For mountain communities, buildings can be a climate problem hiding in plain sight. They are where people live, work, gather, vacation, and stay warm through long winters. They are also, in many places, the largest source of local emissions.
In a recent Mountain Towns 2030 webinar, Paul Bony of the Western Resilience Center, along with John Balfe and Michael Goodrum of NORESCO, walked through how the Routt County Climate Action Collaborative developed a 30-year community-wide building electrification and decarbonization roadmap and, just as importantly, the dashboard and implementation tools to make that roadmap usable.
Starting with the Carbon Problem
Routt County, home to Steamboat Springs and the Yampa Valley, adopted its Climate Action Plan in 2020. The countywide goal is ambitious: reduce carbon emissions 78% by 2050. But unlike some communities where transportation dominates the emissions picture, buildings are Routt County’s largest source – responsible for about 48% of local emissions.
That finding gave the Climate Action Collaborative a clear mandate – if the county was going to meet its long-term climate goals, it needed a serious plan for the building sector.
The Collaborative itself is regional by design. It includes Routt County, the City of Steamboat Springs, and the towns of Oak Creek, Yampa, and Hayden, with the Western Resilience Center serving as the administrative agency. When the Colorado Energy Office released Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, Routt County’s existing regional partnership made it a strong fit.
The grant helped fund three deliverables: a building electrification and decarbonization plan, a dashboard to track progress over time, and a public-facing story map to help communicate the work to residents and local leaders.
Building the Inventory from the Bottom Up
Routt County already had a countywide emissions inventory, completed by Lotus Engineering and Sustainability. But to build a building-sector roadmap, the team needed to understand what was happening inside that sector, so they built a bottom-up inventory of the county’s buildings.
The model combined Routt County assessor data with ComStock and ResStock, two National Renewable Energy Laboratory datasets that estimate building energy use by type, climate zone, and other characteristics. NORESCO filtered those datasets to Colorado Climate Zone 7 to better represent Routt County’s cold mountain climate, then matched them with local building types and fuel data.
It was not a perfect dataset – heating fuel information was incomplete in places. Building categories did not always line up cleanly. But after calibration against the county’s previous emissions inventory, NORESCO’s model came within about 1% of the overall inventory – close enough to give the Collaborative confidence that the roadmap was grounded in reality.
The deeper inventory confirmed several important things: Residential buildings make up most of the county’s building stock, and commercial buildings account for slightly more total building-sector emissions. When the team looked specifically at fossil fuel emissions from natural gas and propane, residential buildings (especially single-family homes) became the central challenge. Single-family buildings alone were responsible for roughly 45% of fossil fuel-based building emissions.
The Dashboard: Turning Targets Into Decisions
Instead of choosing a subscription software platform, the Collaborative wanted something it could own, update, and adapt. NORESCO built the dashboard in Excel, with editable inputs for retrofit quantities, grid emissions, new construction rates, and other assumptions.
The dashboard allows the Collaborative to test different pathways. What happens if the electric grid reaches 80% clean energy around 2030, as Yampa Valley Electric Association’s new power supply contract is expected to do? What if the grid reaches 100% clean electricity by 2045? What if retrofit volumes grow slowly? What if they grow aggressively?
With a cleaner grid, Routt County can make major progress toward its building-sector emissions targets. But even under a 100% clean electricity scenario, natural gas and propane emissions remain – buildings still have to be retrofitted and fossil fuel heating still has to be addressed.
The dashboard also made the scale of work visible. To hit the Collaborative’s original 2030 retrofit percentage targets, the county would need to retrofit thousands of buildings per year – a pace that would be difficult in any community, and especially challenging in a rural mountain region with limited contractor capacity. The recommended pathway relaxes the near-term retrofit volume while still meeting 2030 and 2050 emissions targets, then ramps building retrofits over time.
That is the power of a good model – it does not just say “electrify buildings,” it helps leaders understand what is technically possible, what is operationally realistic, and where the gaps are.
