About
What and Why?
Sustainable Grand is a Grand County non-profit, helping to protect the planet and create a more environmentally friendly community.
Our near-term focus areas are:
Making our buildings more energy efficient; existing and new construction.
Increasing the use of electric vehicles and electric outdoor equipment.
Transitioning our community to clean energy.
Energy Action Plan
The Grand County Community Energy Action Plan was developed in 2024, through nine-months of countywide collaboration with community leaders, Sustainable Grand, Xcel Partners in Energy & Mountain Parks Electric, to identify a shared vision for Grand County’s energy future along with specific goals and strategies to move toward that vision.
"The Grand County community envisions a future where all residents, businesses and visitors have access to energy that is affordable, dependable, and clean."
The plan establishes a countywide goal to double annual participation in residential and business energy efficiency programs by 2026.
Why?
Below are some of the reasons sustainability is particularly important in our county:
Our Fair Share of the Money
Federal and state programs are providing millions of dollars to Colorado communities for energy efficiency, resiliency, renewable energy, EV infrastructure, waste management and more. Historically, Grand County gets very little of this money, because we're not well organized. Our goal is to significantly increase this share of funds coming to our community.
Economy and Lifestyle
If you consider that our region's temperature has increased over the past 100 years, there's a future where our main economic driver [winter tourism] starts to shrink and the supporting industries [restaurants, hotels, retail] struggle to survive. This puts everything at risk; our amenities, the economy, tax base, home values and more.
Climate change, bio-diversity, water, air quality
A warming region will have so many negative affects on the environment that they're too numerous to list. The mountain pine beetle outbreak, caused by warmer temperatures and lower precipitation, was just one example.
Resiliency
We need to build a community which is more resilient to climate change and natural disasters. This is possible with better building codes, Firewise planning, redundancy in our electrical grid, micro-grids that can power critical infrastructure and more.
For example, we need places that can act as shelters in a widespread disaster and these places should function if the electric grid has gone down.