Six months ago, Chris Hansen shocked observers of the Colorado General Assembly when he announced, one week after winning reelection, that he would resign his seat representing Denver in the state Senate.
He was in Durango that day, beginning work in his new position as the chief executive officer of La Plata Electric Association.
The cooperative serves more than 36,000 members across Southwest Colorado. And it’s a confusing entity to many.
The technical specifics of power supply and delivery are so complex they put most people to sleep. Members elect directors to the board, which hires the chief executive, constituting a form of representative governance that parallels local governments, although LPEA isn’t a governmental or even quasi-governmental entity. It’s a nonprofit, but it has a monopoly on the power market. And yes, it’s chief executive is very well compensated by Durango standards (Hansen makes $500,000 annually, far more than the top administrative officer at the helm of any governmental organization and most other nonprofits in town).
Hansen’s excitement when he gets going talking about power supply is, well, electric. Raised in a small Kansas town, now Oxford-educated and a former research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, he is an expert in the electricity sector.
Hansen divides his life into neat decade-long chapters: his 20s were about graduate school, his 30s were in the private sector, his 40s in state government. And now, right around his 50th birthday, Hansen has landed in the world of electricity cooperatives.
He stepped up to lead LPEA at a pivotal moment – and not just for the co-op.
“We are at a moment of tremendous change in the energy sector broadly, in the electricity sector in particular, where you have a great new portfolio of technologies that you can take advantage of,” he said. “The price of emerging technologies continues to fall. That’s especially the case for wind, solar and batteries.”
All co-ops are now greeting this brave new world, according to Hansen, but LPEA is ahead of the curve. Seven months before his arrival, the board of directors voted to blow the escape hatch on its contract with wholesale power supplier Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, effective April 1, 2026. The contract prevented LPEA from generating more than 5% of its own power.
“That, to me, was a really attractive part of the job, because now we get a chance to invest in ourselves,” Hansen said.
Although it was years in the making, the Tri-State exit has become a hotly debated topic. At a community meeting at the Oxford Grange a few weeks before sitting down with The Durango Herald, Hansen came face to face with that skepticism, and not for the first time.
“We do not want Tri-State being bought out and you going to a different company,” one attendee said. “If everything is so peachy keen and everything is working, why are you trying to sell us out?”
The issue has, of late, fallen along political lines. And although Hansen, with eight years of experience in the Legislature, has honed political savvy, that can cut both ways.
“(To) the more conservative members of the community, don't try to pigeonhole me or caricature me as, like, liberal from Denver. I'm not. I'm actually a small town Kansas kid who went to serve my state and did the best I could,” he said.
Hansen considers the experience to be a net positive, emphasizing that he was never a dyed-in-the-wool partisan under the Gold Dome.
“I put together some pieces that are relatively rare in the industry, which is a technical engineering background, a lot of economic knowledge and policy knowledge,” he said. “I literally wrote the bill to create the (regional transmission organization) in Colorado.”
The attacks – like the man at the Oxford Grange who falsely asserted that he knew “for a fact” that Hansen is making more than his predecessor – have been unexpected.
But Hansen is resistant to getting sucked into, as he puts it, the culture war overlay on the debate about where LPEA should get its power.
“Our energy supply is a mix of fossil and nonfossil, and we’re putting it together in a way that is optimal and lowest cost – that’s the job,” he said. “A solar panel at Sunnyside is not a political statement. It is just a very low-cost way to make electricity. So why would we not do that, and do it locally and pay ourselves for that power?”
Despite the rampant rumors that the Tri-State exit will drive costs up and reliability down in the future, Hansen’s message isn’t “trust us,” it’s “here's the result.”
LPEA has shored up its power supply through 2028 through a contract with both Tristate and Mercuria Energy America, a commodity trading group. The result is 10% lower energy wholesale prices. To the chagrin of his skeptics, that savings doesn’t mean bills will go down, just that they won’t go up, for now. But the contract is proof of concept, Hansen said.
“I think we have a really good sight line now to reliable and affordable power supply, and that is the basis of everything we do,” he said. “So I'm feeling very confident we'll continue to deliver and show those results.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
