Physical climate risk creates challenges and opportunities in US municipal finance

Advait Arun for Nature.

The US $4.2 trillion US municipal debt market finances over 70% of essential infrastructure, but escalating physical climate risks, such as flooding and wildfires, are exposing the market’s emerging vulnerabilities. Rising disaster costs and insurance retreat threaten property values, and hence municipal tax bases that secure debt repayment. Despite these signals, municipal bond prices have been slow to reflect climate risk adequately. Well-resourced municipalities may use bonds for adaptation, but those facing constrained credit access may struggle to access capital. This US-focused Review identifies three challenges: (1) climate risk is underpriced in municipal bonds; (2) abrupt repricing could affect high-risk and under-resourced cities most by increasing borrowing costs and limiting capital access; (3) misalignment between adaptation planning and municipal finance weakens long-term resilience and affects creditworthiness. Together, these challenges contribute to a climate-debt doom loop that can be triggered by climate shocks. This synthesis offers actionable strategies for cities’ adaptation plans and governance frameworks to disrupt this loop and strengthen municipalities’ financial resilience.

Nature, January 5, 2026

The Year Ahead 2026: Dial Down the Hype

The magnitude of the hype around AI, whose prospects as a profit maker remain entirely hypothetical, has confounded many sober-minded investors. Yet now, as a century ago, the idea of missing out on the next big thing has persuaded many companies to ignore such prophecies of doom. They “are all kind of playing a game of Mad Libs where they think these moonshot technologies will solve any existing problem,” says Advait Arun, a climate finance and energy infrastructure analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise, whose recent Babsonesque report, Bubble or Nothing, questioned the financing schemes behind data center projects. “We are definitely still in the irrational exuberance stage.”

Bloomberg, December 17, 2025

Something Ominous Is Happening in the AI Economy

Several data-center builders and cloud providers, including CoreWeave, have obtained multibillion-dollar loans to purchase chips by posting their existing chips as collateral, just as many homeowners used their homes as collateral to take out loans for second and third homes in the 2000s. But, as Advait Arun, an analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise, notes in a recent report on the AI sector’s finances, whether that collateral will hold its value is far from clear. When new chip models are released, the value of older models tends to fall. According to Arun, if the collapse in chip prices were steep enough, a vicious cycle could ensue. As older chips fall in value, any loan using those chips as collateral suddenly becomes at risk of default. Lenders might respond by calling in their loans early, before companies have the revenue to pay them back. At that point, the lender might try to sell the chips to recoup their investment, but that will only flood the market with even more chips, driving down the values of existing chips even further, causing other lenders to call in their loans and so on.

The Atlantic, December 10, 2025

If the AI bubble were to burst, these terms will be oft heard

Private credit is basically investment firms like hedge funds and private equity lending money to businesses, like a bank would. Except they’re not regulated like banks. “I don’t even think Americans are necessarily unfamiliar with this concept,” said Advait Arun, capital markets and energy finance analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise. “We might have even heard of it previously as a shadow bank.”

That data center in Louisiana Meta is building, with that special purpose vehicle? A private credit firm is throwing in billions, which is the case for a lot of AI financing. “These chips that companies like Nvidia make, they help those tech companies buy those chips, and they help the data center developers take out long term debt or construction debt to build the data centers themselves,” Arun said.

Marketplace Business News Podcast, December 9, 2025

Third Party Public Developers Are Taking On Solar Projects In States

In the energy sector, the US has numerous entities at the regional, state, and local level endowed with public development capacities. You probably recognize a lot of them: Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), New York Power Authority (NYPA), the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), New Mexico Renewable Energy Transmission Authority — and so many more.

As the Center for Public Enterprise notes, public developers understand how renewable energy deployments require extensive construction and operation management as well as coordinating skilled labor and acquiring special materials. Capital projects have high upfront costs, operate in complex regulatory environments, and have long payback periods. These complexities create coordination problems, especially when non-financial barriers make the commitment of time and financial resources by key stakeholders demanding.

CleanTechnica, December 5, 2025

Racing is not winning for Indiana data centers

Lawmakers and economic-development officials see data centers as a fast track to economic growth. But in this race to attract them, we’re ignoring an essential truth: in every race, there are winners and losers.

Even Wall Street is voicing concern as many analysts are warning of a looming data center bubble. According to the Center for Public Enterprise’s Bubble or Nothing report, some major developers are building data centers using circular financing — borrowing from one another while depending on one another’s cash flows — and betting that AI profits will justify these risky financial relationships. But as we learned when the dot-com bubble, even transformational technologies aren’t always profitable and can collapse under unsustainable economics.

