Preparing For Disasters: Community Resilience Cooperatives

A Community Resilience Cooperative is a robust model that sustainably and equitably reduces emissions and increases resilience. A Community Resilience Cooperative offers a robust bottom-up-meets-top-down solution that sustainably and equitably reduces emissions pollution and increases resilience. By deploying community-owned solar, battery storage with EV backup, efficiency upgrades, and a network of trusted resilience hubs, a community-led cooperative protects its vulnerable populations and keeps its businesses running. Adopting this self-sustaining, decentralized, clean-energy model can deliver immediate backup power, stabilize soaring utility costs, and build equitable, community-wide resilience faster than top-down utility-oriented or fickle policy-dependent approaches. For context, resilience is sorely lacking throughout Colorado, but Boulder County ranks particularly low, facing severe outage risks, wildfire threats, and substantial looming rate hikes. In 2025 alone, local Xcel customers endured an average of 21 hours of outages, heavily impacting small businesses and medically vulnerable residents – and a nearly 6% rate hike! This is a hybrid event. Join in person at Common Flame in Golden, Colorado, or tune in online via the livestream link: https://boxcast.tv/view/preparing-for-distasters---building-community-resilience-cooperatives-r8viw5uqb8kcip206tes In-person attendees are invited to stay for a reception with food, drinks, and conversations after the main presentation. ABOUT OUR SPEAKER James 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, and a former member of the Instrumentation and Measurement and Signal Processing Societies, as well as the Audio Engineering Society (AES) for over 20 years.