About Us
The Energy Futures Lab is an independent, Canadian not-for-profit organization that brings together energy system and community leaders to navigate the complex dynamics and trade-offs of sustainable energy innovation.
We work across sectors to develop and deliver social, policy, technological, and economic solutions that accelerate progress toward Canada’s prosperous, resilient and low-emissions energy future.
Our Mission
We shape people-powered solutions to complex energy challenges.
We do this by bringing together diverse perspectives, building trust and shared understanding, applying systems thinking to identify opportunities for change, and supporting collaborative action that creates lasting impact.
History
The Energy Futures Lab was established in 2015 as an initiative of The Natural Step Canada (now Generate Canada), bringing people from across Canada’s energy system together to explore how we might navigate the profound changes ahead.
From the beginning, the Lab was designed as a different kind of platform: non-partisan, cross-sectoral and grounded in the belief that meaningful change requires people with very different perspectives to work together.
Over the years, the Lab has convened hundreds of leaders, practitioners, innovators and community voices to imagine possible energy futures, test new ideas and build relationships across boundaries that too often keep people apart, and urgent challenges unsolved.
Our work has spanned energy, climate, policy, technology, jobs, the economy, communities, Indigenous rights and reconciliation, and the social systems and constructs — norms, narratives and beliefs — that influence how we use energy and what we think is possible.
Through research, experimentation, partnerships and targeted initiatives, the Lab has helped identify and open pathways for new ambitions and agendas, technologies, projects, investments and approaches to emerge and scale across Alberta and Western Canada.
In September 2026, the Energy Futures Lab became an independent charitable organization, rooted in Canada’s West and carrying forward a decade of experience in creating the conditions for unlikely collaboration and transformative ideas.
Today, the Lab continues to bring people together to ask better questions, challenge assumptions and create the relationships and possibilities that can move Canada, and the world, toward a thriving, sustainable energy future, built together.
The Lab Team