Indiana Capital Chronicle, December 3, 2025

How the AI Bubble Might Play Out

Usually an “anchor tenant”—a big AI firm like OpenAI or Meta or Amazon—guarantees payments of what amounts to rent. They’re paying for the build-out, but through complicated off-balance-sheet vehicles owned by lenders and underwriters, as I’ve talked about at more length elsewhere. But AI firms are also floating corporate bonds in unprecedented numbers, growing the debt load.

The money ultimately covering this debt financing is not coming from AI-related revenues, but cash flow that Big Tech companies earn from surveillance advertising and cloud computing and other business lines. “The big four in this space (Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft) … they’ve made about $35 billion in reported revenue from AI, but they have spent over $560 billion on the technology,” said Advait Arun, author of a great report on the financial structure of the AI industry for the Center for Public Enterprise called “Bubble or Nothing.” A JPMorgan report puts the need for AI revenues at $650 billion a year by the end of the decade in order to finance the current level of spending and make a small return.

The American Prospect, December 3, 2025

A Backup Plan for the AI Boom

Advait Arun for Heatmap.

he data center investment boom has already transformed the American economy. It is now poised to transform the American energy system.

Hyperscalers — including tech giants such as Microsoft and Meta, as well as leaders in artificial intelligence like OpenAI and CoreWeave — are investing eyewatering amounts of capital into developing new energy resources to feed their power-hungry data infrastructure. Those data centers are already straining the existing energy grid, prompting widespread political anxiety over an energy supply crisis and a ratepayer affordability shock. Nothing in recent memory has thrown policymakers’ decades-long underinvestment in the health of our energy grid into such stark relief. The commercial potential of next-generation energy technologies such as advanced nuclear, batteries, and grid-enhancing applications now hinge on the speed and scale of the AI buildout.

Heatmap, November 28, 2025

Connecticut’s pioneering model for publicly owned, small-scale solar

The wraparound services that Solar MAP+ offers bring more than money to the equation, said Advait Arun, senior associate for capital markets at the Center for Public Enterprise. The nonprofit think tank uses the term ​“public development” to characterize the way public entities can expand beyond financing to include ​“all of the steps in a project development pipeline,” including ownership, operations, and maintenance.

That’s not a normal role for green banks, Arun said. As of the end of 2023, green banks and partners had driven a cumulative $25.4 billion in public and private investments, according to the Coalition for Green Capital, a group that includes green banks and environmental advocacy organizations. Most of that funding has focused on de-risking harder-to-finance sectors, such as energy efficiency and rooftop solar installations in low-income neighborhoods, without taking the plunge into the full range of project development activities that Solar MAP+ is involved in.

Canary Media, November 26, 2025

NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announces transition committees

Center for Public Enterprise Executive Director Paul Williams was appointed to Mayor-elect Mamdani’s Transition Committee on Housing.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced Monday the creation of 17 transition advisory committees made up of more than 400 people to help advise his incoming administration on policy and appointments, and to help him chart a new course for city government.

CBS News, November 24, 2025

Policymakers Have to Prepare Now for When the AI Bubble Bursts

In addition, federal, state and local policymakers should also explore a possibility raised in a comprehensive and thoughtful report on data center project finance from the Center for Public Enterprise. The report urges policymakers to begin now to devise “an investment strategy centered on acquiring distressed energy infrastructure assets and repurposing them to serve future demand.” Rather than allowing stranded energy resources to sit idle, agencies and legislatures should now begin a planning process for putting them to productive, equitable, common-good uses. It is better to begin that conversation early and be ready with a plan before the crash happens.

Tech Policy Press, November 24, 2025

Trump’s Westinghouse nuclear deal comes with unresolved questions

Rather than coming from the Energy Department, the Department of Commerce brokered the deal in what one Republican source described as an example of the administration’s internal “chaos.” Rather than coming from the federal budget, the $80 billion appears to be contingent upon Japan fulfilling its $550 billion investment in the U.S. that President Donald Trump negotiated in Tokyo last month. Rather than funneling the money through an entity such as the LPO, the disbursement process remains unclear.

“Without a sense of how this $80 billion is going to be used for nuclear in the U.S., it’s not going to give actual developers or owner-operators a chance to structure their own finances in response,” Advait Arun, a former Treasury Department analyst who now researches capital markets and energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise think tank, told Latitude Media. “Is $80 billion going to go through LPO? Will it go through the White House? Are there other costs? There [are] all these different ways to imagine how the $80 billion will flow.”

