Annual Report 2025
Power Shift: A Secure, Prosperous, Clean Energy Future for All
RMI’s work to create a world of abundant, clean, safe energy continues across boundaries with exciting innovations, new partnerships, and proven solutions.
As we double down on our pragmatic, market-based, and data-led approaches to solving some of the world’s biggest challenges, we are deeply grateful to our donors. You are the reason we can stand firm at a time of significant flux in politics, global energy markets, and climate priorities.
Together, we can make the world safer, richer, fairer, and cooler for all.
Illustration above by RMI’s Yuning Li. Read more about the artist.
Cooling the World without Warming the Planet
Bringing super-efficient air conditioners to market
The future of air conditioning is taking shape in Palava City, home to 200,000 near Mumbai, India. In the region, where temperatures routinely spiral to over 100°F and humidity levels can hit over 90 percent, air conditioning is no longer just a luxury for the well off, but a necessity for all. For a lucky few, innovative new air conditioners (ACs) are delivering comfort using just a fraction of the power of regular units.
Energy-efficient, climate-friendly ACs are needed in more places than ever. Hot, humid cities like Mumbai and Miami were once outliers. But today, rising temperatures worldwide mean even historically cool regions from Paris to Fairbanks, Alaska, are reckoning with dangerous heat waves and the need to add air conditioners to buildings and grids not designed to handle them.
Sixty percent of the world’s population now faces deadly heat conditions. Worldwide, intensifying heat is expected to drive a 2.5-fold increase in cooling energy use and push the planet’s total number of ACs to five billion by 2050, straining the electricity grid and greatly increasing climate pollution. If powered by conventional fossil fuel sources, climate-warming emissions would spike, raising temperatures even more. This creates a fundamental dilemma: how can we provide comfortable living conditions without warming the planet?
In Palava City, RMI tested super-efficient AC prototypes that promise a solution. Developed by India’s largest real estate developer, Lodha, with assistance from RMI, Palava City was built to offer a sustainable, livable, and affordable model of urban living, suitable for the needs of 70 percent of the global population projected to live in urban settings by 2050.
The AC prototypes were developed in collaboration with RMI; the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India; and Mission Innovation’s Global Cooling Prize, launched in 2018. The goal: to develop a residential AC unit with a fifth or less of the climate impact of today’s models. Two entrants developed breakthrough prototypes that exceeded the prize criteria while delivering greater comfort at a significantly lower life-cycle cost.
To bring these super-efficient ACs from prototype to market, RMI and partners formed the Global Cooling Efficiency Accelerator. We tested the two winning models over nine months, gathering real-world data to guide commercialization and garner public- and private-sector backing of super-efficient ACs worldwide.
The results were striking. Super-efficient ACs delivered better comfort while using 60 percent less energy than standard models. Their high-efficiency components, optimized for real-world conditions, along with advanced sensors, motors, and controls, maintained consistent comfort — around 27°C (81°F) with 60 percent relative humidity — and cut peak electricity demand by up to 50 percent, a game-changer that could help avoid overwhelming power grids while reducing climate-warming emissions.
RMI analysis also exposed a critical blind spot in today’s AC performance testing. Current protocols focus too narrowly on temperature alone as a proxy for comfort, overlooking humidity’s crucial contribution to both comfort and energy use. This is partly why today’s high-efficiency ACs struggle to dehumidify in hot and humid climates.
“These are not incremental improvements, they are transformative shifts,” says Aun Abdullah, deputy vice president of ESG at Lodha. “Imagine this at the scale of a city. They show us what the future of cooling in India could look like, and they provide a strong case for updating product standards, consumer awareness, and regulatory frameworks.”
The current era of extreme heat has made air-conditioning essential, and scaling super-efficient ACs is now more urgent than ever. Using super-efficient AC models for the three billion additional units expected by 2050 could not only save lives, but also avoid 68 gigatons of emissions — equivalent to taking 592 million cars off the roads. But realizing this potential will require updated testing standards and performance metrics that reflect real-world conditions, as well as coordinated action across the cooling community, governments, and major buyers — actions that RMI and the Global Cooling Efficiency Accelerator are taking to make efficient cooling possible.
From our donors
“We’re proud to support RMI’s efforts to accelerate access to efficient, affordable cooling technologies, especially for those most vulnerable to heat. Our shared objective is to drive meaningful change in global cooling, at the speed and scale the world urgently needs.”
