Solar Garden | Energy Advocates Gather At CSU-Pueblo
Colorado State University-Pueblo hosted its Re-Powering SouthernColorado event Saturday, drawing a small but intense crowd ofgovernment officials, environmentalists, students andrepresentatives of industry.
It was the third year in a row for the event at CSU-Pueblo.
While vendors touted solar panels and other devices on the campuslawn, panels discussed the potentials and the successes of areaefforts to develop renewable energy.
Pueblo County Commissioner Jeff Chostner hosted a paneldiscussion in the afternoon on jobs and economic development and hetook the opportunity to talk about what the county was doing toconserve energy.
Chostner said that the county’s new judicial building would bedesigned to earn a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design asdid the Health Department building. He said that existing countybuildings are getting energy audits and new controls that havealready saved $400,000 this year in utility costs.
As a whole, he said, Pueblo is “really changing from a smokestackimage that we had in the ’70s to probably the cleanest town in theFront Range.”
John Olson, the landscape architect who worked on the city’s newmunicipal justice design, talked about the concept of form-basedcodes as opposed to what he called Euclidian codes, a reference tothe strict borders of straight lines that have carved urban areasup into separate sections, often isolated from each other.
Form-based codes, he said, allow mixed use of commercial andresidential applications, and more efficient energy use, somethinghe said Pueblo already was doing in the Union Avenuedistrict.
Carol Sturman, president of Woodland Park-based SturmanIndustries, talked about the need for innovation. She and herhusband, who worked for NASA, run a company that has designedeverything from internal combustion engines that double efficiencyto new refrigerator kegs
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