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Clean Future

Environmental stewardship has long been an underlying principle at GUC. Our commitments to energy efficiency and to the protection of the environment extend to our facilities and the ways we use them, to our policies both internal and external, and to our business practices. We have modeled conservation and environmental excellence for many years, long before the term “going green” became popular.

“Stewardship” means taking care of the environment today so that the next generation can enjoy the same amenities and natural beauty as we do. It’s a promise and an obligation that GUC takes seriously.

We practice stewardship every day:

  • We protect and utilize water resources in a sustainable and ecologically balanced manner.
  • We reduce, reuse, and recycle to conserve landfill space.
  • The electricity we provide increasingly comes from renewable resources like wind and solar as well as nuclear and natural gas, which burns much cleaner and produces far fewer greenhouse gasses than coal.
  • We offer customers opportunities to improve the efficiencies of their homes and buildings, which also lowers energy use and minimizes the impact on the environment.
  • We utilize renewable natural gas (RNG) which is methane that is captured at a landfill that would otherwise simply be released into the atmosphere.
  • We have lowered energy use at our facilities by replacing equipment and changing lighting.
  • We have been converting generators from diesel to cleaner-burning natural gas generators.
  • We utilize vegetation to reduce the amount of nutrients heading into the river.
  • We built and operate a compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling station to encourage businesses and individuals to use a fuel that will reduce their carbon footprint (CNG burns much cleaner than gasoline or diesel).
    • The annual carbon emission savings of this alone is equal to removing 159 passenger cars from the road each year.
    • It's also the same as planting 11,244 trees annually.

Simply running the CNG Fueling Station has allowed us to reduce CO2 emissions by more than 3,394 tons over the last eleven years! We are always trying to recruit more industries, businesses, and local governments to convert their diesel fleets to cleaner-burning CNG.

In 2025 alone, GUC reduced an estimated 4,022 tons of CO2 emissions through its various projects and programs. If you include the CO2 emissions reduced through our sale of natural gas to local industrial customers in place of fuel oil, that number jumps to 30,208 metric tons, just in 2025.  Find out more about the various projects and the associated environmental impacts in our 2025 report.