Good morning, Colorado. Those of you who spent the past 48 hours navigating the usual 45-minute trip from Winter Park to I-70 don’t want to be stupefied right away by depressing climate and health news.
So let’s just talk about the Colorado Buffaloes women’s basketball team:
Ranked No. 3 in the country. Drawing 10,000 insanely fun fans per game. Dominating the nation’s toughest conference, with four Pac-12 teams in the top 10. Showcasing fearless slashing guard Jaylyn Sherrod.Get on board, Colorado. Let’s stop spending our winters whining about Todd Helton not making the Baseball Hall of Fame, or whether the Broncos can draft an edge rusher.
It’s a good week to start tuning into women’s basketball: No. 5 UCLA at CU Events Center Friday, No. 6 USC at home Sunday. Buy a cheap ticket to a game and sit next to the CU student band, it’s an absolute blast. Oh, and the cheer squad does a backflip for every made free throw. Even Rocky doesn’t do that for the Nuggets.
In the meantime, there’s hydrogen vehicle news and an Eastern Plains hospital CEO too young to rent a car in many states. Thanks for hanging with us.
CLIMATE
The Biden energy largesse now going to Colorado hydrogen stations
A 2021 Toyota Prius that runs on a hydrogen fuel cell on display at the Denver auto show in September 2021. CSU and a private company have a big federal grant to build public fueling stations along I-25, focused on trucks at first but seeking passenger cars in the future. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
“Ours is NOT a ‘rain follows the plow’ approach.”
— New Day Hydrogen’s Seth Terry, saying they are signing customers before they build
If hydrogen is ever going to take off as an alternative vehicle fuel, the feat will require an enormous amount of government help. Clean fuel advocates are already busy trying to build an adequate network of electric car manufacturers, dealers and chargers — hydrogen is so obscure, by contrast, that the most basic demonstration projects only get done with big federal grants.
And thus it has begun. Colorado clean energy leaders last week celebrated an $8.9 million Biden administration grant to help Colorado State University and partners build three viable public fueling stations using hydrogen technology. There may not be many working trucks or cars on the roads running on hydrogen, but the chicken-or-the-egg scenario does require fueling stations once those vehicles get here.
CSU, the private partner New Day Hydrogen and others will build fueling stations near CSU facilities in Fort Collins, Denver and Pueblo. The stations will initially handle medium- to heavy-duty trucks, then be available for passenger vehicles if manufacturers produce and sell more in Colorado.
New Day Hydrogen said the federal grant would cover 80% of the three projects positioned on the Interstate 25 corridor. The projects also have $250,000 in Colorado’s Advanced Industries funding.
Green hydrogen employs cleanly generated electricity to split hydrogen from water; this can be done with electrolyzers at the fueling station itself. A hydrogen car uses a fuel cell to transform the gas’s chemical energy back into electricity, which powers an electric motor. The byproduct out the “exhaust” pipe is water vapor. (Gray or dirty hydrogen is produced from refining natural gas, greatly reducing the carbon savings from green hydrogen.)
New Day Hydrogen had hoped to get public fueling stations up and running in metro Denver years ago, in partnership with AAA’s auto club. Finding partners and ideal locations has been a challenge, company officials said.
Car and Driver magazine said about 15,000 hydrogen vehicles were on the road in 2022, all in California, which has built out a fueling network and created other incentives. That compares to millions of EVs now on U.S. roads.
Advantages of hydrogen vehicles include fast filling time, comparable to gasoline stations; avoiding the massive battery arrays that steal payload weight from electric trucks; and steadier performance in cold and steep Colorado mountain conditions. The main disadvantage, of course, is that the technology starts so far behind an electrifying world currently grabbing much of the public and private investment.
The three hydrogen stations will have customers when they open, assured New Day Hydrogen CEO Seth Terry. They are not merely building them and hoping “rain follows the plow,” Terry said. The company has been working to sign commitment letters from fleet operators who are in the process of buying hydrogen-fueled trucks.
The federal grant in Colorado is “the market signal to validate our incremental ‘micro-hub’ approach to infrastructure,” Terry wrote in an email. “With this grant, we will unlock early investment to make our first projects a reality that will catalyze fleets to take their first steps into zero emissions with hydrogen.”
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
Nederland’s Boulder Creek gets two guardians. The rights of nature for rivers and other natural features took another big step when Nederland fulfilled a previous resolution and appointed two residents as “guardians” of Boulder Creek. No one’s quite sure yet how much legal or moral power comes with the designation, Michael Booth reports, but the two guardians say residents are already seeking them out to research and focus their concerns about local watersheds.— The Colorado Sun Finding energy independence in a snowy town. Along with the old-fashioned heaps of snow, stunning beauty and blissful isolation in a mountain town like Silverton comes an old-fashioned problem: The power keeps going out. Mark Jaffe reports on new efforts to use “microgrids” of local solar power and batteries as backups to keep essential services going when the power co-op has trouble delivering energy from afar. —The Colorado Sun How much mountain lion hunting is too much? Colorado hunters legally killed hundreds of mountain lions in the first few months of the annual hunting season, Tracy Ross reports. That’s way too many for some wildlife advocates who favor a ban on cougar and other big cat hunting, but it’s not nearly as many as state officials planned for. How to balance big game protections with healthy wildlife management may hit the ballot in 2024.
— The Colorado Sun
HEALTH
One Colorado hospital has a new CEO. It’s his first job after college.
Aidan Hettler, CEO of Sedgwick County Health Center, works with the hospital’s director of transformation, Sarah Greichen, right, in Hettler’s office in Julesburg on Jan. 11. (Alex McIntyre, Special to The Colorado Sun)
“In a normal world, I would have never gotten an interview.”