From Plan to Programs
The 50-plus-page decarbonization plan focuses on removing fossil fuels from Routt County’s building sector. It identifies high-impact retrofit packages – including heat pumps, envelope improvements, lighting upgrades, and appliance electrification – and then pairs those measures with policy and program options that could actually drive adoption.
Three ideas stood out:
First is a HeatSmart-style campaign or energy concierge program that provides human support to residents trying to navigate audits, bids, incentives, contractors, and equipment choices. In rural communities, where contractor capacity may be limited and trust matters, that kind of peer-to-peer support can be the difference between interest and action.
Second is a “Slope Smart Homes” concept aimed at second homes and vacation properties. These homes can be large energy users and difficult to reach through standard outreach. By working with Home Owner Associations (HOAs), property managers, rental agencies, utilities, and homeowners, a mountain community can start with practical measures like smart thermostats, smart plugs, and education – then build toward deeper retrofits.
Third is an “Electrify Routt” program modeled in part on Breckenridge’s electrification work. The idea is to use local funding to close the gap between existing incentives and the actual cost of heat pump projects, especially for workforce housing and community-serving properties. One potential funding mechanism is a renewable energy mitigation program, where high-energy outdoor uses such as snowmelt systems, pools, or hot tubs either install onsite renewable energy or pay into a fund that supports public electrification projects.
Financing remains one of the biggest barriers. Paul Bony noted that the Collaborative is exploring options including micro-PACE, on-bill financing through the local electric cooperative, and leasing structures for geothermal heat pumps that may allow tax credits to be captured by the leasing entity.
The Workforce Reality
Paul put the scale plainly: the community needs roughly 10,000 heat pumps over the next 20-plus years. That means local contractors have a choice – become part of the solution, or watch the work get imported from outside the region.
A recent local “heat pump hoedown” drew 190 registrations across contractor and public sessions. Colorado Mountain College is working on heat pump apprenticeship training. The Northwest Colorado Development Council has launched the Northwest Colorado Innovation Center in Craig and hired a workforce development manager, with HVAC contractors and apprentices among its first focus areas.
That ecosystem matters because electrification is not just a technology transition – it is a workforce transition, an economic development opportunity, and a local capacity challenge.
Routt County is also taking a nuanced approach to the grid. In a cold climate with 9,500 heating degree days at 6,000 to 7,000 feet, peak demand matters, and full electrification with electric resistance backup could create serious distribution challenges. In some cases, dual-fuel systems may be more practical in the near term, while ground-source heat pumps can reduce the need for supplemental heat.
Key Takeaways for Mountain Towns
- Start with the building sector you actually have. Routt County’s roadmap works because it is grounded in local assessor data, local fuel realities, and a cold-climate building model — not generic assumptions.
- Ask “how many of what, by when?” Climate goals become actionable when communities translate them into retrofit counts, timelines, costs, and workforce needs.
- Clean electricity is the multiplier. Yampa Valley Electric Association’s move toward roughly 80% clean power around 2030 dramatically improves the emissions outlook, but fossil fuel heating still has to be addressed.
- Residential buildings deserve early attention. In Routt County, single-family homes are the biggest source of fossil fuel-based building emissions, making them a critical focus for heat pumps and envelope improvements.
- Dashboards can be strategy tools. Routt County’s Excel-based dashboard helps leaders test assumptions, track progress, communicate the scale of work, and adjust as conditions change.
- Financing is implementation. Rebates alone will not close the gap. Communities should explore on-bill financing, micro-PACE, local electrification funds, and creative structures for geothermal and other high-cost measures.
- Workforce is climate infrastructure. Heat pumps do not install themselves. Training, apprenticeships, contractor engagement, and local economic development are central to the plan.
- Local context matters. A policy that works in Denver may not fit Steamboat Springs, Oak Creek, Yampa, or Hayden. Rural mountain communities need tools that reflect their buildings, utilities, contractors, residents, and climate.
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This article is part of the Mountain Towns 2030 webinar recap series. The full webinar recording and presentation materials will be shared with registrants, and the next MT2030 webinar is scheduled for June 17 on implementing innovative sustainable building design through collaboration. Register here!