Lynn Fisher-Dwyer didn’t need another job. Besides running Fisher-Dwyer Greens and Flowers, a nursery tucked into the ruddy hills of Garfield County’s New Castle, she had side gigs in landscape consulting and design, not to mention a teaching position at Colorado Mountain College. So when Auden Schendler called in 2008 and asked her to run for a seat on the board of their local electric utility, Fisher-Dwyer said no.
Two weeks later, he called again: “We really need you,” he said. Schendler, then the director of environmental affairs for Aspen Skiing Company (SkiCo), had seen Fisher-Dwyer’s $100,000, ground-mounted solar array. He knew she heated her largest greenhouse with a solar thermal system. To him, she seemed like the perfect progressive candidate to help him lead a coup at Holy Cross Energy, the Glenwood Springs–based co-op that, at the time, used coal and natural gas almost exclusively to power the Roaring Fork and Eagle River valleys. Still, Fisher-Dwyer demurred. “Auden,” she said, “I don’t have time for this.”
But Schendler kept calling. “He wore me down,” Fisher-Dwyer says. “I did some soul-searching and thought it was time for me to give back to the community.” She decided to enter the race, becoming the first in a line of Schendler-backed, climate-focused candidates to attempt to join the co-op’s board of directors. The challengers quickly discovered, however, that the then directors wouldn’t surrender their power easily. “It was a street fight,” Schendler says. At one point, Schendler joked in an