Latitude Media, November 20, 2025

The AI Bubble Is Bigger Than You Think

A great paper from the Center for Public Enterprise lays out additional alarms. Data centers are not lasting infrastructure, or at least the guts inside them aren’t. If the GPUs are working overtime to compute AI models, they may not last more than two years, and high-end AI firms will always want to upgrade to the latest version anyway. (By the way, our friends at Blue Owl are lending money to Elon Musk’s xAI to buy Nvidia GPUs.)

But AI firms are extending their depreciation schedules for the GPUs; they’re saying they will last much longer than they likely will. That means overstated revenues, as companies have to purchase far more GPUs than they are admitting publicly, and thence possible financial disaster. Indeed, some of the smaller companies are using loans backed by their GPUs to purchase other GPUs.

The American Prospect, November 19, 2025

How Clean Energy Could Prepare for an AI Bubble

On this week’s Shift Key, we’re talking to Advait Arun, a senior associate for capital markets at the Center for Public Enterprise, about his new report on the market dynamics at play in the data center buildout. What kind of bets are these AI companies making? How likely are they to pay off? And if they don’t, who stands to lose big? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

Heatmap, November 19, 2025

Cost-conscious utilities resist Trump’s push for nuclear revival

The sector remains traumatized and skittish after sky-high cost overruns tied to construction of the Vogtle nuclear expansion in Georgia, completed in 2024 at roughly double the anticipated price tag. In 2017, South Carolina’s Santee Cooper and a project partner also abandoned two Westinghouse reactors at VC Summer after sinking $9 billion into the project.

“They don’t want to get caught the way that the Vogtle utilities and developers were,” said Advait Arun, senior associate for capital markets at the Center for Public Enterprise. “They’re weighing the odds.”

E&E News by Politico, November 18, 2025

Is AI Like a Cupcake?

According to a recent report from the Center For Public Enterprise, data center investing is worrisome for four reasons. Because AI’s competitive market structure has minimal differentiation, firms don’t have enough pricing power to cover their costs. Competition also could depress the value of their chips from unsure demand and development pressures. Combined with the recurring capital needs of data centers and the up- and downsides of circular financing through which the “landlords” and tenants invest in each other, we wind up with vulnerable financing.

Econlife, November 17, 2025

Monopoly Round-Up: More Scary Economic Signs

We have a one-legged economy, with the AI build-out serving as a driver of real estate values, the stock market, and GDP growth. It’s central planning, Silicon Valley-style. OpenAI’s Sam Altman scared Wall Street and D.C. a few weeks ago when he came out and pretty much said his company would need a bailout at one point, that AI is too big to fail. But his point isn’t crazy.

If you want a nice deep dive into the problem, the Center for Public Enterprise has a good report titled “Bubble or Nothing.” In it, Advait Arun discussed the subtle use of accounting tricks to disguise the losses, as well as the problem of rapidly dropping value of the GPUs which are the keystone asset of data centers.

BIG by Matt Stoller, November 16, 2025

Morning Bid: Buy the Rumor, Sell the News

This weekend, we’re reading…

JAMIE MCGEEVER, ROI Markets Columnist: “Bubble or Nothing” is deep-dive by the Center for Public Enterprise into the AI boom – its funding and energy needs, its ‘circular’ financing, the revenues it may or may not generate, and the potential economic risks if the bubble pops. It has some excellent – and simple – graphics too. It’s long and detailed, though, so it’s perhaps one to bookmark.

Reuters, November 14, 2025

The Artificial Intelligence Prisoner’s Dilemma

I think Tracy is going to write about this as well, but there’s a great new report out from the Center for Public Enterprise (Disclosure: I play music with CPE’s founder Paul Williams) called Bubble or Nothing looking at things related to datacenter financing. It’s chock full of chart and diagrams about the various vehicles being used to fund this build out.

And the report’s author Advait Arun does a great job of explaining in clear English how it all works, and who the different players in the space are, whether they be hyperscalers, private frontier model labs, traditional data center REITs, neoclouds, and private credit entities. Just take a few minutes and peruse the whole thing.

Bloomberg Odd Lots, November 12, 2025

Mayor Adams’ legacy? Look to the future of affordable housing in NYC.

Paul Williams, executive director of the economic development group Center for Public Enterprise, credited Adams for installing deputies, commissioners and creative policy experts focused on housing.

“It’s up to the future administrations to make the fullest and best use of their reforms,” Williams said.

