A Legacy of Partnering with the US Government

How RMI’s decades-long collaboration with the federal government has helped America, and its people, benefit from clean energy.

One of Rocky Mountain Institute’s first interactions with the federal government dates back nearly half a century to the institute’s founding in 1982. That year, the Pentagon, under Republican President Ronald Reagan, asked RMI to help develop a clean-energy strategy to bolster national security.

The result was Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security, by Amory and L. Hunter Lovins, a book that argues that US energy infrastructure is vulnerable to disruption from accidents or malice, as well as external supply shocks, such as sharp price spikes and disruptive shortages.

Their proposed fix? Clean energy, a shift that would cost less, work better, and be less vulnerable to disruption than the incumbent fossil fuel system.

Referring to work undertaken soon thereafter, Reagan’s National Security Advisor Robert C. McFarlane recounted in The Wall Street Journal that, “Perhaps the most rigorous and surely the most dramatic [off-oil] analysis [was by] Rocky Mountain Institute, a respected center of hard-headed, market-based research.”

Decades later, RMI continues to offer independent, fact-based analysis to the government, a collaboration that has spanned numerous Republican and Democratic administrations. Some of our work is now halted by executive orders and more are under threat as the new administration looks to cut costs. Some of the grants that have been stalled by stop work orders were awarded during President Donald Trump’s first term, including efforts to reduce energy waste and make energy bills more affordable for low-income households.

Of the $26.4 million in federal grants received by RMI since 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, the institute was awarded $11.4 million in Trump’s first term and slightly more, $14.1 million, under President Joe Biden. During Obama’s two terms, RMI secured a little less than $860,000. All grants received are disclosed publicly, and expenditures are closely tracked by the federal government.

“We’re committed to working across the aisle constructively to secure a clean, prosperous, sustainable energy future, for all,” said RMI CEO Jon Creyts. “To deliver on that vision, everyone must participate — and everyone benefits from having options in their energy choices.”

Still, while federal grants only represent a fraction of RMI’s total funding, the institute’s work with the military, lawmakers, and the executive branch has helped the government pioneer technologies that have not only saved it money, but also have the potential to be adopted broadly, boosting domestic manufacturing, jobs, and US competitiveness — and saving money for American households.

Highlights of RMI’s work with the federal government:

• For decades, RMI has worked with the General Services Administration to cut energy consumption and related costs. In 2019, for example, RMI conducted a GSA-funded assessment of grid interactive technologies at six GSA locations to enhance building efficiency, support the grid, and lower costs. Applying learnings like these across the federal government’s enormous portfolio of properties delivers millions of dollars in recurring savings.
• Since the 1980s, RMI has helped the US Air Force, Army, and Navy reorient their approach to the design and operation of facilities — from ships at sea to bases on the land — to cut energy use, reduce vulnerability to supply disruptions, improve facility resilience, and reduce long-term operating costs.
• Federal support awarded during the first Trump administration developed and deployed cost-effective methods to improve the efficiency of existing homes in low-income communities, lowering the residents’ energy costs and avoiding energy waste. Under the second Trump administration, that program is halted.

Solutions like these that deliver multiple benefits have always had bipartisan support and withstood political shifts. Corporations and businesses also like them because they provide the certainty needed to drive investment.

“Bipartisan solutions are inherently more durable,” notes Bob Inglis, a former Republican US representative for South Carolina, in a piece in Washington State’s Tri-City Herald, co-bylined with Brian Baird, a former Democratic US representative from Washington state. “And durability is good for everyone involved, from utilities — which will make capital investments in equipment and technology to reduce emissions — to future generations looking for a stable climate and preservation of our natural resources,” writes Inglis, who now directs republicEn.org, a growing group of conservatives who care about climate change.

Federal and state partnerships

RMI’s work extends across both red and blue states, too, delivering solutions from scaling resilient buildings and deploying renewables to nurturing clean industry investment. The preponderance of public and private investment has flowed to Republican regions.

Over the four years to January 15, 2025, clean energy investment bound for red states totaled $216 billion, nearly three times the $79 billion headed to blue states, according to RMI analysis. Looking ahead, three-quarters of the $524 billion in pending investment in clean energy projects is slated for Republican congressional districts, per analysis published in Feb. 2025 by MIT and the Rhodium Group.

“Today, RMI is working with numerous Republican-led states who are developing clean energy and related technologies,” said RMI’s Jacob Corvidae, who works with states on helping to develop a clean energy economy. “They are attracting economic development and improving both the affordability and security of energy.”

“We talk and work with everyone… and try to be fluent in different political languages… RMI’s inclusiveness elicits respect from well-informed people across the political spectrum… and hence helps us convene broad conversations and form unusual relationships.”

Corporate collaboration

This commitment — nonpartisan, nonideological, and independent — is also evident in RMI’s corporate partnerships, which revolve around how to make for-profit businesses more successful by innovating products, reducing waste and related costs, identifying coming trends, and managing risk better. Over the past decade, this approach has surfaced in multiple corporate collaborations: The institute conducted a net-zero energy study for McDonalds, teamed up with Uber to expand electric mobility, and worked with multinational mining companies such as BHP to help transform old mines into cleaner power sites.

Building on its reputation as a neutral, pragmatic facilitator, RMI has seeded and grown a series of industry coalitions aimed at developing sector-wide solutions that can benefit many companies at once. Such coalitions are especially impactful in sectors where finding a solution demands investment or coordination that no single player can easily achieve. Select examples include:

• In the power sector, RMI helped to establish VP3, the Virtual Power Plant Partnership. This coalition of nonprofits and corporations are guiding policy, regulations, and market rules to scale virtual power plants (VPPs). Initial funding of the VP3 effort was made possible by General Motors and Google Nest. VPPs interconnect the devices in people’s homes and businesses to provide valuable services to the grid, and in turn compensate consumers for those services provided.
• In shipping, and related financial sectors, RMI helped to launch the Poseidon Principles, a global framework to measure and disclose the climate alignment of financial institutions’ shipping portfolios. By establishing a common, global baseline, banks and other financiers have greater and clearer incentives to help the sector cut its emissions — from around 3 percent of the global total today — by investing in more efficient ships, clean fuels, and other upgrades.
• Energy companies pose a particular challenge — and outsized opportunity — to reduce costs and pollution, while keeping energy reliable and affordable. In 2023, RMI rolled out a suite of advanced tools to support oil and gas operators. By combining satellite sensing with advanced image recognition, these help the industry, regulators, and the public identify and reduce leaks of methane — a superpotent greenhouse gas — from rigs, pipelines, and other infrastructure.
• RMI’s cutting edge research can also deliver sector-wide solutions. In February 2025, RMI unveiled novel analysis to help maintain US leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) and ensure computational security, and meet skyrocketing electricity demand to power a new generation of supersized data centers focused on AI. Known as “Power Couples”, RMI’s approach pairs new data centers with new deployments of solar, wind, and batteries in close proximity to existing natural gas power plants, all to share their existing links to the grid and increase resilience.

This roster of innovation highlights RMI’s history of advancing pragmatic, sector-wide solutions that can benefit all the companies across an industry, not just one player, a given region, or one political perspective over another.

“In its early days, we would state that RMI was ‘apolitical.’ However, it became clear through our influence of energy-related policy this wasn’t the case,” said Marty Pickett, RMI’s general counsel. “Rather, we are ‘nonpartisan.’ It’s a unique approach that continues to be critical today for our growth as a leader in clean energy.”