The Energy Future Coalition is a nonpartisan public policy initiative that seeks to speed the transition to a new energy economy. Combining expertise and advocacy, the Coalition brings together business, labor, and environmental groups to identify new directions in energy policy with broad political support. The Energy Future Coalition works closely with the United Nations Foundation, with which it is co-located, on energy and climate policy, especially energy access, energy efficiency, and bioenergy issues.
Mission
The Energy Future Coalition is an ambitious, visionary effort by business, labor, and environmental groups to bridge their differences and identify broadly supported energy policy options that address three great challenges related to the production and use of energy:
The political and economic threat posed by the world's dependence on oil.
The lack of access of the world's poor to the modern energy services they need for economic advancement.
The Coalition seeks to connect those challenges with a vision of the vibrant economic opportunities that will be created by a transition to a new energy economy. On the third challenge, the Coalition works closely with its sister organization, the United Nations Foundation.
C. Boyden Gray, Founder, Boyden Gray & Associates; U.S. Ambassador to the European Union under President George W. Bush; White House Counsel under President George H.W. Bush
Thomas E. Lovejoy, Biodiversity Chair, The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment; Former Chief Scientist and Counselor, Smithsonian Institution
In late 2001, with the support of the Turner Foundation and Better World Fund, the Energy Future Coalition held exploratory meetings to discuss the inadequacies in U.S. energy policy. These meetings were focused on addressing our dependence on foreign oil and the associated risk to our economy and national security, the neglected threat of climate change, and the need to bring electricity and modern fuels to the two billion people who lack them. A consensus emerged on the need for change, and on the opportunity to present a new vision that linked security, environment, and economics for a more sustainable future. Over the next six months, more than 150 individuals from business, labor, government, academia, and the NGO community came together to create a compelling new vision of what the energy economy could become, and to identify policy changes that would spark a revolution in energy technology. The Coalition focused on practical political coalition building, aimed at breaking the gridlock along partisan lines that had previously prevented substantive advances in energy policy. The Coalition created six Working Groups of diverse participants that participated in a nine-month effort to identify a new path forward. These working groups presented recommendations in the areas of transportation, bioenergy and agriculture, the future of coal, end-use efficiency, the smart grid, and innovative financing for international energy development. The original recommendations formulated by the working groups can be found in the 2003 report, . Elements of the Coalition's recommendations were included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Building on the Coalition's Bioenergy and Agriculture Working Group, a group of agriculture and forestry leaders developed the 25x'25 vision, which states that America should produce 25% of its energy from renewable resources by 2025. In the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 Congress endorsed 25x'25 as a goal for the nation. In 2007, the Coalition began working at the state level on the cheapest and fastest way to meet our energy needs—energy efficiency. In 2008, the Coalition launched exploratory meetings into what would become the initiative. In 2010, developed federal legislation to incentivize commercial building energy efficiency upgrades via federal rebates. The legislation became known as Building STAR, and while it ultimately failed to pass, it laid the foundation for continuing work in the commercial building energy efficiency sector at the federal, state, and local levels. was launched in 2010 as an outgrowth of the Coalition’s work on the smart grid. This initiative brings together a diverse group of stakeholders to support policies that scale up a cleaner electricity system by unlocking domestic renewable energy resources currently stranded in our country’s remote areas and deploying smart technologies to make the transmission and distribution grid more reliable, resilient, and secure, accommodate renewable power, and enable more energy efficiency by consumers and businesses.