Gothamist, November 5, 2025

What Zohran Mamdani’s Win Means for Climate Politics

Thanks to its density, New York City remains one of the most climate-friendly cities in the country: Apartments tend to be more energy-efficient than single-family homes, and New Yorkers rely less on cars than any of their peers around the country. That alone means there are climate benefits to making it more affordable for people to move to and stay in the city, some economists say.

“The best thing we can be doing for climate in New York City is putting far more people in New York City by building more housing for them,” said Paul Williams, executive director of the think tank Center for Public Enterprise.

New York Focus, November 5, 2025

Center for Public Enterprise visits Honolulu to support innovative housing finance

From October 22–24, 2025, the Center for Public Enterprise (CPE) visited Honolulu to collaborate with the Department of Housing and Land Management (DHLM) and partners across City and State government on strategies to make housing more affordable and attainable for local families.

Over the course of three days, CPE met with members of the City administration, Honolulu City Council, and key partners from the State of Hawai‘i, along with representatives from the development community, financial and banking sector, and housing advocacy organizations. The series of meetings created a valuable forum for cross-sector collaboration—bringing together public officials, developers, and community advocates to share ideas and challenges from multiple perspectives.

City and County of Honolulu, November 4, 2025

Could County Create Affordable Housing Loan Fund?

Financing is often a barrier to building affordable housing. Typically, affordable units are developed with financing from the federal government through block grants or Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. A revolving loan fund allows projects that would otherwise require federal financing to more quickly secure funding for affordable housing from a local lender.

The Center for Public Enterprise, a Brooklyn-based think tank focused on public sector economic development, has called revolving loan funds “one of the government’s most effective tools: a way to turn a one-time invest into a lasting source of financing for projects and sectors the private market deems insufficiently profitable but which deliver needed public benefit.”

Urban Milwaukee, November 3, 2025

This Federal Office Was Meant to Ensure America’s Energy Future. Trump Aims to Kill It.

Experts and insiders warn that the tumult within OCED and the DOE more broadly is eroding the private sector’s trust in the federal government and its ability to drive energy innovation.

“The administration has really created a chilling effect on the willingness of future early-stage technology developers to work with the Department of Energy,” said Advait Arun, a senior associate for energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit think tank.

Mother Jones, October 16, 2025

Bethlehem hires nonprofit to establish loan fund to support housing development

The initiative is part of Bethlehem’s affordable housing strategy, “Opening Doors: Strategies to Build Housing Stability in Bethlehem,” which identifies the creation of a revolving loan fund as a key tool to increase housing production.

The contract is with the Center for Public Enterprise, which is offering its services at a deeply discounted rate due to its philanthropic support, coming in significantly under the budgeted cost for technical assistance within the “Opening Doors” plan, city documents said.

WFMZ-TV Bethlehem, October 7, 2025

XGS Energy’s Closed-Loop Geothermal System Aces Its Field Test

The testing took place off the US-395 highway in a volcanic field in California’s Mojave desert, sandwiched between the eastern edge of the Sequoia National Park and western border of Death Valley National Park. The geothermal field XGS tapped is already actively producing energy for the Coso Operating Company, which runs a 270-megawatt geothermal power plant on the land. The results, the company said, showed the “unprecedented predictability and active control of field performance” of XGS’ technology “versus other geothermal systems, which are subject to complex and continuously changing subsurface reservoir conditions.”

At least one outside observer agreed. “This is impressive, and something to be proud of,” Advait Arun, an energy analyst and senior associate at the think tank Center for Public Enterprise, who co-authored a recent report on next-generation geothermal, told me.

Heatmap, September 30, 2025

A New Construction Lender in Town

Paul Williams for Vital City.

In rental housing markets, a vacancy rate of 5% or lower is typically considered an emergency level — because it means there is so little housing available for new households. New York City’s vacancy rates are now 1.4%, according to the housing census conducted in 2023. Unsurprisingly, market rents here have risen sharply over the last five years, from $3,400 to $4,400 for a Manhattan one-bedroom and from $4,400 to $5,400 for a Manhattan two-bedroom…

Vital City, September 17, 2025

The Fed Is Cutting Again. That’s Good for Renewables — But Maybe Not Good Enough.

The Federal Reserve announced today that it will cut the federal funds rate by 0.25 percentage points, bringing it down to between 4% and 4.25%. Fed officials also projected quarter-point rate cuts at the last two meetings of the Federal Open Markets Committee this year.

