About Us

The United States must continue deploying clean energy to lower energy costs and deliver economic benefits to communities and workers while addressing climate change. Despite this imperative, Invest in Our Future and the clean energy deployment field face a challenging federal policy landscape over the next three years as clean energy incentives phase out. IOF is prepared to face this challenge head-on with its grantees and partners by executing a multi-faceted strategy to overcome the major obstacles holding back clean energy buildout.

IOF sees new opportunities to unlock the enormous potential of clean energy. Increasing electricity demand and rising energy costs, in part due to the construction of AI data centers, are creating pressure to quickly add more capacity to the grid. Clean energy and battery storage technologies stand out as a clear solution—they are commercially available, faster to deploy, and cost competitive even without federal incentives.

To meet this potential, the clean energy sector must overcome several deployment barriers in the United States. It is too difficult to site and permit utility-scale clean energy projects, and investors have been slow to finance smaller commercial-scale projects because of a flawed perception of their risk. Clean energy employers need more highly skilled workers, but the sector struggles with real and perceived concerns around benefits and wages. At the same time, clean energy has become more politically polarized despite the significant benefits it can offer to rural and working-class places.

IOF’s work—and the work of philanthropy broadly—remains as important as ever to clear these obstacles to clean energy deployment.