Spotlight: Solid State Cooling
As cooling demand surges across the world, solid-state cooling is emerging as a game-changing alternative to today’s century-old vapor compression systems: no refrigerants, fewer moving parts, higher energy efficiency, and simpler, more compact systems. In some cases, these systems could cut cooling energy use nearly in half.
And it isn’t just a lab experiment. Startups like MIMiC and Magnotherm — supported by RMI’s climate tech accelerator, Third Derivative — are already testing solid-state cooling for hotels, apartments, and retail refrigeration, which together represent multi-billion-dollar opportunities. For large building owners and global manufacturers, these benefits could mean lower operating costs and a path to sustainability.
Spotlight: Cool Roofs
RMI’s Third Derivative is scaling passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC) technologies — advanced materials that reflect sunlight and emit heat into deep space —cooling buildings even under direct sun. Unlike traditional white-painted roofs, PDRC- equipped “super cool roofs” can lower indoor temperatures by up to 10°C, offering an energy- free cooling solution. This is especially valuable for communities without access to air conditioning. In India alone, widespread adoption could prevent 317,000 heat-related deaths and avoid 68 million tons of climate pollution by 2030. To make this potential a reality, RMI and partners are field testing PDRC products to validate the technology and bring cooling directly to those most at risk.
Spotlight: RMI’s Ankit Kalanki quoted in TIME
As heat waves spread across the globe, air conditioning has gone from a luxury to a necessity for more people. But this comes at a cost. Current power- hungry approaches to air conditioning generate around 7 percent of global annual emissions every year.
RMI’s global cooling team, led by Ankit Kalanki, is working to cut ACs’ need for power and associated emissions.
“Air conditioning is becoming a lifeline in this overheated world,” says Kalanki. “It’s no longer a luxury. We rely on air conditioning for comfort, to feel productive, to feel safe and healthy, and this is an invisible driver of electricity demand and emissions.”
As RMI pushes to commercialize super-efficient AC innovations and make them accessible and affordable, there’s plenty builders, designers, and consumers can do right now to cool indoor spaces and reduce their AC- related energy costs.
Personal story: Aun Abdullah
“Cooling must be seen not as a luxury but as a right.”
Aun Abdullah is helping shape a new model of climate-friendly urban development in India. As a deputy vice president at Lodha, one of India’s largest real estate developers, he has played a key role in ensuring his company embeds sustainability across its portfolio.
In the mid-2010s, Abdullah was leading Lodha’s commercial design portfolio with a focus on energy efficiency and green certifications. That work sparked a partnership with RMI in 2018, starting with a large commercial development in Palava City, India.
Over time, the collaboration expanded: “By 2021, we had jointly reimagined Lodha’s sustainability strategy and brought climate risks to the forefront,” Abdullah says. “This was an essential shift as Indian cities grew increasingly vulnerable to extreme heat, energy and transition risks, and other climate- related stresses.”
Together, RMI and Lodha launched the Net Zero Urban Accelerator, an initiative aimed at end-to-end decarbonization of the built environment. High performance cooling became a central focus for the accelerator. “India, now the world’s most populous country, has a large urban population exposed to rising heat stress,” Abdullah explains. “Cooling must be seen not as a luxury but as a right, and as a driver of development and energy security for India.”
Through the accelerator, RMI and Lodha zeroed in on two critical levers: passive design and equipment efficiency. “We are not only implementing these strategies through climate- responsive and nature-integrated urban development, but also measuring and publishing their impact,” he says. “These insights bring to life the real value of interventions often treated as green building checklist items.”
Lodha’s approach shows how thermal resilience and energy efficiency can be mainstreamed across India’s fast-growing middle-income housing sector. “Unlike niche, high-cost exemplar projects, we aim to achieve broad-based, replicable impact,” Abdullah says. “By testing ideas through pilots and large-scale portfolio demonstrations, we’re creating both proofs of concept for the industry and evidence for policymakers.”
That systemic approach is especially critical as India’s energy demand continues to rise. “Unless we treat energy efficiency as a first resource — borrowing from Amory Lovins’ enduring wisdom — we will only deepen our energy and climate vulnerabilities.”
