Living the Future: Colorado Community Embraces All-Electric Lifestyle
This Colorado community has achieved a net-zero community powered by electricity and solar energy.
According to Canary Media, these homes are special in a crucial, planet-friendly way: They don’t burn fossil fuels.
Geos is an all-electric neighborhood of 28 homes boasting energy-efficient designs. And although they do occasionally pull dirty electricity from the grid, their rooftop solar panels harvest enough renewable energy to offset their grid use over the year — making them net-zero homes.
That’s unusual. Most homes today are climate liabilities, not boons. A staggering nine out of 10 U.S. housing units need to have their fossil-fueled equipment swapped for electric replacements if the nation is going to decarbonize fast enough to avoid climate catastrophe.
The Geos community shows one vision for the all-electric homes of the future, resident Dar-Lon Chang tells me.
Chang was formerly an engineer in the oil and gas industry, but he left when it became painfully clear that his employer, ExxonMobil, wasn’t going to stop extracting and selling the fossil fuels responsible for the global climate crisis anytime soon. In 2019, he moved from Houston to his just-finished Geos home in Arvada, Colorado with his wife and daughter to start a career in clean energy and live in a way true to his values.
“Moving to the neighborhood was amazing,” Chang says. It was climate action literally brought home.
Net-zero communities: An up-and-coming climate solution
Geos, whose first home was completed in 2017, is one of a small but growing number of net-zero communities popping up across the U.S.
