CO-WY Engine revs up during critical moment in climate change fight

BOULDER — The need for initiatives such as the Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine was self-evident on Thursday in Boulder, as the scent of wildfire smoke hung in the air and temperatures reached the mid-90s.

“The central Rockies are warming faster than the globe by about 50%,” University of Wyoming professor Bart Geerts said during a presentation of the CO-WY Engine during BizWest’s Confluence and Net Zero Cities conference. The month that just passed is likely to be “the warmest July that Colorado and Wyoming have ever seen.”

The CO-WY Engine was designated a Regional Innovation Engine by the National Science Foundation, making the collaborative effort eligible for as much as $160 million in federal funding over the next 10 years. 

The initiative, led by Fort Collins-based accelerator program Innosphere with participation from Colorado State University and the University of Colorado, will “create technologies and tools needed to combat global climate changes, and develop a new climate economy, locally and nationally, through: 1) identifying climate challenges, including needs in measurement, standardization, and barriers to equitable technology adoption and implementation; 2) funding and providing strategic partnering for the selected technologies, developed via use-inspired and translational research; and 3) implementing new programs that align the regional workforce,” according to CO-WY Engine documents.

“We can commercialize in this space in order to innovate in this space,” Innosphere chief operating officer Tim Jones said. 

The joint CO-WY Engine effort from Colorado and Wyoming researchers and clean-tech business leaders is among the groups to win a Regional Innovation Engine designation from the NSF, which has nearly $1.6 billion in CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 funding to dole out it to engine programs over the next decade.

“We have data on pretty much everything we need, and we synthesize that data to answer questions that are important to society,” said Virginia Iglesias, interim director of Earth Lab at the University of Colorado. 

The CO-WY Engine recently launched its Use-Inspired and Translation Grant opportunities to accelerate the research, development, and commercialization of innovations into tangible products, services, or solutions that address climate resiliency.

Priority areas for this grant cycle include complex earth sensing, soil carbon capture data and analytics, methane emissions analysis, extreme weather modeling, wildfire risk and prediction, and water availability prediction.

CO-WY engine leaders believe that the group’s effort will catalyze the creation of 22,000 jobs and could boost gross domestic product in the two states by $1.5 billion.