RMI’s partnership, he adds, has been vital in addressing these challenges. “RMI’s technical depth, combined with a strong presence in the policy ecosystem, helps us sharpen our initiatives and align them for maximum influence,” he says. “Whether it’s shaping climate-resilient design standards or advancing market transformation for super-efficient technologies, RMI’s expertise strengthens both our on-the-ground execution and our strategic direction.”
From Our Donors
“RMI and Third Derivative’s work to deploy breakthrough cooling technologies like passive daytime radiative cooling represents a vital step in tackling extreme heat. As temperatures rise, scalable, low-cost solutions are critical for resilience. RMI’s technical rigor, systems thinking, and market engagement make them an ideal partner to bring frontier solutions from lab to real-world impact.”
Powering Data Centers with Clean Energy
“Power Couples” can energize data center growth — without forcing families and businesses to foot the bill
Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be everywhere these days, from health care to daily shopping and every web search. Unfortunately, the data centers around the world that power AI use a lot of energy, and they’re multiplying quickly. Absent smart solutions, meeting new power demand from data centers could increase electricity costs for everyday utility customers — and add stress to the outdated grid.
In the United States, as our energy demand grows, companies building data centers often struggle to find enough electric power. Even placing these data centers near existing power plants raises concerns, as siphoning power from existing power plants can raise costs for other customers and hurt grid reliability. What’s more, it can take years to build the new transmission and distribution lines needed to link new power plants to new data centers.
That’s where Power Couples come into play — no, not celebrity couples like Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Rather, Power Couples refer to RMI’s “co-location strategy” of pairing large electricity consumers, such as data centers, with new solar, wind, and battery resources sized to meet on-site demand, all located near an existing gas-fired power plant with existing connections to the grid.
This arrangement would allow more rapid approval of new generation resources, given that this arrangement doesn’t require construction of additional transmission capacity. And with some physical safeguards, it could ensure that the new load doesn’t impact grid reliability. Not least of all, costs are borne by the customers creating the new demand — the data centers — rather than nearby households and businesses that get electricity from the existing plant. In fact, any surplus clean energy not needed by the data centers can be exported to the grid, driving down both emissions and the cost for the rest of the customers.
Our report explaining this strategy, How “Power Couples” Can Help the United States Win the Global AI Race, was RMI’s most-read publication of the past year and was picked up in Axios, E&E News, Canary Media, and CNBC.
“About 70 percent of this data center growth that we’re seeing could be met… using existing gas interconnection points to build out data centers and renewables in ways that don’t affect the rest of the grid, don’t force you to do upgrades, but still deliver the power that data centers need,” RMI’s Uday Varadarajan said on CNBC’s “Power Lunch.”
“If you had to build a whole lot of new wires and a whole lot of new generation, normally everybody would have to pay for that,” he said. But with Power Couples, “the data centers pay for what they need and export relatively inexpensive power to the rest of the grid.”
In other words, it’s a win-win situation.
Even if the forecasted load growth is exaggerated, the Power Couples strategy is still beneficial. “Future electricity needs for artificial intelligence are wildly uncertain,” says RMI cofounder Amory Lovins, “shaped by unproven concepts, disputed performance, limited trust, volatile markets, unpredictable adoption, and technical efficiency that quadruples roughly each year.”
Fortunately, Power Couples can be built at any site in phases and scaled up over time. And if the loads don’t pan out as forecasted? That’s just more wind, solar, and storage deployed at existing generators to cut grid costs and emissions.
RMI’s analysis finds that Power Couples at existing gas generators in the United States could rapidly satisfy over 50 gigawatts (GW) of new data center or other concentrated loads with cleaner energy. This is equivalent to the output of 27 Hoover Dams, or enough energy to power five cities the size of New York.
Instead of building new gas infrastructure that could raise ratepayers’ bills, we can power our load growth more quickly, cleanly, and affordably with Power Couples.
Personal story: Alex Engel
Turning a Bold Idea into Action
Meet Alex Engel. He’s one of the “brains” behind RMI’s Power Couples work — and a new startup that is helping to find quick-to-deploy sites for clean energy across America’s congested grid.
Raised by environmentally active parents, Engel’s passion for climate solutions began early. At New York University, his work on campus sustainability projects led him to discover RMI and sparked an interest in transforming the electricity system.
After joining RMI in 2017, Engel became part of a team focused on “clean repowering,” a strategy that speeds the deployment of renewables by siting new solar, wind, and other clean energy sources at the same grid interconnection points as retiring gas and coal power plants. This approach helps bypass one of the biggest barriers to renewables: slow and costly interconnection.
