Nearly twenty years ago, Northwest energy efficiency stakeholders from Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington came together to address the challenges of a changing utility environment. In the face of potential deregulation, the majority of Northwest utilities ramped down or ended successful local energy efficiency programs. Long-standing regional support infrastructure for energy efficiency was being downsized or dismantled as wholesale market prices for energy dropped. At the same time, there was a growing recognition of a powerful, new approach to efficiency program design and operation. In several distinct markets, the region had demonstrated the value of a coordinated, marketbased approach to efficiency programs. Recognizing that this new approach would be most effective if it represented the collective market power of the entire Northwest, regional stakeholders came together in 1996 to create the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA) to capture the value of this new approach called “market transformation.”