Homes with no energy bills are catching on — even in Pueblo — and the extra cost isn’t as high as you’d think

A study that found building net-zero homes costs not much more than standard homes changed the trajectory of a Pueblo housing project. Now, more than 5,000 net-zero ready homes are proposed for Colorado.

“What it felt like to me was the whole process of developing an all-electric, net-zero community had been happening, and I wasn’t aware of it. It had gone so much further into the mainstream,” said Resnick, a long-time land developer with projects in California and Arizona. “And then I understood how to build a net-zero community.”

These net-zero or zero-ready homes produce more than enough energy from solar or wind power so they can feed extra power back into the local energy grid to compensate for night use. But the number of such homes is tiny, less than 0.1 percent nationwide (the Net Zero Energy Coalition counted up 13,906 units in the U.S. and Canada last year). And some decade-old projects in Colorado have languished for years due to lack of financing after the housing crash.

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