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Clean Energy

An overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists now agree that fossil fuel use is altering the global climate and thus severely damaging the ecosystems and conditions that support life on Earth. In effect, humans are experimenting on a massive scale with the Earth’s capacity to maintain healthy ecosystems or to absorb and adapt to pollution that humans cause.

After over 20 years of grantmaking both in and beyond New England, the new Clean Energy Program will concentrate exclusively in New England during the Fund’s last ten years. The goal of the Clean Energy Program is to improve the six-state region’s air quality, build a clean energy economy, and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent within ten years. These aims can be realized by reducing our reliance on coal and other fossil fuels and adopting clean energy and efficiency alternatives.

New England states have been leading the way in creating precedent-setting state and regional energy policies, including the nation’s only carbon cap and trade system known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.  Other programs are pursing aggressive renewable energy and efficiency targets that are spurring the region’s promising clean energy economy.  When the federal government at last moves to adopt national climate and energy policies, state and regional programs can serve as models, laboratories and aids to achieving meaningful clean air goals and greenhouse gas reductions.

 

Objectives

  • Retiring New England’s six remaining coal-fired power plants and replacing them with cleaner, more efficient energy sources
  • Further reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector by strengthening state and regional clean energy policies, particularly the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and ensuring their strong implementation
  • Reducing air pollution from buildings with large-scale upgrades to improve energy efficiency and install cleaner heating fuels
  • Reducing air pollution and dependence on oil from the transportation sector by expanding the use of electric vehicles and cleaner fuels
  • Identifying the most effective ways of reducing reliance on cars, trucks and airplanes in favor of walking, cycling, public transit and rail 
 
 Strategies
  • Supporting advocacy and organizing campaigns to strengthen clean energy policies and programs
  • Stimulating use of energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, cleaner heating and vehicle fuels, and public transit and rail among institutional customers such as hospitals, colleges and universities, state and local governments, and military facilities
  • Enhancing the clout of new constituencies, especially New England’s clean energy industry, health-based organizations, commercial and residential building owners, and those concerned about dependence on fossil fuels
  • Mobilizing mayors and other local officials to foster adoption of energy efficiency, cleaner fuels in the buildings sector and cleaner fuels, smart growth, and public transit in the transportation sector
  • Mobilizing the financial community to provide the large-scale investment needed to rebuild New England’s energy infrastructure, linking this support to the commercial building sector by funding the organizations best positioned to work with banks and provide a technical understanding of energy efficiency
  • Exploring the most effective and politically feasible means of instigating changes in personal behaviors that result in a decrease in car use

2011 Grants

Policy

American Lung Association

$100,000
To support the US Environmental Protection Agency's ability to implement and enforce the Clean Air Act, and to push EPA to enact regulations and policies that improve air quality, especially those that affect coal-fired power plants.

Connecticut Fund for the Environment

$50,000
To reaffirm Connecticut's leadership role in the national discussion on climate change by promoting policies and investments in energy efficiency and clean energy.

Conservation Law Foundation

$100,000
To advance policies and instigate actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in New England to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, the interim goal needed to attain 80 percent reductions by 2050.

Conservation New Hampshire

$15,000
To enrich the quality of life in New Hampshire by improving the environment and conserving natural resources.

Consultative Group on Biological Diversity

$2,000
To provide general support.

Environment Maine Research & Policy Center

$25,000
To defend Maine's strong climate and clean energy standards and programs against efforts to weaken them.

Health Care Without Harm

$75,000
To reduce energy use throughout the health care sector, and to encourage the sector to assume an advocacy role in defending the Clean Air Act and EPA's authority to regulate air emissions.

Maine Conservation Voters Education Fund

$20,000
To act as coordinator for the Environmental Priorities Coalition in defending Maine's strong environmental standards and programs against efforts to weaken them.

Natural Resources Council of Maine

$15,000
To defend Maine's strong climate and clean energy standards and programs against efforts to weaken them.

New England Clean Energy Foundation

$75,000
To build the foundation's research and education capacity as part of promoting clean energy policies and strengthening the clean energy sector.

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Renewables

Clean Energy States Alliance

$75,000
To catalyze and facilitate development of offshore wind power in the Northeast.

Energy Consumers Alliance of New England

$20,000
To promote effective implementation of Rhode Island's new policy to accelerate development of small-scale, land-based renewable energy.

Environment America Research and Policy Center

$90,000
To conduct research, organizing and advocacy to advance renewable energy and energy efficiency in New England.

National Wildlife Federation Northeast Natural Resource Center

$50,000
To build support along the Atlantic coastline for appropriately sited offshore wind development.

Vermont Public Interest Research and Education Fund

$50,000
To promote the strongest possible clean energy and energy efficiency policies and programs in Vermont.

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Coal/Diesel

American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy

$50,000
To ensure the continued successful implementation of recently enacted utility sector energy efficiency policies in four key Midwestern states.

Clean Air Task Force

$75,000
To provide legal and technical analysis to achieve the strongest possible EPA rules governing emissions from power plants, to defend the rules from congressional attack, and to build an industry constituency in support of ongoing reductions in power plant greenhouse gas emissions.

Conservation Law Foundation

$75,000
To end New England's reliance on coal-fired power plants by advancing the retirement or conversion to cleaner fuels of the seven remaining coal plants in the region.

Earthjustice

$75,000
To promote federal regulations on coal ash disposal and upgraded EPA rules for controlling water pollution from coal plant scrubbers and ash handling systems.

Environmental Integrity Project

$80,000
To secure the strongest possible federal standards for both the disposal of coal ash and the discharge of toxic pollutants into waterways, and to provide research and analysis to state and regional organizations on coal ash disposal sites, as well as violations of Clean Water Act permits at the eight New England coal plants.

Interfaith Power & Light

$40,000
To build the capacity of Midwest chapters to support clean alternatives to coal and mobilize Midwestern faith communities as prominent opponents to coal power.

Ohio Citizen Action Education Fund

$50,000
To retire Ohio's existing fleet of coal-fired power plants.

Rockefeller Family Fund

$75,000
To demonstrate that new coal-fired power plants are poor investments compared to alternatives and begin retiring existing plants by stopping capital flows.

Sierra Club Foundation

$125,000
To stop the construction of new coal plants and expedite the retirement of existing coal plants in the Midwest.

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Efficiency

Ceres

$50,000
To reduce greenhouse gases from the electric power sector by mobilizing utilities to support EPA regulations and to retire outdated coal-fired power plants.

Ceres

$50,000
To present President Mindy Lubber with the 2011 Frank Hatch Award for Enlightened Public Serivce (Sparkplug Award).

Environment Northeast

$130,000
To facilitate implementation of strong clean energy policies in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

Environmental Law and Policy Center of the Midwest

$50,000
To implement strong energy efficiency standards established in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio.

Natural Resources Council of Maine

$50,000
To promote and defend energy efficiency and clean energy policies in Maine.

Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships, Inc.

$110,000
To support adoption and implementation of public policies that advance the efficient use of energy.

Ohio Environmental Council

$50,000
To build on recent energy efficiency successes by continuing to implement and defend Ohio's Energy Efficiency Resource Standard, establishing policies to encourage adoption of combined heat and power, and creating a model on-bill finance program in Oberlin.

Sustainable Endowments Institute

$45,000
To assist more than 200 colleges, universities and hospitals in investing a total of $1 billion in self-managed revolving loan funds to finance energy efficiency improvements.

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See 2010 Grants

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