Denver Water has what a board member has called “a front row seat” to the impacts of climate change.
Dependent on snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains for all of our water supply, Denver Water has long believed that we have a responsibility to not only adapt to inevitable changes of a warming planet, but to lead in addressing the causes of climate change. Additionally, we aim to be an inspiring part of a societal shift to greater energy efficiency and new sources of the energy that powers our operations.
We are excited and proud that our work is featured as part of the US Water Alliance’s Net Zero Fundamentals series, and we value our engagement with the Alliance’s Net Zero Community of Practice. We hope, too, that sharing Denver Water’s story will bring value to the water utility sector and that we can inspire continued change in the field.
With a dedicated Sustainability Team and the support of our Executive Team, our utility has focused on the challenges of climate change for over a decade. In recent years, our leadership tasked the Sustainability Team with developing initial proposals for attaining Net Zero carbon emissions by 2040 and 2050. However, over the last two years, with the urgency of the climate crisis only growing, our leadership and five-member board determined that Denver Water should aspire to a 2030 target.
“Denver Water has a front row seat to the impacts of climate change, and its effect on the reliability of our water supply,” said Dominique Gómez, Board President for Denver Water, at the time of the Net Zero announcement in November of 2024. “We have long prioritized our environmental stewardship, and we now have an enormous opportunity to accelerate our work on reducing our climate impact, which will also build resilience in our system and reduce our operating costs.”
Denver Water has witnessed the impacts of climate change firsthand. Catastrophic wildfires in our water collection system over the last 30 years, along with extended droughts and the other side of climate impacts—ferocious rainfall overwhelming our infrastructure—have made it clear that we need to increase the system’s resilience to handle more extreme events and less predictable weather patterns.
Interlaced with preparing for present and future climate impacts were the increasingly clear financial benefits associated with Net Zero goals. Driving down future energy costs by investing in the near-term leads to the kind of return on investment that even more skeptical executives and board members can get behind. Making those arguments, showing our work, and illustrating the benefits to both our operations and our customers was key to moving Denver Water forward.
The work is paying off. Denver Water is on track to meet our 2025 interim goal of cutting carbon emissions by 50% from 2015 levels. We have made dramatic improvements in energy efficiency, recently began adding electric vehicles to our large fleet, and generate significantelectricity using hydropower at several of our dams and tunnels, as well as solar power at our Operations Complex in Denver.
In 2024, Denver Water completed the Northwater Treatment Plant, located west of the city. Under most conditions, this plant will generate sufficient renewable energy to power its own operations and provide excess electricity to the grid. Denver Water heats and cools its newly built Operations Complex in Denver using natural temperature variations in water pumped through the building, replacing the need for natural gas. Most recently, Denver Water set and met a goal to reduce 1 million kilowatt-hours of energy use within a year.
These efforts are also designed to improve our operational resiliency, reducing the utility’s dependence on the power grid, protecting from outages during extreme weather events, and ensuring we can continue to treat and deliver water during emergencies. All these elements — financial, environmental, and operational — contribute to the benefits of Net Zero.
A caveat. None of this is easy. There will be pushback. We’ve experienced it ourselves. And it can be cyclical. When a new, more ambitious goal is set, even with institutional support, new roadblocks and doubters will emerge, as well as often well-intentioned skeptics. Organizations that are pushing forward should have their eyes wide open to this and understand that it is part of the process.
As a key member of Denver Water’s sustainability team noted, “Sometimes patience is needed. Everyone on the planet should have started this process earlier. For those starting out, the best time to act was 40 years ago; the second-best time to act is today.”
Our most significant motivator: Denver Water views itself as a key part of our community and believes we should be at the forefront, not simply reacting or lagging, on a generational issue as important as climate change.
As an anchor institution in Colorado, Denver Water can and should play a leadership role in reducing energy use that contributes to a warming climate. It makes sense not only as we see a more erratic climate threaten a dependable water supply but as a signal to Coloradans that all of us must, to the extent we can, take steps to limit our carbon emissions.
Denver Water is grateful to see the US Water Alliance leading in this space and inspiring others in the water field to keep pushing all of us forward. We are excited to share our story and, in turn, learn from and apply the work of others featured in the Net Zero series.
