SWEEP: Colorado’s "Efficiency" Crusaders

The Sleeper Non-Profit with their hands in virtually any energy-related issue in Colorado

Colorado once prided itself on affordability, wide-open opportunity, and pragmatic independence. For decades, the state attracted newcomers with low taxes, relatively cheap housing, and a live-and-let-live culture.

But over the last twenty years, Colorado has undergone a massive political transformation.

Beginning in the early 2000s, a small group of wealthy progressives — Tim Gill, Pat Stryker, Rutt Bridges, and Jared Polis — devised what became known as the Blueprint. Their strategy, later chronicled in the book The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care) and the documentary Rocky Mountain Heist, was simple but devastatingly effective: pour tens of millions into a constellation of obscure and difficult to track nonprofits, issue-advocacy groups, and media outlets to permanently tilt Colorado’s politics to the far left.

Instead of competing head-to-head with centrists on either ass cheek of the uniparty on traditional terms, the Gang of Four built an NGO-industrial complex that could shape narratives, fund candidates indirectly, and flood the statehouse with policy shops and “experts.”

The result was a political landscape where progressive causes could flourish with little organized resistance.

And along with the partisan realignment came a new ideological package: a blend of green Malthusianism and luxury beliefs — moral stances that cost elites little but impose heavy burdens on ordinary people. This amounted to a form of Progressive Colonization: the importation of Yankee moral statism and Left Coast environmentalism into a state historically defined by Far Western individualism and El Norte traditions.

Climate policy became the flagship example. To the donor luxury belief class in their new Berkeley or Park Slope in the mountains homes, renewable mandates, natural gas bans, and “beneficial electrification” were badges of virtue.

To everyday Coloradans, they meant higher costs and fewer choices.

This is the context in which groups like the Boulder-based Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP) have thrived.

SWEEP can count on favorable coverage from “local” media and a sympathetic ear in the statehouse precisely because the Blueprint ecosystem cleared the way.

In today’s Colorado, NGOs aren’t just advocates — they are fourth-estate policy engines drafting bills, feeding testimony while the rest of us are at work, and shaping the very vocabulary of the debate.

Who and What Is SWEEP?

The Southwest Energy Efficiency Project was born in 2001, the brainchild of Howard Geller, a career efficiency advocate who cut his teeth at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy in Washington, D.C.

Colorado and its neighbors were laggards on the utility efficiency programs that grew out of the energy crisis in the 70s, and Geller spotted the opportunity: a nonprofit that could lobby legislatures, utilities, and regulators into scaling “demand-side management” across the Mountain West.

SWEEP also does work in Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada.

Within a decade, SWEEP was claiming credit for taking utility efficiency budgets from a paltry $20 million a year to nearly $400 million across six states. By its own telling, it helped “avoid” ten new power plants and prevent 80 million tons of CO₂ emissions. Those are the kinds of numbers donors and the Malthusians love — big, round, impossible to verify.

They sound impressive until you ask basic questions: What plants, where, at what cost?

And who, exactly, paid for these “savings”?

The answer is always the same: the every day Coloradan.

By the time Geller retired in 2021, SWEEP had expanded far beyond its efficiency niche. It was pushing new building codes, “beneficial electrification” mandates, and transportation initiatives — a policy wish list that just happened to align with the interests of its funders and utility allies. To lead this next phase, the board tapped Elise Jones, a Boulder County Commissioner whose politics were reliably green and reliably statist.

In other words, what began as an efficiency nonprofit morphed into a lobbying shop dressed in technical jargon. SWEEP is now less about lightbulbs and insulation than about power: the power to dictate how Coloradans heat their homes, cook their meals, and travel.

Who Pays SWEEP — and What They Get in Return

In 2023, SWEEP reported about $2.4 million in revenue, chump change in the NGO-industrial complex, and to their credit little to none of it was directly taxpayer funded.

