The drive for clean and secure energy is at a crossroads.

From Capitol Hill to Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and from Beijing to Bangalore to Brussels, yesterday’s green rhetoric is giving way to a sobering realization: Achieving an energy future that cuts emissions, boosts security and promotes jobs will require building it in an economically sustainable way.

Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance was created in 2011 to help blaze an economically sensible path toward an advanced global energy system. The center, housed jointly at Stanford’s law and business schools, incubates practical ideas and actual businesses. It works to help attract the massive capital flows needed to transform the energy world and to ensure that the money is spent intelligently and efficiently. The International Energy Agency projects the world will have to spend $38 trillion over the next two decades to meet soaring energy demand. Given those stakes, the Steyer-Taylor Center’s guiding principle is non-partisan and no-nonsense: If the global energy system is to grow into one that’s cleaner, more secure, and more efficient, the finance and policy tools used to build it must themselves get more robust and less wasteful.

The Steyer-Taylor Center seeks to ensure that investments are made in an economically and environmentally reasonable way across the entire energy system: in fossil fuels, in renewable sources, in nuclear power, and, critically, in energy-efficiency technologies that minimize waste in the delivery and consumption of energy regardless of where that energy comes from.

The center has five principals: Dan Reicher, executive director; Jeffrey Ball, scholar-in-residence; Kassia Yanosek, entrepreneur-in-residence; Felix Mormann, research fellow; and Alicia Seiger, consultant.