This may provide some relief to renewables developers and investors, who are especially sensitive to financing costs. “On the financing side, high rates are never going to be exactly a good thing,” Advait Arun, a climate and infrastructure analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise, told me. “I think in this case, it’s going to be good that we’re finally seeing cuts.”

Heatmap, September 17, 2025

YIMBYs on the Cusp of Major Victory in California

The evidence is nearly unanimous that more housing supply—even when it’s market-rate housing—leads to more affordable housing.

Housing experts agree, seeing SB 79 as one of the most significant housing bills to come before the California legislature in years. Housing has long been a top concern for state officials, but previous reforms have “mostly danced around a solution,” Paul Williams, the executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, told the Prospect. SB 79, on the other hand, “cuts directly to the heart of the issue by requiring cities to toss out their exclusionary zoning and legalize potentially millions of new homes around transit and bus lines.”

The American Prospect, September 13, 2025

Clean energy developers hope for clarity in upcoming FEOC guidance

Advait Arun, senior associate for energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise, said he thinks there’s “some understanding of what the cost percentages of prohibited content look like,” but as far as “what kinds of licensing or servicing agreements might violate a FEOC rule, or what kinds of prohibited foreign entities actually are already in these construction processes — I just don’t think we have that clarity yet.”

Utility Dive, September 8, 2025

The Gas Turbine Crisis May Be Ending

“The executives seem keen to stress that this expansion will be lean and efficient,” Advait Arun, a climate and infrastructure analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise and the author of a much-cited Heatmap article on the turbine shortage, told me. “There’s a tension between getting over their skis by expanding overmuch while also killing the goose that’s laying their golden egg by not expanding.”

Heatmap, September 2, 2025

Donald Trump’s attacks on renewables sector quash nearly $19bn worth of projects

ndustry watchers say that while demand for energy to power the AI boom will only grow, the US risks irrevocably damaging its renewables sector, which is often the cheapest and fastest source of energy to deploy.

“Renewables can be built and connected in a matter of a year or two, in a way that meets data centre developers’ timelines,” said Advait Arun, an energy policy analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise. “If you’re ignoring renewables, then you’re missing a key part of the equation.”

The Financial Times, August 22, 2025

Now We Decide the Future of U.S. Climate Policy

Advait Arun for Heatmap.

Today, the Inflation Reduction Act would have turned three years old — if it hadn’t been buried alive in a big, beautiful grave. While the IRA was a hodgepodge of programs salvaged from President Biden’s far more ambitious Build Back Better agenda, it still represented the biggest climate investment in U.S. history. It catalyzed over $360 billion in energy and manufacturing investments and was expected to drive the installation of over 155 gigawatts of new solar and wind energy by 2030. And now Republicans have taken a sledgehammer to its achievements…

Heatmap, August 16, 2026

Heat pump adoption expected to grow despite federal shift

“It remains to be seen how developers of these really innovative technologies can navigate this, because it’s not going to be the easiest process from here on out,” Advait Arun, senior associate for energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit think tank, told Canary.

Utility Dive, August 15, 2025

Can the public take over Central Hudson?

An informal evaluation by the Center for Public Enterprise, a left-wing think tank, estimated Central Hudson’s buyout price to be between $561 million and $1.19 billion. Citing his own informal evaluation, Tom Konra, an Ulster County-based portfolio and financial analyst who specializes in renewable energy and energy efficiency investing, believes the true price is between $2.2 and $3.6 billion.

Times Union, July 30, 2025

The Fed Has No Relief for Renewables Developers (or Trump)

“The lack of interest rate relief means that construction loans, which are floating-rate loans tied to market conditions, will command higher interest rates and raise the total project costs for energy developers,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me over email. “Developers rushing to build solar and wind energy between now and next summer to take advantage of tax credits will have to pay out these higher interest costs as they build.”

Though the Fed’s decision was unsurprising, the circumstances surrounding Wednesday’s meeting were out of the ordinary. For the first time since 1993, multiple Fed governors cast no votes on a rate decision. Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, both Republicans appointed by Trump, have voiced their preference for the Fed to lower rates by a quarter of a percentage point.

Heatmap, July 30, 2025

Atomic Abundance and Its Enemies

A year and a half after passage, NYPA announced laudable progress by establishing a pipeline of dozens of renewables projects across New York. Given technical and permitting requirements, each can take well over a year to see through. “This is a pure lesson in the scalability of state capacity,” Paul Williams of the Center for Public Enterprise tells me. “NYPA, which already has a large energy portfolio, was able to harness its teams of engineers and underwriters to build out a huge new development pipeline for renewables.”