But the publicly available donor list reads like a who’s who of green philanthropy and institutional players with single issue leftist/green causes.

• $31,500 from the Schwab Charitable Fund, one of the many donor-advised funds used to obscure their names from their donations.

• $120,000 each from the Hopewell Fund (a tentacle of Arabella Advisors) and the Colorado Gives Foundation.

• $45,000 from the Woman’s Foundation of Colorado

• $56,000 from the anti-nuclear Colorado Conservation Education Fund

• $806,000 from the United States Energy Foundation, a left leaning green “pass through” organization.

• The remaining coming from private sources.

It’s the same script Robert Bryce has exposed again and again: deep pocketed individuals or foundations fund NGOs, NGOs push policies, utilities profit, and families pay the bill.

The Dark Money Behind The Gas Bans

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And what about the results?

As Frédéric Bastiat warned, the “seen” is paraded about — rebates, programs, “avoided” emissions. The “unseen” is quietly ignored — the higher bills, the lost savings, the family budgets drained to support somebody else’s vision of efficiency.

And SWEEP doesn’t just cash the checks — it spends them pushing laws. As a 501(c)(3), it can’t endorse candidates directly, but lobbying is very much on the menu.

SWEEP have testified on more than hundreds of bills across the region and hired professional lobbying firms like Siegel Long Public Affairs to shepherd “clean energy” legislation through the Colorado Capitol. They also send their people to hyper-local meeting such as city council or county board meetings.

The crown jewel so far is HB22-1362. Touted as a building-code modernization bill, it actually handed sweeping authority to an unelected board that now requires all new systems to be “demand-response capable.” Translation: Xcel or another utility can shut off or throttle “smart” appliances whenever they declare a peak-demand event.

Here’s the kicker: it works beautifully for the utilities too. Minnesota-based Xcel, Colorado’s largest electric utility (and the same entity behind the controversial Pathway transmission line project) operates, like every other IOU, under a “cost-of-service” model that guarantees a fixed return on approved capital projects.

Every new mandate pushed by organizations such as SWEEP or the even more infamous Rocky Mountain Institute means more capital to build, and more guaranteed profit.

Since 2019, the average Colorado residential electric bill has jumped 38 percent while compadres in energy sanity such as the Independence Institute are sounding the alarm that Colorado’s electrical grid is heading for disaster.

And the small players? They get squeezed too. San Luis Valley REC for example scored $1.7 million in federal money for solar farms to help them comply with the state’s strict carbon emission reductions laws but shifting mandates, bureaucratic red tape, and the solar farms themselves is leaving it’s predominantly low-income members with higher bills.

Investor-owned monopoly, rural co-op, or even with municipals, the story is the same: SWEEP type organizations pushes the mandates, utilities build the capital, regulators bless the costs, and ratepayers are left holding the bag.

The Price Tag for Everyday Coloradans

Efficiency is supposed to save money. Or at least that’s the sales pitch.

But in practice, SWEEP’s agenda has made energy costlier for ordinary households.

Starting with the basics: the Department of Energy admits electricity costs 3.5 times more per BTU than natural gas, and heating with electricity costs 46 percent more than heating with gas.

Real-world stories confirm it too.

Denver’s Sexy Pizza swapped out gas ovens for a $55,000 electric unit. “Local” media celebrated the switch as climate heroism. Within weeks, the owner discovered the truth: the electric bill outpaced the old gas costs, subsidies and rebates notwithstanding.

Multiply that lesson across restaurants, small businesses, and households, and the so-called transition looks less like efficiency and more like forced inefficiency.

And the hidden costs pile up. Builders tack the expense of EV-ready wiring, fancy windows, green cult-approved appliances, and new code compliance into the building costs. Local governments get a larger cut in fees and require more code review time to approve building permits. Landlords roll retrofit costs into rent. Utilities slap program surcharges on monthly bills or beg to the regulators for yet another rate increase. For everyday Coloradans, it’s death by a thousand cuts — a dozen small fees that quietly drain household budgets while politicians and wealthy green elites congratulate themselves on “climate leadership.”

