With rising energy prices, improving technologies, growing interest in energy independence, and new commitments to addressing climate change, the time is ripe for significant changes in energy practices.

The Kendall Foundation sees the potential for reforming energy policy and bringing about much higher levels of clean energy implementation, in part through using innovative financing mechanisms that creatively leverage private financing with limited public investment. With this approach, massive implementation of energy efficiency can be achieved, which broadly defined includes the widespread adoption of traditional conservation measures such as lighting retrofits and better insulation, as well as installation of renewable energy technologies and combined heat and power facilities, and the use of demand response technologies that shifts some power usage to off-peak hours thus reducing the need to use the dirtiest and most expensive power plants to supply electricity. When deployed at this scale, energy efficiency helps to stabilize energy and electricity prices, while also significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Cambridge Energy Alliance, a signature undertaking for the Kendall Foundation, has become a great learning laboratory for understanding the challenges associated with achieving massive implementation of energy efficiency across all sectors in the city. Lessons learned will continue to be shared, informing others working to promote aggressive efficiency efforts at the municipal, state and regional levels.

The Kendall Foundation also has a history of supporting trans-boundary initiatives that have resulted in successful New England and Atlantic Canada partnerships. Working together across states and provinces, nonprofit organizations are reinforcing and linking carbon-reduction programs and developing complementary and forward-looking energy efficiency policy.