Here is the latest from Tom Plante, Director of the
Governor’s Energy Office

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) presents extraordinary opportunities to strengthen Colorado’s New Energy Economy and create new green jobs across the state. We were gratified to hear from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) last week that our State Energy Plan has been approved.

You can read the plan we submitted on our Web site - the DOE had one change - we weren’t allowed to have a “Debt Financing” program, but we moved that funding into “Revolving Loans” and increased the amount we will offer through our New Energy Economic Development (NEED) grant program.

Now that we have received plan approval from the DOE and they have released 50% of our funding, we will have Requests for Proposals (RFP) and grant applications coming out quickly. We already posted the RFP for the “Access to Information” component of our plan last weekend and our first round of NEED grants should be announced by next week. Our commercial programs should be expanded and launched by the end of the month and we expect to have our residential programs rolling out later this fall.

We will continue to announce these opportunities as they are released to this newsletter list.

Of course with this tremendous opportunity comes a need for additional oversight to ensure these funds are invested effectively, efficiently, wisely, and with an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability. In addition to our internal oversight, we will be contracting with a third party monitoring and verification firm to provide an additional level of verification that the services promised are being delivered effectively.

In February, President Obama signed the Recovery Act here in Colorado. At that time, he said he would be expecting that this historic national investment would be met with the greatest level of responsibility and stewardship. We are honored at this opportunity and, with your help, look forward to propelling Colorado’s New Energy Economy to a new level of productivity, innovation and success.

Tom Plant
Director, Governor’s Energy Office

CLICK HERE to view Current ARRA Funding Opportunities and much more
on the GEO website.