This is classic malinvestment: resources diverted into projects politicians prefer rather than what everyday Coloradans would freely choose.

The “climate payoff” is imperceptible too — Colorado produces less than a tenth of one percent of global emissions — but the household pain is undeniable.

SWEEP in the Bigger Picture

Zoom out, and SWEEP is just one cog in a much larger NGO-industrial machine. National outfits like RMI, Rewiring America, and the Climate Imperative Foundation pump out the slogans and white papers, bankrolled by billionaires like Bloomberg and Bezos. SWEEP’s job is local translation — showing up at the statehouse and city councils to turn donor-class talking points into mandates Coloradans have to live under.

One of SWEEP’s favorite buzzwords is “equity.” The rhetoric is that electrification and efficiency programs will lift up disadvantaged communities. The reality, as critics have shown, is often the opposite. In California, Jennifer Hernandez documented how that state’s progressive climate mandates created a kind of Green Jim Crow — raising housing and energy costs, shuttering unionized industries, and driving working-class Black and Latino families further from homeownership. In San Diego, upcoming restrictions on natural gas in buildings as argued here will disproportionately impacted the city’s vibrant Asian-American restaurant scene — stripping away wok hei in Chinese kitchens, Korean BBQ, and teppanyaki traditions that simply can’t be replicated with electric griddles.

The lesson travels out to to the Coastal Elite’s favorite interior colony - when Colorado NGOs like SWEEP push “beneficial electrification” as an “equity” policy, the real-world outcome often looks more like cultural erasure and higher costs for entrepreneurs.

“Equity” in SWEEP’s hands doesn’t mean respecting communities’ own choices. It means central planning in moral costume — a way for elites to launder luxury beliefs through the language of justice. In practice, it widens inequality while delivering negligible climate benefit.

Why It Matters

The story of SWEEP is not one of scandal but of structure: a nonprofit turned policy machine, advancing an agenda that raises costs while delivering negligible benefit.

For Coloradans, the stakes are clear. Every new mandate means higher costs of living. Every efficiency “target” adds a surcharge. Every electrification requirement chips away at choice.

Even the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), a constitutional amendment passed in the early 90s to require tax hikes be approved by voters and not through the legislature, has been neutered by endless “fees” — backdoor taxes in disguise — stacked on everything from utility bills to extras on vehicle registrations, fees on Uber rides, items shipped to one’s door via Amazon or other competitors. For working families, it’s death by a thousand cuts: a dollar here for “climate equity,” five there for “transportation electrification,” ten more hidden in an electric bill.

And now the mandates go beyond cost into loss of control. The Model Low Energy and Carbon Code requires demand-response appliances — meaning the utility, not you, decides when the AC runs or the water heater cycles.

That is the logical endpoint of the SWEEP vision: an affordability crisis wrapped in sustainability and degrowth jargon, enforced by people you never elected but want to micromanage every part of your life.

It all traces back to the Blueprint. The Gang of Four didn’t just flip a state; they imported a new worldview. Progressive Colonialism fused Yankee moralism with Left Coast dogma, turning Colorado into a showcase for luxury beliefs that flatter elites while hollowing out livability and affordability for everyone else. SWEEP is one cog in that larger machine.

So when you hear the soothing word “efficiency”, remember: it isn’t about efficiency for you. It’s efficiency for the machine — for consultants, utilities, and donor-class activists who turned a once-affordable state into their sandbox.

The only real question left is the one every regular Coloradan should ask when opening their next bill: efficient for whom?

And the answer, too often, is obvious: buzzwords such as “efficiency” and “equity” becomes the moral feel-good froth, while the substance underneath is just another luxury belief — a costless virtue signal for elites, and one more bill or fee for everyone else.