Tucked between an interstate and a mountainside in the base of a steep canyon in western Colorado, a small hydropower station has long staked an outsize claim on the Colorado River.
That’s because the 115-year-old Shoshone Generating Station in Glenwood Springs owns something unique in the parched West: 1 million acre-feet of water rights, some of the oldest and largest in the state.
Turning on the tap at the power facility can change how water flows on both sides of the Continental Divide: boosting flows west to farmers, ranchers and rural communities all the way to the Utah border, or curbing facilities that funnel it east to the Front Range and population centers like Denver and its suburbs.
All of that influence means that as the aging facility approaches a likely retirement in coming years, who controls those flows is significant in a state often split between its rural West and urban East, demarcated by the Rocky Mountains.
