Joan MacNaughton
Biography
Joan MacNaughton is the Executive Chair of the World Energy Trilemma for the World Energy Council, an annual assessment of the quality of 129 countries’ energy policies. She is Past President and an Honorary Fellow of the Energy Institute (the learned society for energy professionals in the UK), and the Chair of the UK Board of Trustees of The Climate Group.
She chairs the international Advisory Board of the Energy Academy of Europe, and is a member of the Advisory Council of the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis in the US. In 2012 she served as Vice Chair of the UN High level Panel on the Policy Dialogue on the CDM.
She frequently lectures and acts as a moderator of discussions on a wide range of energy and climate topics, including Ministerial/ CEO roundtables at the Clean Energy Ministerial and at World Energy Leaders events convened by the World Energy Council From 2002, as Director General of Energy for the UK (the country’s senior official responsible for all energy policy), she played a key role in shaping UK policy nationally and internationally, leading the work on the energy aspects of the climate proposals agreed at the G8 Gleneagles summit in 2005, and overseeing the energy agenda during the UK Presidency of the EU.
She was the Chair of the Governing Board of the International Energy Agency from 2004 to 2006, leading a review of the Agency’s strategy and the activation of the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina.
On leaving government, she had a second career in business, creating a policy department for Alstom (a global engineering company) and spearheading its advocacy for clean sustainable energy, culminating in a year as the company’s Global Adviser on Sustainable Policies.
She has chaired or served on numerous boards such as the Board of Governors for Argonne National Energy Lab at the University of Chicago, where she chaired the Budget Committee, the International Emissions Trading Association (of which she is now a Fellow), the GCCSI, CCSA, and many others outside the energy sector.
She has served as a non-executive director of a FTSE company. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute of Energy Economics of Japan and of the Global Forum of Competitiveness Councils. She was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath by HM The Queen in 2006.