Jacobin, July 16, 2025

Episode 561 | Jeff Hauser vs. Paul Williams – Debating What the Abundance Agenda Gets Right and Wrong

Jeff Hauser, Founder and Executive Director of the Revolving Door Project & Paul E. Williams, Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Public Enterprise, join The Realignment’s first-ever debate episode. In this conversation, Marshall moderates a conversation/debate between Jeff and Paul on the pros and cons of the abundance agenda. The discussion explores whether building more housing, energy, and infrastructure is compatible with critiques of corporate power and the status quo, the origins of abundance, the differences between left, right, and centrist abundance, tensions between the national and local abundance discourse, and points of agreement.

The Realignment Podcast, July 15, 2025

The Race to Build Solar and Wind Before Trump’s Tax Credit Deadline

Historically, developers have been allowed to qualify for tax credits by proving either that they’ve started physical construction or spent a certain amount of money. Now, Trump has given federal regulators 45 days to revise those definitions.

The specific definitions that the Treasury adopts could prove decisive in some cases. But whatever exact language the administration lands on, the bottom line is that Trump still has significant leeway to kill wind and solar projects if he’s committed to it, said Advait Arun, senior associate for energy finance at the think tank Center for Public Enterprise.

New York Focus, July 11, 2025

What’s Left of the LPO After the One Big Beautiful Bill?

“The LPO is statutorily allowed to take loans on its books to finance these projects in these categories, but it has no credit subsidy by which to take the risk required to do so,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me.

The particular programs that have been eliminated support new and improved energy technologies, clean energy infrastructure, fuel efficient vehicles, and help native communities access energy project financing. The long-running Loan Guarantee Program and the advanced vehicles program in particular are behind some of the best known LPO efforts, supporting companies such as Tesla, Ford, and NextEra Energy, and projects such as Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear reactors, the Thacker Pass lithium mine, and Shepherd’s Flat, one of the world’s largest wind farms.

Heatmap, July 9, 2025

Geothermal survives in ​‘big, beautiful’ budget bill — but hurdles remain

New tariffs on things like steel and aluminum have increased the cost of drilling equipment, heat exchangers, and other key components. A provision in the budget bill aimed at restricting Chinese companies and individuals from accessing tax credits will make it harder for developers to prove compliance, increasing the risk for investors who finance clean energy projects.

“We’re making an ugly layered cake of barriers to quick and clean project development,” said Advait Arun, a senior associate for energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit think tank.

Canary Media, July 9, 2025

Anti-China rules make GOP megabill even worse for clean energy

Some sectors don’t have an existing framework to look to. Such guidance doesn’t exist for geothermal and nuclear power projects, or for inverters and other grid equipment, noted Advait Arun, senior associate for energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit think tank. Until the Treasury Department releases guidance on those technologies, ​“it’s going to be tough, if not impossible” for developers of those projects to know how to calculate their exposure to FEOC, he said.

Even if Treasury guidance does eventually offer some clarity, companies are almost certainly going to struggle to obtain the depth of information the FEOC rules in the bill appear to require. Companies tend to be secretive about their exact suppliers, Lee said, adding that this difficulty was part of what slowed down the Biden administration’s rulemaking around domestic content requirements.

Canary Media, July 8, 2025

Trump signs budget bill slashing clean energy tax credits

Chirag Lala, director of energy at the Center for Public Enterprise, said in a Monday interview that the uncertainty the legislation’s provisions, such as the FEOC rule, introduce creates “basically a massive cost of capital shock on top of everything else.”

“Another way to think about this is, the clean energy economy involves a combination of numerous different actors, and all of their decisions have to synchronize together in order to get more stuff built,” Lala said. “Every single one of these actors has seen various kinds of decisions they make become more difficult, and that also makes it more difficult for them to act together or make beneficial decisions together. And I think that, in a nutshell, is why we expect investment to suffer.”

Utility Dive, July 3, 2025

How the G.O.P. Bill Will Reshape America’s Energy Landscape

China currently dominates supply chains for batteries and Congress added complex restrictions to the credits that bar recipients from having ties to “prohibited foreign entities” like China. The Treasury Department would need to clarify those rules, and some worry that the restrictions are so complicated that the credits could end up being unusable for many projects.

“There’s a ton of uncertainty around these new rules,” said Advait Arun, a senior associate for energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit organization. “It’s premature to call this bill a victory” for nuclear and geothermal power, he said.