But as electricity demand began growing — fueled by reshoring manufacturing and energy-hungry data centers — clean repowering alone couldn’t keep up. “You’re using existing interconnections, but growing demand requires serving more load,” Engel explains. That realization led to Power Couples.
Power Couples combine new clean-energy resources with legacy gas and coal systems at the same sites. This adds new, clean supplies while avoiding interconnection delays. “Beyond the fact that Power Couples get you around some of the interconnection challenges, they also more easily ensure that the new loads are responsible for bearing the costs and risks of the assets that serve them,” Engel says.
Now, Engel and four RMI colleagues are turning the Power Couples idea into reality through a new venture: Colectric. The startup identifies Power Couple–ready sites and develops project packages that bring together utilities and other key players. Engel says years of consulting with regulators and utilities at RMI helps the team coordinate with stakeholders who don’t often work together, such as investor-owned utilities and community-based organizations.
At RMI, Engel was encouraged to stretch beyond his comfort zone. That led him to run the 2019 e-Lab Summit, a gathering of cross-sector energy leaders. “You cannot solve energy issues as just technical problems,” Engel says. “You also have to understand the people, markets, and institutions driving change. And e-Lab was a crash course on that.”
A human-centered approach to problem-solving, combined with technical creativity, shaped how Engel and his team tackled complex challenges such as Power Couples. It’s a hallmark of how RMI works: blending ideas, partnerships, and on-the-ground solutions. And it’s a perfect example of RMI’s “think, do, scale” approach, which has helped seed and spin off numerous organizations that are scaling impact around the world.
Through Colectric, Engel is helping bring bold RMI ideas to life. What began as a strategy paper is becoming a market-ready solution — showing how innovation at RMI can catalyze real-world transformation. Engel and his colleagues are on track to launch their new venture in the fall of 2025.
Spotlight: Virtual Power Plants — A Year of Action
RMI’s Virtual Power Plant Partnership (VP3) helps to scale the benefits of virtual power plants (VPPs) across the United States. VPPs are aggregations of distributed energy resources such as smart thermostats, batteries, and electric vehicles that can be coordinated to deliver a wide array of benefits to the energy system. Besides helping lower the cost of energy, they can reduce peak demand from the grid and power our homes and critical facilities during power outages. In the Intermountain West, VPPs met the needs of the electricity grid with 20 percent lower costs to generate power, translating to roughly $140 in annual savings per customer. VP3 members help advance VPPs by connecting the VPP industry, developing VPP research, and engaging policymakers. Over the past year, ten state legislatures introduced VPP bills, regulators in ten states and Washington, D.C., advanced VPP policy, and utilities in 34 states and Puerto Rico initiated or expanded VPPs.
Spotlight: Preparing the Grid for EVs
Electricity load growth is not only coming from the data center boom. The world’s move to electric vehicles also means more demand from the electric grid. In collaboration with GridLab and Advanced Energy United, RMI’s CHARGED Initiative convened dozens of experts to develop actionable ways utilities can prepare the grid for high levels of electrification. As a result, ComEd, one of the largest electric utility companies in the nation, filed a flexible interconnection plan to the
Illinois Public Utility Commission. And recently, based on a series of expert interviews with current and former utility commissioners, utility representatives, researchers, and nongovernmental organizations, we developed a set of Transportation Electrification Building Blocks to help utilities, regulators, and other stakeholders plan for and invest in upgrades needed to support EV load growth, while also protecting ratepayers.
Spotlight: Low-Carbon Solutions for Data Center Booms in Growing Markets
RMI ‘s China team also tackled the issue of energy demand growth from AI. Their report, Powering the Data-Center Boom with Low-Carbon Solutions, analyzes the key challenges of reducing emissions from data centers and proposes pathways to address those challenges. The report made a big impact: China Unicom and China Mobile, the leading data center investors and operators, both approached RMI to collaborate on developing industry standards and writing white papers on addressing energy demand from data centers.
From our donors
“RMI unquestionably has been a leader in revolutionizing how global business leaders think about energy systems.”
Solutions Council donors provide RMI both a critical foundation and the flexibility to act quickly on urgent opportunities with gifts of $1,500 or more annually.
Industrial Innovation
Clean industrial hubs are building economies, spurring innovation, and delivering cleaner air.
