip) |
| AI Performance (FP4) | Not supported / not disclosed | 2,000 TFLOPS (per chip) |
| Neural Processing Unit | 3× custom NPU cores per SoC | Blackwell Tensor Cores + Transformer Engine |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | LPDDR5X |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | ~384 GB/s | ~273 GB/s |
| Memory Capacity | ~16 GB typical system | Up to 128 GB (Jetson Thor) |
| Power Consumption | Est. 80–100 W (system) | 40 W – 130 W (configurable) |
| Camera Support | 5 MP proprietary Tesla cameras | Scalable, supports 8MP+ and GMSL3 |
| Special Features | Dual-SoC redundancy on one board | Native Transformer Engine, NVLink-C2C |
The most striking difference right off the bat is the manufacturing process. NVIDIA is throwing everything at Drive Thor, using TSMC’s cutting-edge 4N process (a custom 5nm-class node). This allows them to pack in the new Blackwell architecture, which is essentially the same tech powering the world’s most advanced AI data centers.
Tesla, on the other hand, pulled a move that might surprise spec-sheet warriors. Teardowns confirm that AI4 is built on Samsung’s 7nm process. This is mature, reliable, and much cheaper than TSMC’s bleeding-edge nodes.
When you look at the compute power, NVIDIA claims a staggering 2,000 TFLOPS for Thor. But there’s a catch. That number uses FP4 (4-bit floating point) precision, a new format designed specifically for the Transformer models used in generative AI.
Tesla’s AI4 is estimated to hit around 100-150 TOPS (INT8) across its dual-SoC redundant system. On paper, it looks like a slaughter, but Tesla made a very specific engineering trade-off that tells us exactly what was bottling up their software: memory bandwidth.
Tesla switched from LPDDR4 in HW3 to GDDR6 in HW4, the same power-hungry memory you find in gaming graphics cards (GPUs). This gives AI4 a massive memory bandwidth of approximately 384 GB/s, compared to Thor’s 273 GB/s (on the single-chip Jetson config) using LPDDR5X.
This suggests Tesla’s vision-only approach, which ingests massive amounts of raw video from high-res cameras, was starving for data.
Based on Elon Musk’s comments that Tesla’s AI5 chip will have 5x the memory bandwidth, it sounds like it might still be Tesla’s bottleneck.
Here is where Tesla’s cost-cutting really shows. AI4 is still running on ARM Cortex-A72 cores, an architecture that is nearly a decade old. They bumped the core count to 20, but it’s still old tech.
NVIDIA Thor, meanwhile, uses the ARM Neoverse V3AE, a server-grade CPU explicitly designed for the modern software-defined vehicle. This allows Thor to run not just the autonomous driving stack, but the entire infotainment system, dashboard, and potentially even an in-car AI assistant, all on one chip.
Thor has found many takers, especially among Tesla EV competitors such as BYD, Zeekr, Lucid, Xiaomi, and many more.
Electrek’s Take
There’s one thing that is not in there: price. I would assume that Tesla wins on that front, and that’s a big part of the project. Tesla developed a chip that didn’t exist, and that it needed.
It was an impressive feat, but it doesn’t make Tesla an incredible leader in silicon for self-driving.
Tesla is maxing out AI4. It now uses both chips, making it less likely to achieve the redundancy levels you need to deliver level 4-5 autonomy.
Meanwhile, we don’t have a solution for HW3 yet and AI5 is apparently not coming to save the day until 2027.
By then, there will likely be millions of vehicles on the road with NVIDIA Thor processors.
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