Name: How To Solve Colorado's Outage Problem
Start: 2025-08-28T19:00:00-06:00
End: 2025-08-28T21:00:00-06:00
Location: Jefferson Unitarian Church - Golden, Colorado

Meetup Link: https://www.meetup.com/j-cres/events/308065739/
Power outages are a key reliability metric. Outage frequency and duration for all events in Xcel Energy’s Public Service Company territory have been increasing for the past decade. The best estimate of the economic cost of these outages just reached a staggering peak in 2024 of $1.28 billion. The brunt of this cost is being silently borne on the backs of our small to medium-sized commercial and industrial businesses. Colorado’s economic lifeblood. The failures that caused these outages have occurred almost exclusively in the low-voltage distribution system, the transformers, poles, and wires in our neighborhoods. The root causes are primarily due to a combination of increasing fossil fuel emissions, pollution-induced extreme weather events, and an aging centralized grid system. This is a systemic problem that is not unique to Xcel or Colorado. It requires that we continue to reduce emissions pollution and think down to community levels about how to prioritize and address reliability and resilience, which represents a new paradigm and challenge for power system co-planning and co-investments.
Fortunately, there is already a portfolio of clean energy solutions and technologies available for deployment at the distribution level to address reliability and resilience issues, where they are needed by our small businesses and their employees. This may work if we can figure out ways to work together in a sustainably smart and collaborative way. This talk is intended to get the public conversation going on what truly is the root of our energy emergency in Colorado, and present some ways we can solve it, together, in a bottom-up meets top-down approach by empowering our communities and encouraging distributed energy prosumerism.
Please plan to stay for a reception with food, drinks, and conversations afterward.
This is a hybrid event. A live stream link will be provided for remote viewing.
Our venue has ample free parking right outside and is wheelchair accessible. We also have assisted listening devices.
Our 7 PM start time is outside the busy traffic time, and getting there is easy. We're about a mile west of the I-70 exit at Youngfield/32nd Ave (Applewood).
About Our Speaker:
Mr. Jim Gilbert currently serves on the CRES Policy Committee.
Before his retirement, he worked as an electrical engineer both as an employee at Medtronic, General Motors, Digisonix, and Cummins, and as a consultant in a variety of research and development projects. He founded and ran his own company, St. Vrain Technologies.
He is a senior member of the IEEE Power and Energy, Circuits and Systems, Power Electronics, and Engineering in Medicine and Biology Societies, a former member of the Instrumentation and Measurement and Signal Processing Societies, as well as the Audio Engineering Society (AES) for over 20 years.