The Denver Regional Council of Governments has preserved $200 million in federal clean energy funding amid a series of green budget rollbacks, and will spend it to help low-income consumers get electric heat pumps and building owners to overhaul energy use.
The new Power Ahead Colorado program uses a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency appropriated during the Biden administration that survived through a series of Trump administration policy reversals. The money was committed in the fall of 2024, with only a “brief hiccup” in early 2025 to confirm the grant could be distributed and Power Ahead Colorado could begin making plans, officials said.
The money will be divided among energy audits and furnace replacements; clean energy job training; and local governments and landlords looking to meet new state rules for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of heating systems.
Some of the money directed toward heat pumps will include an education program to explain what they are and how they reduce emissions. An electric heat pump replaces both a gas-fired winter furnace and summer air conditioning units, using electricity to transfer heat from one place to another, depending on the season. As more of Colorado’s utility-scale electric generation moves away from coal and toward renewable energy sources including solar and wind, replacing home or large-building natural gas furnaces with heat pumps running on clean electricity could cut another large chunk of greenhouse gas emissions.
Power Ahead Colorado also has $6 million set aside for community innovation grants for local governments, nonprofit groups or small businesses that have promising ideas for reducing emissions at the building level. In an interview Monday, DRCOG officials mentioned a California effort to install clean electric temporary water heaters after a home water heater failure. The homeowner may then learn to appreciate the performance of the electric tankless or on-demand water heaters while they decide how to replace the old gas-powered water heater.
DRCOG, a metro regional policy advisory arm that also carries out some grant funding, says it plans to train nearly 5,000 Coloradans in clean energy work during the $199.7 million EPA grant.
The “Power Ahead” focus on heat pumps is not to be confused with the Colorado Energy Office’s “Charge Ahead Colorado” program, which gives grants and administrative help to build EV charging stations and networks at multifamily housing, businesses, and institutional and NGO buildings.
A prime goal of the program, besides issuing the rebates and renovation assistance, is to make more seamless the complex infrastructure of government codes, energy efficiency advice, qualified contractors and installers with the necessary skills.
“It’s an impressive, unprecedented kind of opportunity with this amount of money in Colorado,” Power Ahead program manager Robert Spotts said. As a trusted go-between for state and local agencies and nonprofits, Spotts said, “we’re just in a unique space, to really thread the needle and connect the dots” on clean energy.