On 28 March, E Co. turned 26. It is a milestone worth reflecting on because of what has been built, defended, and proven right over those years. We sat down with our founder, Grant Ballard-Tremeer – who has spent 26 years creating E Co. – for a candid conversation about the long game: what the market got wrong, why justice was never an afterthought, and what keeps the work alive after a quarter century.
1. On 26 years: did E Co. ever feel like it had ‘missed the boat’?
In the early 2000s, the industry conversation was dominated by transactional mechanisms: the Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation, the business of individual carbon deals. There was a season, honestly, where it felt like E Co. had missed the boat. Everyone else seemed to be chasing those transactions, and we weren’t.
What we were doing instead was staying focused on market transformation and systemic change. It wasn’t the popular position at the time. But over the last two and a half decades, something remarkable happened: the market moved toward us.
What hasn’t changed, not one bit since 2000, is the absolute necessity of local engagement and local ownership. That truth has been constant. What has changed is how we must handle it. Systemic change can quickly become a buzzword, a slide in a deck, a line in a proposal. Our challenge now is ensuring that it remains a lived reality in how we design every single intervention we touch.
2. On gender and justice: was there an ‘aha’ moment?
There wasn’t a single turning point and that’s worth saying plainly, because the industry often tells the story of gender as a journey of discovery. For us, it was never a destination we arrived at. My background is in clean cooking, and in that space, gender dynamics are not a side item. They are key to the entire system.
From the very beginning, our approach has been driven by something more fundamental than policy frameworks or reporting requirements: empathy. A genuine, disciplined effort to understand what people actually need, and how the social and economic systems around them actually function.
The climate space has a habit of layering justice onto existing models — adding it as a consideration after the financial architecture is already built. That was never how we worked. When you start from the human being, particularly the women and girls most affected by energy poverty, and most at the hard edge of climate change, the entire design logic changes.
3. What does ‘Year 26’ actually look like for E Co.?
E Co. has never been a company that shows up to forums for the sake of it. That’s not a criticism of the meetings and events; it’s just not who we are. We lead by example, and in our 26th Year, that means continuing to place the needs and rights of vulnerable people, often women and girls, at the very heart of how we design projects.
Our vision is “A World Sustainably Transformed”. The vision is not complicated to state, but it is hard to execute. The word “Sustainably” captures a LOT: we aim to ensure that the green transition is technically sound and socially just, delivering lasting results, from its inception. Not retrofitted or reviewed at the end. Built that way from day one.
E Co. moves the needle through the discipline of designing interventions where justice is the opening sentence.
4. After 26 years, what keeps the flame alive?
Resilience, for me, is grounded in Stoicism and specifically in that core Stoic discipline of separating what I can control from what I cannot. It sounds simple although it is not. But it is the thing, more than anything else, that has prevented burnout over a career that spans more than a quarter century in one of the most urgent and challenging fields in the world.
Alongside that, two skills matter enormously: empathetic understanding and reframing. The ability to see a situation through someone else’s eyes, genuinely, and then to reframe what feels like an obstacle into something workable.
These ideas are at the heart of something I’ve been working on for some time now: a book called The Zero-Sum Illusion: An Actionable Toolkit to Stop Conflict Winning in Life, Work and Society, due out this summer. It explores what I call a ‘Me – Them – Us’ framework.
The framework begins with Me, such as learning self-empathy and the separation between what I can control and what I can’t. These are the foundations of everything. From there, Them, meaning developing the capacity to understand others from where they stand. And finally, Us, which is the collaborative action that becomes possible, as a result, in our homes, our boardrooms, and the wider world.
It’s the same logic that has shaped everything we’ve done at E Co. for 26 years. Start with the human being. Understand the system around them. Then act together.
COMING OUT this summer: The Zero-Sum Illusion by Grant Ballard-Tremeer. Sign up for Grant’s insight-driven newsletter (sent every few weeks) at kt.zerosumillusion.com/nls