Transitioning to cleaner, more efficient energy requires innovative solutions, many of which — solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicles — are available today. However, in heavy industries, especially those that are energy-intensive, such as steel, chemicals, and heavy transport, off-the-shelf solutions aren’t available.
Cleaning up heavy industry poses a thorny problem — and RMI sees clean industrial hubs as a promising solution. They unite project developers, policymakers, financial institutions, and community-based organizations to support regional clusters of clean energy and clean industry projects.
RMI’s regional-based approach to industrial decarbonization brings together bricks-and- mortar industrial assets such as factories and refineries with social infrastructure, such as workforce programs and policy development. Siting these projects together helps achieve economies of scale and pools industrial know-how, pushing first-of-a-kind and other cutting-edge projects forward faster.
A hubs approach ensures that projects advance with the necessary policy clarity, financial backing, and community trust to make them successful while also providing a plug-and-play blueprint for other regions, whether in the United States or elsewhere.
This year, we completed a years-long project to accelerate these hubs in two important states: California and Texas. Partnering with 18 first-of-a-kind clean industrial projects, we helped those regions get one step closer to growing their economies, strengthening local workforces, and protecting energy security while reducing industry’s environmental impacts.
Worldwide, clean industrial projects only reach a final investment decision, or FID (the last step before a project is greenlit), 20 percent of the time. We changed that math dramatically: 50 percent of the projects RMI supported reached FID, underlining the promise of the hubs-based model. This means real emissions reductions — 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050 if all projects are completed — but also real investment, with $34 billion in public and private funds committed to these projects.
In the year ahead, RMI will continue its work with states to foster clean industrial innovation. Where California and Texas have led, others can follow.
Personal story: Theseus Development
An Innovative Zero-Cement Concrete Building Technology
Theseus Development is addressing the challenge of decarbonizing construction by replacing traditional cement with an alternative: its zero-cement geopolymer interlocking building system. By eliminating the carbon dioxide generated by heating and producing the ingredients in conventional cement, the new approach cuts emissions by over 80 percent, lowers construction costs by more than 25 percent, and triples building speed, enabling builders to create sustainable and affordable homes at scale.
“We partnered with RMI’s Third Derivative because it is the world’s most remarkable climate and deep-tech ecosystem, bringing together innovators, investors, and industry leaders to accelerate impactful solutions,” said Evans Nartey, Theseus Co-Founder. “Through their network and support, we’ve been advancing our investor readiness and refining our commercialization strategy.”
In the year ahead, the Ghanaian-based start-up aims to commission its 50-ton/day pilot production facility, secure key strategic partnerships, and deliver its first large-scale projects. Their mission is to empower builders across Africa and beyond with sustainable materials that transform the way the world builds.
Spotlight: Supporting emerging tech: The Future Industries Partnership
Emerging climate technologies attract just 10 percent of venture capital funding and only 3 percent of total global investment. To address that gap, RMI, Founders Factory, and HSBC launched the Future Industries Partnership.
The partnership leverages RMI’s technical expertise — as well as the network linked by RMI’s startup accelerator Third Derivative — to connect startups to an ecosystem of experts, investors, and corporate partners seeking opportunities to accelerate the net-zero transition in emerging markets. The three-year program will support climate tech startups focusing on steel, cement, and chemicals in Asia and the Middle East.
Spotlight: A platform for creating demand for sustainable steel
The Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform (SSBP) was launched in 2023 as a first-of-its-kind steel buyers’ group, convened by RMI, to accelerate steel decarbonization through collaborative steel purchases and market action in the iron and steel sectors. The group’s goal of aggregating orders for 1 million tons of near-zero emissions steel by 2028 took a step forward in 2024, when the group issued its first call to producers to submit bids for 2028 delivery. SSBP’s cohort also grew in 2024, as it welcomed Amazon and Johnson Controls to a group that already included Invenergy, Microsoft, Nextracker, and Trammell Crow Co.
Spotlight: Making Electronics More Efficient
Manufacturing electronics accounts for 4 percent of carbon pollution globally, and demand for AI chips, smartphones, and other gizmos is only set to increase in the years ahead. Not only can we cut these emissions, but we can do so in a cost-effective way by focusing on energy efficiency in advanced manufacturing. Our report, Towards Net-Zero Electronics, explores how manufacturers in the final assembly process — a key step in the manufacturing chain — can both retrofit and plan new facilities to focus on saving energy and preventing waste. The recommendations, from smarter heating and cooling to variable lighting and simplified factory layout, provide a blueprint for companies looking to optimize their energy use while creating high quality electronics.
