A specialty contractor built around one model: design, build, install, maintain
Sustainability 1st LLC is a Colorado company founded in May 2026, structured around a single idea — that rural energy and connectivity infrastructure shouldn't be assembled from three different vendors who never talk to each other. One contractor designs the system, builds it, installs it, and stays on to maintain it.
We work across three service lines: solar microgrids, wind microgrids, and broadband connectivity. Most projects use more than one at once, which is exactly the point — a solar array and a wind system on the same property should be designed together, not bolted on separately.
Our flagship project is our own headquarters: a five-acre site in Costilla County, in Colorado's San Luis Valley, where those systems, alongside the site's own water infrastructure and land management work, will be running and visible, not just described in a brochure.
I grew up in Connecticut, which is still home base as far as I'm concerned, no matter how many other states I've lived in since. My family ran a construction and development business, so before I understood much of anything else, I understood job sites — permits, crews, materials showing up late, the gap between a blueprint and a finished structure. That's where the instinct for building things that actually hold up came from, long before it had anywhere else to go.
College took me between Connecticut and California, and the thirty years after that took me almost everywhere in between: Indiana, Tennessee, Florida, the DC/Maryland region, Massachusetts, and now Arizona, with Colorado next. Along the way I spent decades in IT, working inside some of the most security-conscious environments in the country, including postings tied to the White House and the Pentagon. That kind of work teaches you a particular discipline — systems that fail quietly are worse than systems that fail loudly, and you design for the failure you can't see coming, not just the one you can.
Later, I spent time overseas with the Foreign Service, living in Albania as part of that posting. Watching infrastructure work — or not work — in a country with a very different relationship to its power grid, its water systems, and its connectivity than the one I grew up in changed how I think about what "essential" actually means. It's easy to take reliable infrastructure for granted until you've lived somewhere it isn't guaranteed.
Sustainability 1st is what happens when all of that lands in one place: a construction background that understands how things get physically built, an IT career built on systems thinking and security discipline, and firsthand experience with what life looks like when the infrastructure everyone assumes will just be there, isn't. Rural Colorado has its own version of that gap. This company exists to close it.
See the flagship project