Colorado's Power Pathway

The backbone of Colorado's clean-energy future.

Colorado’s Power Pathway is Xcel Energy’s $1.7 billion expansion of the state’s high-voltage grid: approximately 550 miles of new double-circuit 345 kV transmission line looping through twelve counties of eastern Colorado, along with new and expanded substations, built to deliver roughly 5,500 megawatts of new wind and solar generation planned through 2030. The line runs from the Fort St. Vrain generating station in Weld County south through Morgan, Kit Carson, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Crowley, and Pueblo Counties, then back north through El Paso, Elbert, and Arapahoe to the Harvest Mile substation — one of the largest transmission builds in the western United States. The first segments entered service in spring 2025, with full program completion expected in 2027.

Vivid Engineering Group has served as owner’s representative on all five segments of the program, providing quality assurance testing and inspection of transmission structure foundations and substation sites, along with geotechnical engineering. On site since 2023, our field teams and geotechnical engineers have verified the integrity of the drilled foundations that carry every steel structure along the route and supported construction at the program’s new substations — Canal Crossing, Goose Creek, and May Valley — as well as expansions of existing facilities. Working across the open plains of eastern Colorado, often far from the nearest laboratory, Vivid’s crews have kept sampling, testing, and inspection moving at the pace of the build, segment after segment, from the first foundation to the last.