Energizing Resilient Communities
For island communities in Alaska, the Caribbean, and beyond, clean energy is delivering affordable, reliable energy
It’s an unhappy fact that communities located at the far ends of the energy supply chain — whether it’s snow-packed Arctic towns in Alaska or sun-soaked islands in the Caribbean — are saddled with a double cost.
Their remoteness means paying the highest prices for fuel and facing some of the direst consequences of burning it: the sinking foundations, extreme weather, and record high temperatures brought about by climate change.
Enter clean energy, and the script can flip to opportunity. This past year, RMI highlighted the benefits of local, community-oriented energy projects that lift the burden of high-imported fuel costs and provide reliable, clean power to those who need it.
In May 2025, with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP) at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, RMI convened more than a dozen clean energy leaders from Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands for its Energy Leadership Academy (ELA). The group studied how to unlock clean energy projects in their communities. And as a part of their instruction, the leaders visited successful projects in Alaska, while engaging with and learning from one another along the way — via roundtable discussions, presentations, shared discovery, and role-playing exercises.
The Economic Choice — Renewables in the Arctic Circle
Above the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Alaska, a commitment to clean energy is leading to lower bills and more energy security. The city of 3,000 pioneered wind energy in this blustery region, establishing the first wind farm in the Arctic in the late 1990s.
Since then, the city has added a 1 MW solar array and a 1.2 MW battery. Its clean portfolio displaces 350,000– 400,000 gallons of diesel fuel annually, a huge cost saving. And at peak generation, the renewables can meet 80 percent of demand. Plans for an even greater clean energy buildout were in place until recent federal funding cuts created uncertainty.
The decision to invest in renewables in this harsh region are led by hard economics. Kotzebue’s fuel deliveries are only available by barge, and due to frozen sea conditions can only support one major delivery per year, at high market costs. This reality made investing in clean energy an easier decision: its newest wind turbines will more than pay for themselves over the project’s 20-year lifetime, and the projects are creating jobs, as the site attracts Alaskan engineers and other technicians to keep the operation running smoothly.
Kotzebue is only a snapshot of the resilient and cost-effective measures these communities are taking to maintain energy security. Through RMI’s Energy Transition Academy, we are equipping local leaders with the tools and know-how they need to take control of their energy future and free themselves from high import costs and unpredictable market forces. Energy transition in the Caribbean RMI’s ambition is best exemplified by our work with policymakers, utilities, and energy leaders to accelerate a just and equitable transition to renewable energy in the Caribbean. Our recent report, A Caribbean Regional Transition Scenario, lays out a blueprint for energy independence for a region dependent on an aging, inefficient, and often unaffordable diesel-based energy model.
Energy transition in the Caribbean
RMI’s ambition is best exemplified by our work with policymakers, utilities, and energy leaders to accelerate a just and equitable transition to renewable energy in the Caribbean. Our recent report, A Caribbean Regional Transition Scenario, lays out a blueprint for energy independence for a region dependent on an aging, inefficient, and often unaffordable diesel-based energy model.
From solar to geothermal to distributed systems, RMI demonstrates how islands can chart a more secure future — while saving money. It is an actionable toolkit that regional and global policymakers can use to accelerate a just and equitable transition to renewable energy.
“The Caribbean energy transition is the foundation upon which the region can build a future that is resilient, prosperous, and inclusive,” says David Gumbs, who directs RMI’s Islands Energy program. “Every step forward brings the Caribbean closer to a future where energy empowers, opportunity flourishes, and climate resilience becomes a reality.”
From the Arctic to the Caribbean, communities on the frontlines of climate change are proving that clean energy isn’t just possible — it’s transformational. With the support of RMI and its partners, local leaders are flipping the script on energy, creating models of resilience, equity, and hope for a world in transition.
Personal story: Shalenie Mahdo
A Force for Change in the Caribbean
Shalenie Madho, right, pictured here with RMI’s Kaitlyn Bunker, wants to ensure Small Island Developing States like Jamaica have the resources and collaboration needed to tackle climate change head-on.