— Aidan Hettler, CEO of Sedgwick County Health Center
When Aidan Hettler showed up for a job interview at the Sedgwick County Health Center in the summer of 2022, he was prepared to tell the hospital’s board that he absolutely should not get the job.
He had been talked into applying by somebody at the hospital, despite having no health care experience to speak of — and he was just 22 years old.
“Unashamedly, I did say in the interview … ‘I don’t have any right sitting in your CEO chair. You do not want this, I promise,’” said Hettler, who graduated earlier that year from Colorado State University with a degree in business administration.
The board of the hospital — a small facility in Julesburg less than a mile from the Nebraska state line — didn’t see it that way, and quickly brought him aboard.
In the 15 months since, Hettler, now 24, has dived into his new role with a gusto, talking to as many people in the organization as he can to learn how it works and seeking out an experienced mentor on his own.
But Hettler acknowledges the fact that he was interviewed at all is a sign of a challenge many rural hospital leaders have faced in Colorado in recent years: immense difficulty hiring and retaining CEOs.
“If it was not difficult to recruit, no, I probably would not have gotten an interview,” Hettler said. “In a normal world, I would have never gotten an interview.”
CEO turnover at critical access hospitals in rural Colorado was 34% in 2021, according to the Colorado Rural Health Center — much higher than the national average of 16% that year.
While industry experts say the pandemic certainly aggravated many of the factors that drive those numbers, some facilities have been dealing with regular CEO turnover for years.
That’s a problem, because recruiting a qualified executive to a rural community can take months. While patient care continues on, strategic planning and organizational stability can go right out the window as the hunt goes on.
“Those kind of transitions take time. They take resources,” said Jeff Tieman, president and CEO of the Colorado Hospital Association. “If a CEO leaves because of retirement or a CEO leaves because they get a new job somewhere else in the state or somewhere else in the country, it’s not as simple, usually, as just slotting someone into that role.”
You can read the rest of this story, by Sun contributor Gabrielle Porter, later this week at ColoradoSun.com.
MORE HEALTH NEWS
Teens are learning to take 911 calls as a Colorado county scrambles to find dispatchers. El Paso County, like many in Colorado, is struggling to find enough 911 dispatchers to staff its emergency communications center. Now, a new program at Calhan Public High School is training students to be able to take on the job after graduation. As Erica Breunlin reports, it’s part of a wave of high school programs training students to work in emergency services. But it comes with some bracing lessons — one of the first things students learn is that they may be the last person someone talks to.— The Colorado Sun Colorado’s rural hospitals are caught in an aging-infrastructure conundrum. Rural hospitals are often strapped for cash, in part because they tend to offer mostly essential, low-profit services. Being able to do orthopedic surgeries like joint replacements could help boost their bottom lines. But to do that, many need to expand and upgrade their facilities, which is hard for them to do because, as we said, they’re strapped for cash. It’s just one reason many rural hospitals are approaching a crisis point.
— KFF Health News
Note: Three cheers from us at The Temp to the reporter here, longtime health journalist Markian Hawryluk, for his retirement and best wishes to him and his wife as they embark on a 3-year-long RV adventure across America. You can follow their travels at 123rvblog.com. In Colorado’s fourth pandemic winter, examining one of COVID’s “fascinating and beguiling” patterns. Remember that COVID thing we told you about here last week, the one where COVID has a bafflingly consistent peak in Colorado that is out-of-step with much of the rest of the country? Well, it turns out people who actually know stuff have noticed it, too. As CU epidemiology professor Elizabeth Carlton said, even though data on the phenomenon is limited, it seems likely that some mystery environmental and/or social elements are at work.
— The Colorado Sun
The world is going red in a big way, and that’s not good. Weather analysts have confirmed 2023 as the hottest year on record around the globe. (NOAA)
Last week we brought you bad news about Colorado’s warming average temperatures due to climate change. This week we’re spreading the misery and the blame worldwide, with the hope that knowledge is motivation.
NOAA confirmed month-by-month suspicions that 2023 would be the hottest average year on record around the globe. The brightest red “tiles” above show parts of the planet reporting record average temperatures for the year. From the SEC to southern New Zealand, all the wrong kinds of records are getting set.
CLIMATE
Climate torts to watch in 2024. What are the biggest climate and environment court cases to follow in the coming year?— HCN An electric plane design soars past a key frontier. BA Dutch company perfects a 90-seat all-electric plane shooting for 500-mile range.
— Fast Company That “king crab sale” is never free. Severe overfishing wipes out the available supply of yet another seafood staple.
— CBS
HEALTH
When a scooter crash smacks you twice. Electric scooters are a growing source of injury for folks in Colorado — both those riding them and pedestrians. But when you get run down by one, it can also be hard to punish the person who did it.— Denverite Denver Health is at “a critical, critical point.” The hospital lost less money last year than the year before, but uncompensated care for migrants is straining its resources.
— The Denver Post🔑 How Epic could tilt the presidential election. Seriously. Epic, the widely used electronic health records company (it’s the vendor for UCHealth, for instance), is undertaking a major expansion at its headquarters in Wisconsin, which is bringing more young, Democratic-leaning workers into the swing state.
— Becker’s/Bloomberg
Thanks again for tuning in for climate and health news. Next week between NFL playoff games and more CU Buffs, join us for a free 6 p.m. online event Jan. 24 talking about the future of cars, roadways, public transit and city planning with a terrific panel of experts. We’ve debuted a new event format that incorporates reader questions asked ahead of time, and live chat answered by our experts and hosts, so check it out.
— Michael & John
Corrections & Clarifications
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Type of Story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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