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KUNC FEATURE

Three months after the Fourmile Fire ripped through the foothills west of Boulder, homeowners who lost their houses in the blaze are being asked to adhere to stricter standards as they rebuild, according to Kirk Siegler at our partner KUNC.

Insurance companies want residents of the burn area to do more wildfire mitigation work on their properties. Boulder County’s government wants to see the homes built to be more environmentally friendly, Siegler reports.

From KUNC

LARAMIE, WY (KUNC) - Wyoming is a prime place for wind development. Some of the best quality winds in the country blow across its miles of sagebrush and range land. But the state is also home to more than half of the remaining greater sage grouse. That’s a rare game bird that came close to being listed as an endangered species earlier this year. Ensuring its protection has at times conflicted with the national push for more green energy.

Bill Miller is standing on high ground, on the top of a rock formation called the Bolton Rim. He faces into the wind and holds up a small device, about the size of a cell phone.

“Seeing how hard the wind’s blowing,” he says.

Miller works for the Denver-based Anschutz Corporation, and he’s in charge of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project. He’s surrounded by rugged rock and rolling hills that stretch to the horizon. Here, a 20-mile-an-hour wind is nothing more than a gentle breeze.

CASPER, WY (KUNC) - Northwestern Wyoming, where hot water gushes from the ground may seem like a perfect place for geothermal power plants. But even in these hotspots this alternative energy is developing slowly.

“The sense is that there is a whole lot of geothermal energy to be developed in the West, but we need to develop the technologies to find it successfully and work with it,” said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Washington-D.C. based Geothermal Energy Association.

Wyoming has only one geothermal energy site, and it’s nowhere near Yellowstone National Park’s legendary geysers. Teapot Dome, outside of Casper, is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy. The small geothermal unit runs in conjunction with an oilfield testing center, and it doesn’t produce much energy, said Lyle Johnson, an engineer at the site.

Line would take Green River Water to Colorado

Wyoming’s Green River has long been overlooked by water managers in Colorado, or at least if you ask Aaron Million. His proposal to tap into it was actually born out of a graduate thesis he wrote in a resource economics class while attending Colorado State University in Fort Collins in 2002.

The Green is actually part of the Colorado River basin; making it subject to long-standing water treaties. One of those permits the transfer of water between upper Colorado River basin states; the tent pole behind Million’s thesis that Colorado is entitled to some of the Green River water.

“Is it unprecedented? Absolutely not. I mean, around the world projects of this size get done every day,” he says.

Even around the arid West, a 550 mile water pipeline is not unheard of. But a two to three billion dollar project that’s privately financed would be unprecedented, at least for this region. But Million sees the project as a private-public partnership. He plans to sell the water to growing towns and cities. [more]

A group of former reporters and editors at the now defunct Rocky Mountain News is launching a subscription-based online version of the newspaper. The group – which is backed by several entrepreneurs – formally launched a five-week long subscription drive yesterday in Denver.

The nearly 150 year old Rocky Mountain News published its final edition at the end of February becoming one of the first major newspapers in the country to collapse. Many other big city dailies are teetering on the brink, or about to follow suit. The Seattle Post Intelligencer, for instance, printed its final edition just this morning. The P-I will move to a stripped down on-line format and lean heavily on bloggers for the news. That model is not what many in the journalism business want to see, including internet entrepreneur Brad Gray. He’s one of four co-founders of InDenverTimes.Com

"We can’t stress enough how important we think this kind of journalism is to our society, to our democracy, we think it has to be preserved," he said. [more]

from KUNC

When President Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill Tuesday at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, he was surrounded by Colorado renewable energy leaders, many of whom saw the bill as hope.

And, as Kirk Siegler reports for KUNC in Colorado, the state's favorable regulatory climate toward renewable energy served as the perfect backdrop for key provisions in the stimulus plan.

"Its an investment that will double the amount of renewable energy produced over the next three years, provide tax credits and loan guarantees to companies like Namaste, a company that will be expanding instead of laying people off as a result of the plan that I'm about to sign," Obama said.

Boulder-based Namaste Solar CEO Blake Jones introduced Obama and later said he expects the stimulus will help him grow his business by 20 percent this year, 40 percent next year and not lay people off as expected. But, Namaste wasn't the only company in the room happy for that signature.

Pascal Noronha, President and CEO of Fort Collins-based AVA Solar said the tax credits will spur demand for solar energy -- and that will be good for his company. [more]

Lawmakers, resorts, non-profits -- they're all feeling the national economic pinch at home in Colorado. This week, public radio station KUNC looked a several aspects of the downturn's effects in the state.

Today, the story is about ski resorts reporting dismal advanced bookings and sluggish ticket sales overall. Their solution? Cut skiers huge deals.

[more]

From Colorado's KUNC

Renewable energy was on the minds of Democratic house leaders in Denver Tuesday during a mid-day press conference.

The only problem for those touting the benefits of wind and solar power - was a group of determined John McCain supporters protesting the Democrats energy agenda.

From Denver, KUNC's Kirk Siegler has this radio piece about the issue.

Democratic strategists say Barack Obama will need Latino votes if he wants to win in western such as Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

But some Latino voters in these areas remain loyal to former candidate Hillary Clinton - and they say it will take a fair amount of convincing, to move them over to the Obama camp. From Denver, KUNC's Sarah Hughes has more here.

DemCon 08

With a predicted one billion viewers expected to tune into Barack Obama's acceptance speech alone, imaging is everything for a host city.

But Denver residents are split over whether the city should play up its folksy western reputation, or its emergence as a cosmopolitan city with a burgeoning clean energy economy.

In the first of a series of stories this week on the DNC's impacts on the Mile High City, KUNC's Kirk Siegler reports from Denver. [more]