Shalenie Madho was raised in Trinidad by an avid environmentalist father, who instilled in her a deep respect for nature. She is now a Climate Finance Access Network (CFAN) advisor in Jamaica, focusing on unlocking climate finance in the Caribbean Island nation.
CFAN, designed and coordinated by RMI, builds capacity in developing countries to better access climate finance by embedding highly trained climate finance advisors. Madho is one of six advisors currently comprising the first Caribbean CFAN cohort.
CFAN was launched to address the struggle many developing countries face in navigating the complex international climate finance system. In a survey we conducted with representatives from 119 developing countries, 96 percent of respondents said they had already identified specific projects in need of climate finance, but needed support in developing project proposals and securing finance for those projects.
And CFAN advisors have been successfully helping them do that. The program, which launched in 2021, currently boasts a project pipeline of US$2 billion, of which $150 million has been deployed, $578 million has been submitted for approval, and $1.3 billion is under development.
As a CFAN advisor, Madho has a bold vision — to ensure that Small Island Developing States like Jamaica have the resources and collaboration needed to tackle climate change head-on. To do this, she is working on a series of pivotal projects across Jamaica, focusing on the water, energy, and agriculture sectors with an emphasis on climate-vulnerable and underserved communities. Her efforts are aimed at developing agricultural systems that are sustainable and robust enough to withstand the harsh realities of climate change. By fostering climate resilient agriculture, she is helping to secure food sources and livelihoods against unpredictable environmental shifts while increasing water supply and storages, reducing poverty, and encouraging entrepreneurship. Madho is currently supporting a US$30 million project on climate-resilient agriculture that has the potential to improve food security for 50,000 Jamaicans.
Madho is also playing a crucial role in enhancing the infrastructure of local schools and health facilities. Recognizing that climate-related events like flooding and drought can disrupt essential services, she has spearheaded initiatives to fortify these critical structures, ensuring that educational and healthcare services remain uninterrupted, even in the face of extreme weather events.
“It’s disheartening to see essential services like electricity and water unmet due to funding shortfalls,” Madho says. “Witnessing these tough living conditions drives me to develop initiatives that support diverse livelihoods — farmers, fishermen, teachers, engineers — ensuring everyone benefits regardless of their profession.”
Madho’s journey — from Trinidad to Jamaica —demonstrates the powerful impact of dedicated individuals to create a sustainable future for all. “Everyone can make a change and make a difference in Jamaica by leading,” says Madho. “It’s not just the Government’s responsibility to address climate vulnerability, impacts, and mitigation, but also the people’s.”
Spotlight: Building Hurricane-Resilient Solar
In 2024, Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic, caused severe destruction across parts of the Caribbean. In the aftermath, RMI’s Islands team traveled to the Grenadines to assess the damage on three solar systems directly in Beryl’s path. RMI’s report, Solar Under Storm III, analyzes those findings to provide technical recommendations for hurricane-resistant solar power, which have already been shared by key outlets in the solar energy space, including Solar Power World, PV Magazine, ATEC Energy BVI, and many more. The report updates the recommendations from our Solar Under Storm I and II reports, written in 2018 and 2020, which led to new guidelines for installing solar power across the Caribbean, keeping the lights on for many people in storm-ravaged areas.
Spotlight: Growing Resilient Forest Economies
Colorado is facing more frequent wildfires, a shortage of affordable housing, and limited high-quality job opportunities in rural areas. RMI’s report, From Wildfire to Wealth, explores how using wood from wildfire mitigation efforts can address all of those issues. Small diameter trees from forest thinning can be turned into high performance building products, creating a thriving mass timber industry. The report provides recommendations for wood products businesses wanting to take advantage of this opportunity in Colorado and beyond.
Acceleration Fund
Our work to energize resilient Island communities was jump-started in part by the Acceleration Fund, a donor-supported source of flexible funding that helps us scale proven work rapidly and broadly and refine emerging projects that can offer a big return on philanthropic investment. The Fund supported RMI’s work to advance stalled renewable energy projects in Barbados, helping stabilize the grid and provide a model for other Caribbean nations. Learn more about the Acceleration Fund.
Fiscal Year 2025 Financials and More
FY25 Financial Statement
RMI's revenue grew significantly in fiscal year 2025.
Thank You, Donors
As an independent nonprofit, RMI's work to create a clean energy future for all is powered by generous donors like you.
Ways to Give
Your gift will help us increase access to safer, healthier energy in more communities around the world.