EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Grants

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program is providing a total of $5 billion in grants to states, local governments, tribes, and territories to develop and implement ambitious plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful air pollution. Authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act, this two-phase program offers both noncompetitive planning grants and competitive implementation grants.

The Colorado Energy Office (CEO) received a planning grant, and must submit a Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) with specific GHG reduction strategies by March 1, 2024. The update to the state Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Roadmap will help inform the state’s PCAP. Colorado's PCAP will include both state and local measures for this grant.

In November 2023, CEO hosted a series of virtual meetings for local government stakeholders to provide input on draft local government actions to include in Colorado’s PCAP. CEO has published a revised draft of local government measures for the PCAP, and is seeking limited feedback via email until February 12, 2024.

For questions, comments, or more information on local government measures and engagement, please contact Christine Berg, christine.berg@state.co.us.

The state of Colorado, municipalities, counties, tribes, tribal consortia, and territories will be eligible to apply for competitive implementation grants based on the measures included in Colorado’s PCAP. CEO will be applying for an implementation grant to fund both local government and state-implemented measures.

If you would like to provide implementation ideas or other comments regarding this application, please fill out the Colorado CPRG Implementation Grant Application Feedback Form. To the extent possible, please include information about the transformative impact, amount of GHG reduction, cost effectiveness, and community benefits for any proposed ideas. Although not comprehensive, these are some of the criteria the EPA uses to evaluate applications. Implementation grant applications are due April 1, 2024.

For local government measures, CEO intends to apply for an implementation grant for a Colorado Local Climate Action Accelerator program to support widespread progress on equitable climate action at the local level. CEO is requesting that local governments interested in this program:

• By February 28th, 2024: Review the draft local government measures and Local Climate Action Accelerator overview, and complete the survey indicating which measures you are interested in pursuing if the state is awarded funding. This is in no way binding and we do not intend to utilize individual responses. However, this information will help us develop the budget and model the potential benefits of the Local Climate Action Accelerator program in aggregate.
• By March 20th, 2024: Submit a letter of support to CEO for inclusion in the implementation grant application. We have provided a template you can edit here. Download CEO letter of support template.