What two towns in Colorado with names that start with “A” have in common
by Allen Best
Aspen and Antonito have little in common other than they are both in Colorado’s mountains — and both are likely to be impacted by the warming, more erratic climate.
Aspen, of course, has dozens of billionaires. Over the holidays, Jeff Bezos was reportedly on the verge of a private marriage to Lauren Sanchez with a $600 million extravagance. The potential marriage and its excesses were covered around the world, including by the Times of India. As for the marriage? It seems not to have happened.
Antonito? It’s located a few miles from New Mexico in the San Luis Valley. It has no resident or part-time billionaires.
They may share an interest in microgrids. Aspen certainly does. The town nearly lost power as a result of the Lake Christine Wildfire in 2018. Since then, Holy Cross Energy has been working on a microgrid — although the first one is likely to be too small for more than the barest of critical functions.
See: Microgrids and electric cul-de-sacs, Big Pivots, Aug. 19, 2024.
State legislators in 2022 ordered that state agencies create a roadmap for what local utilities and others need to be thinking about. That report, the Microgrid Roadmap, was released in late December.
The roadmap defines and evaluates different types of microgrids, criteria to identify priority projects, and recommends key policies to facilitate microgrid deployment in Colorado.
Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, describes microgrids as a useful tool for helping achieve Colorado’s climate-induced energy transition goals.
“Reliable access to clean electricity is a must as communities electrify buildings and cars. This roadmap offers a long-term strategy for the role of microgrids in supporting energy resilience across Colorado (and) helping Coloradans, especially in rural and underserved areas, keep their lights on, vehicles, charged, and homes warm.”
The roadmap identifies a broad swath of southern Colorado from Las Animas, along the Arkansas River, to Cortez, as being more vulnerable to power outages, including longer-duration events, or greater vulnerability to community members.
Several other areas — Lake and Grand counties in the central mountains, and Mesa County and two counties of northwestern Colorado – are similarly vulnerable, based on the same criteria.
The roadmap also reports strategies for addressing costs, interconnection standards, and legal considerations, which are among the main challenges for implementation of microgrids in Colorado.
Microgrids exchange power with a traditional utility grid while also receiving power from local electricity sources. They can be fueled with fossil fuels – and indeed, most of them that now exist do have oil-fueled generators. They are commonly associated with hospitals.
Colorado, of course, wants to create microgrids using renewable energy.
Using state and federal grid resilience funding,state Department of Local Affairs offers the Microgrids for Community Resilience Grant program to support microgrid planning and implementation. To date, DOLA has funded 25 planning and construction projects, totaling about $17.7 million (including local match) to ensure local energy resilience.
United Power, serving 113,000 members on metropolitan Denver’s northern side, mentions in its roadmap the need to embrace microgrids as part of a more decentralized electrical grid.
“This grid modernization also ensures increased resiliency through the integration of hyper-local energy generation, microgrids and adaptive measures.”
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