Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, signed legislation on June 1 ordering the utility commission to establish a process by February 2019 for electric utilities to evaluate and invest in energy storage as the state looks to harness the emerging technology. The bill allows electric utilities to file applications for rate-based projects of up to 15-megawatts capacity by May 2019. In March, the state enacted bipartisan legislation to limit barriers to customer-sited storage. Regulators seek to spur investments to leverage the multiple benefits of batteries, including the ability to add large amounts of intermittent renewable generation to the system, and to defer or eliminate the need to build new transmission projects and generators to accommodate spikes in electricity demand.