Third Way Institute: Grantee Spotlight (2025)

Grantee spotlight: Third Way Institute

The Giving Green Fund plans to award a grant to Third Way Institute to support its work on clean firm energy infrastructure finance and strategic communications. Third Way Institute is a multi-issue policy think tank and advocacy organization that champions moderate policy.

Third Way Institute’s work falls within our philanthropic strategy of unleashing clean energy in the U.S. Please see Giving Green’s strategy report for more information, including recommended sub-strategies, theory of change, and key uncertainties.

Last updated: October 2025

What is Third Way Institute?

Third Way Institute is a U.S.-based nonprofit founded in 2005. Its Climate and Energy program’s mission is to develop and galvanize support for policies that rapidly deploy every clean energy technology needed to decarbonize as quickly as possible and create economic opportunities across communities. To accomplish this, Third Way Institute uses its expertise and resources to build awareness within the policy community for research, development, demonstration, and deployment of a wide range of clean energy solutions. It engages and educates a wide variety of stakeholders, including policymakers, NGOs, industry, media and labor.

What are we funding, and how could it help address climate change?

We are funding Third Way Institute’s Clean Firm Energy Infrastructure Finance and Strategic Communications Initiative. Under this program, Third Way Institute will develop research-backed messaging to communicate the benefits of clean term technologies to leading policymakers, industry, the NGO community, and media. Third Way Institute will additionally conduct an initial landscape assessment of clean firm power financing challenges and lay out a path to resolve these challenges through market and regulatory solutions.

In our strategy report on unleashing clean energy in the U.S., we identified opening new sources of financing and building demand support for clean firm technologies as promising sub-strategies. We believe that Third Way Institute’s proposed work is well-aligned with our strategy. In general, we believe that Third Way Institute’s work can address climate change by increasing the investment and deployment of clean firm power in the U.S.

Why do we think Third Way Institute will use this funding well?

We think Third Way Institute will use this funding well based on its strong research, analysis, and educational outreach efforts in support of clean energy technology broadly.

Its historic wins include:

• Assisting grantees of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) whose funding was wrongfully terminated for political reasons by researching their options to appeal, renegotiate, or file suit.
• Championing the creation of the DOE’s  Office for Clean Energy Demonstrations and guiding the implementation of these new programs to maximize opportunity.
• Publishing a first-of-its-kind analysis on the Biden Administration’s Energy Earthshots, which assessed how achieving these cost reduction targets for 10 clean energy technologies would help reduce energy costs while also reducing emissions. It also briefed a wide variety of stakeholders on the importance of funding innovation to meet these goals.
• Leading efforts to defend and expand DOE’s Loan Programs Office to provide additional financing opportunities to help commercialize new clean energy technologies, including reforms making financing tools more efficient, accessible, and appealing to potential borrowers.

We think that Third Way Institute’s close working relationships with members of the policy community will remain valuable under current political dynamics. Additionally, with our funding, Third Way Institute will be able to expand its existing work on specific clean firm technologies to also include broader, technology-neutral solutions.

Giving Green believes that additional climate donations are likely to be most impactful when directed to our top nonprofits. For several reasons, we may choose to recommend grants to other organizations for work that we believe is at least as impactful as grants to our top recommendations. We are highlighting this grant to offer transparency to donors to the Giving Green Fund, as well as to provide a resource for donors who are particularly interested in this impact strategy. This is a nonpartisan analysis (study or research) and is provided for educational purposes.

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