SUSTAINABILITY SPOTLIGHT

The nation's largest park concessioner treads softly across the West

It isn't easy being green. Xanterra Parks & Resorts, the nation's largest park concessioner, just makes it look that way. So the steam-powered engines of the Grand Canyon Railway now run on clean-burning, 100-percent-recycled vegetable oil. There's a ban on the sale of plastic water bottles at Zion Lodge and Zion National Park, but newly installed hydration stations make it easy for guests to use their own refillable bottles. By Lisa Ryckman

ENERGY/INVESTMENT

Aravaipa Ventures pours its funds into the West

Robert Fenwick-Smith might seem like an unlikely champion for Colorado cleantech companies, a Brit whose career includes running a company whose holdings were in pharmaceutical packaging and processing machinery. Three years ago, the Harvard Business School MBA founded Aravaipa Ventures, named for a canyon in Arizona that made him fall in love with the West.

ENERGY/WIND

The power struggle over the West's best wind

The best wind in America is in Wyoming. It is a door-snapping, heart-pounding wind that barrels in from the west, chasing the truckers along Interstate 80 as they race to make Omaha by nightfall. Beyond power and speed, Wyoming has consistency – what’s known as capacity. At many places in the state, the wind blows more than 40 percent of the time.

ENERGY/BIOFUELS
The industry must foster the next generation of innovators

In today’s biofuels industry, most of the growth has centered on jobs for those workers who have already been trained in industries such as construction, engineering, chemistry and biology. The industry now supports tens of thousands of direct and indirect jobs across the country and up and down the value chain from the labs of San Diego to the ethanol plants of Iowa to the offices of Silicon Valley. By Mary Rosenthal