Eric Eriksen puts in long nights and weekends to keep the lights on in southern Colorado. As the CEO of the San Luis Valley Rural Electric Cooperative, Eriksen leads a member-owned nonprofit that provides electric service to more than 7,500 people across seven rural counties in the Rocky Mountains — a small cooperative serving a large area.
After Eriksen took over the post in 2023, the utility’s members urged him to apply for a flurry of federal funds available through Biden-era legislation. It was a heavy lift for Eriksen’s team to take on 150- to 200-page federal grant applications. They had to do it fast, he said, and they had to be good at it. Even then, they knew, the application might be denied.
It paid off: The electric cooperative was awarded $1.7 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in January 2025 to construct two 1-megawatt solar farms. (The co-op’s peak electric demand is around 70 megawatts, and it already has one 3 MW solar farm.) But just weeks later, President Donald Trump issued an executive order pausing climate and energy... Read more
