Celebrating a Leader: Margie Gardner's Lifetime Achievement in Energy Efficiency

Margie Gardner, Vice President and Senior Advisor at Resource Innovations, has been a leader and innovator in energy efficiency for decades, including helping to launch market transformation efforts that have delivered significant and lasting savings to consumers and businesses. This summer, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) officially recognized her impact on the industry by awarding her a Champion of Energy Efficiency in Buildings Award for Lifetime Achievement. It is a prestigious and well-deserved honor, one that highlights both the scale and legacy of Margie’s work.

“I feel lucky to have had a career that has allowed me to do things that hadn’t been done before, with many ‘firsts’ that provide savings and other benefits to households and businesses,” said Margie. “This couldn’t have happened without many collaborators along the way – so many that it’s hard to count. I thank them for their partnership and am gratified to be honored with this award.”

Back in the early 1980s, Margie began her work in energy efficiency with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) helping to develop the first least-cost plan for the Northwest. The plan demonstrated that energy efficiency could be the cheaper and cleaner path to meet energy demand than building dozens of coal and nuclear plants. Over time, this work supported the decision to cancel several planned coal and nuclear power plants. She continued this work with the Northwest Power Planning and Conservation Council at a time when energy efficiency (then called “conservation”) was becoming a growing strategy. She co-led strategy development for assessing cost-effective savings goals and helped develop plans for utility programs to realize those savings.

By the 1990s, when deregulation was driving significant changes in the energy industry, Margie was part of a think tank-style working group that envisioned the opportunity to collaborate across four states to leverage entire markets for the adoption of energy efficiency – an approach named “market transformation (MT).”  She became the founding Executive Director of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA) and for over a decade led delivery of an award-winning portfolio of ~30 MT programs. From 1997 to 2022, NEEA helped co-create enough energy savings to power more than 670,000 homes each year.^[1] NEEA has become arguably one of the most successful market transformation endeavors in the nation and is a model for new programs starting up in Minnesota and California.

 In 2012, Margie became the Executive Director of the newly founded California Efficiency and Demand Management Council (CEDMC). As with previous positions, this involved regulatory and legislative advocacy, organizational leadership, fund raising, and vision.  At CEDMC, she helped achieve significant legislative and regulatory results, including legislation to simplify the approach to large industrial efficiency projects and overhauling the framework for implementing energy efficiency through utility programs.  

Moving to Resource Innovations six years ago, Margie helped build MT awareness and regulatory practices in Illinois and then led the launch of California’s market transformation administrator (CalMTA), a program of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that is administered by Resource Innovations. Today, CalMTA is beginning to use the tool of MT to change markets in favor of efficiency in the world’s fifth largest economy. Under Margie’s leadership, Resource Innovations brought together an expert team to work with stakeholders and develop a market transformation portfolio for all Californians, with particular focus on communities in traditionally underserved markets.

“Margie’s work over the decades has helped shape how we conceive of and implement efficiency and aligns with Resource Innovations’ four foundational pillars of climate change, equity, innovation, and scale and impact,” said Lauren Casentini, CEO of Resource Innovations. “Launching CalMTA was an uncharted, but incredibly important, program for California and I cannot think of anyone else better positioned to get it started. Thank you, Margie, for a job—and career—well done!”

^[1] Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance 2022 Annual Report. https://neea.org/annual-report/2022.