The New York Times, July 3, 2025

Senate passes megabill that curbs IRA tax credits, drops wind and solar tax

Chirag Lala, director of energy at the Center for Public Enterprise, said in a Monday interview, “Across different provisions of this bill, what you have is either a) subsidies being outright taken away, and/or b) for the provisions that do exist, increased uncertainty across the board facing these developers. And in this kind of environment, that tends to chill investment.”

Advait Arun, a senior associate for energy finance with CPE, said Monday that even without the excise tax, the new foreign entity of concern rules would hamper clean energy development.

Utility Dive, July 1, 2025

Matthew Alexandris: The new housing pipeline is dry. Here’s why

A more ambitious plan would be to create a national housing construction fund. In a policy paper for the Center of Public Enterprise, co-authors Paul Williams and Yakov Feygin argue that governments facing significant housing supply deficits should create a fund available to private and non-profit developers to access funding and acquire the capital to get shovels into the ground.

The idea is not just based on easing the burden of today’s higher rates on housing production, instead it is about creating an economic environment where housing construction does not dip in times of trouble and achieves a degree of insulation from the business cycle at large, so that the pipeline of new housing is smooth, stable, and high over time.

The Hub Canada, June 23, 2025

There’s a state-level effort brewing to save vulnerable clean energy projects

In a new white paper exclusively shared with Latitude Media before publication, FAS, in collaboration with Climate Group and the Center for Public Enterprise, outlines a roadmap for scaling subnational project finance for climate projects. It was based on a series of closed-door conversations with developers, financiers, and local-level stakeholders.

Latitude Media, June 18, 2025

Inside PHA’s $6.3 billion plan to save public housing

While PHA‘s proposals look unusually expansive in comparison with its recent history, they are of a piece with the plans of other big cities. Public housing in the United States has been chronically underfunded for much of its history, and all large housing authorities face similar challenges of aging infrastructure and perennial lack of interest from Congress.

The nonprofit Center for Public Enterprise, which advises housing authorities throughout the country (although not PHA), reports that cities like New York City and Boston are also accelerating redevelopment of their housing.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 22, 2025

How Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful’ Budget Bill Helps China Win the Clean Tech Race

Business leaders in solar, wind, battery and EV manufacturing had hoped that the boom in clean energy investments in Republican districts would translate into political support for tax credits that benefit renewable energy and clean tech. But in the final hours of negotiations, the bill’s text grew even worse for clean energy interests, phasing out most of the tax credits even earlier than proposed in the bill’s earlier draft.

“It’s a significant shock,” Chirag Lala, director of energy at the Center for Public Enterprise, told Newsweek. CPE is a nonprofit that works with state and local governments on energy development and investment. The tax credits played an important role in reducing risk for investors, he explained, and have triggered hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in new projects.

“If we were hoping to be a big player in the manufacturing or development of key industries—nuclear, geothermal, batteries, electric vehicles—this is a huge set back,” he said.

Newsweek, May 22, 2025

Oregon lawmakers propose state loan fund to spur more apartment construction

The mix of 30% income-restricted units tends to hold nationwide under this model, said Ashwin Warrior, deputy director of housing with the Center for Public Enterprise.

Across cities and states with similar revolving loan funds, according to the center, there are about 730 units built or under construction using the model, with more than 3,300 in the pipeline. Some $383 million has been committed to funds similar to SB 684.

Oregon Live, May 13, 2025

House GOP proposes early phaseout of IRA clean energy tax credits

The placed-in-service requirement “severely crimps utility scale renewables” to the point that “the only projects that will get the full ITC and PTC are those already in the queue,” Advait Arun, senior associate for energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise, said in an interview.

Clean energy advocates warned that the Ways and Means budget could disproportionately harm the “clean firm” technologies President Trump and House Republicans seem to favor, like advanced nuclear and geothermal.

Utility Dive, May 13, 2025

As offshore wind struggles, is advanced nuclear a viable Plan B for Eastern states?

In a March whitepaper, the New York-based public development think tank Center for Public Enterprise floated concessional construction financing, long-maturity term financing, “targeted and strategic equity stakes” to spread project risk, cost overrun insurance and an offtake procurement authority to purchase power from completed projects as possible derisking mechanisms.

Utility Dive, March 27, 2025

In Brief: New York’s Plan to Build Public Renewable Energy

“There is no state in the country that has put together such a large public renewable development strategy, and certainly not so quickly,” said Paul Williams, executive director of the think tank Center for Public Enterprise. “They essentially pulled a 3.5-gigawatt pipeline out of thin air in less than a year.”

