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Schaffer promotes solar, wind

He says he's 'more aggressive' than Udall on alternative energy

By Ed Sealover, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 30, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer talks Wednesday with Norm and Linda Bledsoe, of Aurora, outside the Old Town Pub and Restaurant in Steamboat Springs during a campaign swing.

Photo by Brian Lehmann / The Rocky

U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer talks Wednesday with Norm and Linda Bledsoe, of Aurora, outside the Old Town Pub and Restaurant in Steamboat Springs during a campaign swing.

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Bob Schaffer returned to the familiar subject of energy Wednesday but went in a new direction by saying that he was "more aggressive" in promoting some alternative energies than his Democratic opponent in the U.S. Senate race, Mark Udall.

Udall, an Eldorado Springs congressman, is a favorite of the environmental movement. He co-chaired the campaign to pass the constitutional amendment that imposed renewable-energy standards on Colorado utilities and has authored or co-sponsored 82 renewable-energy bills during his two years in the legislature and 10 years in Congress.

But Schaffer, a Republican former congressman from Fort Collins, said he has solutions to providing more energy from wind and solar that Udall either has not pushed or has opposed. A former executive for an energy company involved in both oil and wind power, Schaffer said he supports making the current renewable-energy tax credits good for five years rather than one year and allowing smaller companies and individuals to take advantage of them.

"I'm actually more aggressive in regard to wind power and solar power than Udall is," Schaffer told a crowd at a Craig coffee shop on the second day of a two-day Western Slope tour. "He's a fine cheerleader. It goes over well at Sierra Club meetings."

Udall's campaign press secretary, Tara Trujillo, called the statement dishonest, noting that Udall is the co-chairman of the House Renewable Energy and Efficiency Caucus, while Schaffer served from 1997 to 2003 in the U.S. House and mentioned renewable energy just once on the floor.

Udall only voted against a proposal to extend the renewable-energy tax credits to five years because it was part of the financial industry bailout bill that he opposed - a bill that Schaffer has also said he would not have supported, Trujillo added.

"No matter how much Bob wishes he could change history, the facts are that while Mark was writing bills to help make Colorado the nation's leader in renewable energy development, Bob was carving his path to being an oil and gas executive," Trujillo said.

Schaffer, who toured the drilling process technology program at Colorado Mountain College in Rifle on Wednesday, also separated himself from Udall on the issue of extracting fuel from oil shale. Udall sponsored a measure in 2007 that slowed plans for the government to give oil shale development leases to private companies.

Schaffer said that while he wants questions answered about how much water it would take to get fuel from oil shale, he wants to remove barriers to settling the issue. He noted that the burgeoning oil industry already has helped Rifle to have just a 2.1 percent unemployment rate as many other businesses suffer.

"We're still a ways away. However, we're sitting on top of 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil that makes Saudi Arabia irrelevant three times over," he said of the Western Slope oil shale deposits.

SealoverE@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5438