In March, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy organization disbanded its energy policy team, resulting in dozens of staff members being cut. Now, some of those former employees have founded a new nonprofit organization called the Clean Economy Project.
Similar to Breakthrough Energy, the new organization is betting that clean energy can beat fossil fuels on cost, if not today then in the near future. According to a New York Times report from March, Gates decided to cut Breakthrough’s lobbying group after concluding it would not make much headway with the Trump administration.
Informally called CleanEcon, the new organization is backed by an undisclosed group of more than ten funders that includes philanthropists and venture capitalists. The team, which consists of ten people, has stated it has three primary goals. These goals are building energy projects faster, accelerating innovation to lower costs, and de-risking private investment into clean industries.
Aliya Haq, who served as vice president of U.S. policy and advocacy at Breakthrough Energy for nearly six years, is the president of the new organization.