Clean energy transition with TerraPraxis

Climate philanthropy concentrates on the tractable and visible: renewables deployment, electric vehicles, domestic policy in wealthy countries. That leaves genuinely hard problems, such as what to do about thousands of coal plants with decades of operating life left, largely unattended.

A coal plant is more than a furnace. It is a turbine hall, a grid connection, a cooling system, a trained workforce and a local economy. Replacing the coal-fired heat source with a clean one, while keeping the rest, is far faster and cheaper than building replacement capacity from nothing, and it avoids the political fight that closing a plant outright provokes. Making that repeatable across hundreds of sites requires standardized designs, regulatory groundwork and tools that let plant owners evaluate the option, which is the kind of work funded here.

The work sits in a gap: too early and too systemic for a commercial firm to fund, too technical and unglamorous for most climate giving. It is carried out by TerraPraxis with a global network of partners, and aims at rapid transitions in the neglected corners of the decarbonization problem.

Gifts through Rethink Charity come with an official Canadian donation receipt. This program has also received allocations from our Climate Change Fund.