Colorado city aims for 'zero-energy' goal

It’s not there yet, but the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, has set itself an admirably ambitious goal: to become home to the “largest active net zero energy district in the world.”

Dubbed FortZED, the effort was first conceived in 2007 and involves a variety of strategies from community involvement to smart-grid development. Its goal: to enable a two-square-mile area of downtown to achieve net-zero energy use, that is, to use no more energy than it can generate locally.

The district — which includes about 7,200 electric utility customers, both individuals and businesses — aims to achieve zero-energy status by producing local renewable energy, reducing energy use in buildings, using energy storage and load management to use energy efficiently and deploying smart-grid technologies and infrastructure.

The effort recently got a jump start with the launch of a Renewable and Distributed Systems Integration (RDSI) project that seeks to reduce the area’s peak electricity load while making better use of energy from renewable and distributed sources. The three-year project is being supported through a combination of funding from the US Department of Energy and from local investors and partners.

For example, New Belgium Brewing, one local partner, is implementing smart-grid technologies that will let it reduce its own energy consumption when demand on the local grid is high. The systems will also help the brewery integrate its on-side biogas and solar power with city energy supply and demand. (The brewery is also big into promoting travel by bike instead of car through its “Tour de Fat” challenge, which gets one person in each participating city to trade in his or her car — title and all — for a custom-built commuter bicycle.)

Individuals in the FortZed district are also being encouraged to “Take it to zero” by pledging to reduce their home energy use and, among other things, buying shares in a “community solar garden” that generates off-site solar energy for the city’s grid.

Local utility company Spirae is also establishing a Centre for Smart Grid Advancement to study and promote ways to achieve the full potential of smart-grid technologies.

As city officials note on the FortZed Challenge website, meeting the zero-energy goal “won’t be easy.” But, by all appearances, local agencies, businesses and individuals are going all-out to try to hit that target. Their experiences over the next few years should provide some enlightening lessons for the rest of us.