DENVER -- Utility officials say at least 90 jobs will be lost as coal-fired power units and a coal mine shut down in Colorado.
Lee Boughey of Tri-State Generation and Transmission said 93 people work at the Nucla Station power plant and the New Horizon Mine that supplies the plant. He says all those jobs will be eliminated after the plant shuts down in 2022.
One unit of the Craig Station plant will shut down in 2025, but two others will keep operating. Boughey says Tri-State doesn't yet know how many jobs will be lost, but 280 people work there now.
Nucla is in southwestern Colorado and Craig is in the northwest corner of the state. Tri-State operates both.
They're being shut down under an agreement to clean up the state's air.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, Inc. supplies power to 43 electric cooperatives and public power districts that serve more than one million consumers throughout Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming.
In 2014, 60 percent of the electricity generated in Colorado came from coal, 22 percent from natural gas, and 18 percent from renewable energy resources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Colorado's Renewable Energy Standard requires investor-owned electric utilities to provide 30 percent of electricity sold from renewable energy sources by 2020, with 3 percent coming from distributed generation.
