State Policy Roadmaps
Colorado
Advanced Energy United’s resource, "Advanced Energy Creates Opportunities for Colorado: A Policy Roadmap for Colorado’s Next Governor," outlines how Colorado’s next Governor can expand affordable advanced energy generation and storage, increase the efficiency and reliability of the state’s transmission infrastructure through advanced transmission solutions, continue support for flourishing EV markets; and promote customer-facing technologies to make energy more affordable for consumers across the state.
To achieve these goals, Advanced Energy United’s recommendations for Colorado’s next Governor focus on these core tenets:
- Build It: Colorado must prioritize reforms to planning, siting, permitting, interconnection, and procurement of advanced energy resources. Energy prices are too high in part because there are too many barriers for advanced energy to connect to the grid and provide low-cost power. While there are also federal barriers, Colorado can lead on building advanced energy to meet load growth from AI and ensure households and businesses have reliable energy.
- Make it Flexible: Colorado’s next governor can lower costs right now by making it easier to adopt technologies that make electric demand flexible. This means scaling up distributed energy resources (DERs), energy efficiency (EE), virtual power plants (VPPs), and advanced vehicle and building electrification solutions via state programs, plans, and rates. These innovative technologies make it easier for grid operators to keep costs down in real-time and in the long run. They also prepare the grid for increased electricity demand from data centers, domestic manufacturing, electric vehicles (EVs), and heat pumps.
- Make it Affordable: Energy costs will be higher if we do not properly plan energy investments. Our next governor can take steps to ensure that our public utilities are planning, optimizing, and delivering the right types of energy investment at the lowest possible cost, while also identifying least-cost financing avenues for projects both big and small and working with our partners around the region to better share energy across state lines.
- Support the Growth of Electric Vehicles (EVs): In 2025, EVs constituted nearly a third of all new vehicle sales in Colorado, significantly outpacing the national average. This gives drivers, utilities, and utility regulators a powerful new energy tool in the toolkit: access to significant mobile battery capacity and flexible demand.
To download the Colorado state policy roadmap, please complete the form.
