There’s no understating the lightning-fast progress that clean energy policy, jobs, and opportunity have made in Colorado these past three years. Though the pandemic has shaken the industry, Colorado entered 2020 as the nation’s sixth largest employer of clean tech workers. Clean tech industries now employ nearly 30,000 more people than the state’s legacy fossil fuel industries.
At the policy level, state lawmakers and agencies have crafted a policy ecosystem for the growth of these new industries that’s among the best anywhere in the country — thanks to the long hard work of everyone reading this article. Recent state legislation has planted the seeds of future growth by creating a statewide climate action plan, investing in rural clean tech jobs projects through acronyms like DOLA and REDI and the
new state Office of Just Transition, preparing for the massive generational transition to vehicle and building electrification, and forcing Tri-State to map out a cleaner, cheaper future for rural ratepayers.
With these many seeds already producing so healthy a harvest, we might think that Colorado would take a step back this year and content itself with the gains. That’s not how 2021 is shaping up. Here are the big plays in the Colorado clean energy world in 2021. If you want to be a part of the team that works to shape our future, please get in touch with us today.
Throughout the year, Tri-State will continue its legislature-mandated Electric Resource Plan with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. There, it will tackle major decisions about coal transition, new renewables, the social costs of climate pollution, and future investment — all impacting ratepayer pocketbooks across the Colorado rural electric cooperatives that it supplies. Ratepayers will need to make their voices and priorities heard during forthcoming public comment opportunities.
Across the Western Slope, rural electric co-op ratepayers will get to vote on Boards of Directors elections for their co-ops in late spring and early summer — in virtually every case by mail ballot. This is a great chance to dialogue with candidates and help your community sort out the visionary from the merely comfortable.
At the federal level, the new administration and congress have come to power with an unprecedented populist vision for new cleantech and infrastructure jobs that can help revitalize opportunity in rural
communities. Whether these goals become our future is up to you and me.
There’s an often-circulated aphorism that, even if questionable in its attribution to some ancient Chinese source, seems to fit this moment: “May you live in interesting times.” We’re fortunate to be here at the cusp of a
civilizational transition that many of you have sought for many long years. I hope you’ll join us in rising to this moment and this work in the year to come.