All of the projects on NYPA’s current list are either solar or battery storage; the authority is not yet dipping its toes into the wind industry. Twenty-seven of the projects, representing more than 90 percent of the plan’s total energy capacity, are partnerships with private developers. NYPA plans to build the remaining 10 on its own, mostly small-scale solar and mainly on public land.

New York Focus, March 25, 2025

Costs to build gas plants triple, says CEO of NextEra Energy 


“I think parts of the cost increase is financing, which is higher interest rates. Part of the cost increase must be labour. Part of the cost increase I think are delays in permitting interconnection queues,” Advait Arun, senior associate for energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise, a New York-based think tank, told Gas Outlook.

A spokesperson for GE Vernova, which manufactures gas turbines, told Gas Outlook that their gas turbine backlog does indeed stretch through 2028, and that only a small portion of those orders relate to data centres and AI, suggesting that there will likely be more demand ahead.

Gas Outlook, March 25, 2025

The Explainer: What To Know About The MTA’s New Congestion Pricing-Backed Debt

In the same way that lawyers never agree on anything, municipal bond experts disagree on how eager people would be to buy congestion pricing debt. For instance, one such expert said that traders yearn for muni bonds, and that even in risky deals bondholders have ways of protecting themselves from losing everything they’ve lent.

“Municipal issuers often include something called ‘extraordinary redemption’ features that allow bondholders to collect their investment with some haircut if something ever happens to the revenue source,” Paul Williams, the executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise. “The appetite for government bonds has been healthy for for many years, and I expect that it would be similar here.”

Streetsblog NYC, February 5, 2025

Housing Hopes, or Housing Half Measures? State of the State 2025

Her budget proposal includes new policies to send state cash to help affordable housing developers and local governments boost their housing stock.

One such measure is the creation of a $100 million state fund to offer low-cost loans to developers who include affordable housing in new buildings. When developers repay the money, it can be used to back more housing projects. Massachusetts and Atlanta recently implemented similar funds.

“This is a type of tool that is increasingly being deployed all over the country,” said Paul Williams, director of the think tank Center for Public Enterprise. “You fund it once, and then you have a tool that supports projects in a revolving fashion.”

New York Focus, January 15, 2025

Philly debuted an exciting affordable housing pilot in 2024. Will Mayor Parker plan more like it?

The city still holds a ground lease on the land The Parker is built on, which allows it to intervene if the developer does not hold up their end of the deal. It’s an innovative twist that allows for permanently affordable housing, unlike many federal programs where subsidies often expire after a few decades as was recently seen with the University City Townhomes.

“This sounds very similar to what we’re seeing cities and housing authorities do across the country,” said Paul Williams, executive director of the Brooklyn-based Center for Public Enterprise. By “using public resources more creatively” many cities have managed to build new kinds of mixed-income housing without scarce federal government aid.

It is a similar idea to a community land trust — a popular idea where a nonprofit like a community development corporation owns the land — but in this case backstopped by a city agency, the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation (PHDC).

The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 30, 2024

FIMBY: Finance in My Backyard

Paul Williams for The American Prospect.

I grew up on a tree-lined street in Columbus, Ohio, a mile or two from the Ohio State University campus. It was populated mostly by single-family homes with nice-sized yards and driveways, and dotted with duplexes every few lots or so. At one corner, there were two small apartment buildings with six or eight homes each, and at the other, an elementary school. This always felt prototypically American to me—as anyone’s childhood neighborhood presumably feels. Color me surprised when I grew up and learned that such a street would be illegal to build in most cities in the country today…

The American Prospect, December 11, 2024

Rhode Island Could Create a ‘Public Developer’ to Address Housing Crisis

President-elect Donald Trump made few specific housing commitments during his campaign. But he has vowed to cut government spending, and Republicans in recent years have cut from Section 8 housing vouchers and and other Department of Housing and Urban Development programs. During his first term, Trump proposed cuts to housing assistance programs in all of his budget requests.

“The likelihood that there’s going to be an expansion of federal subsidies and incentives is very low for the next four years,” says Paul E. Williams, executive director at the Center for Public Enterprise, a Brooklyn-based think tank focused on building capacity in the public sector. “So any opportunities that you have to expand your production of [housing] yourself in a sustainable way, independent of those programs, is going to look more appealing.”

Governing Magazine, December 11, 2024

Public housing didn’t fail in the US. But it was sabotaged.

These bright spots show that there’s a solid foundation that the United States can build on rather than abandon its public housing experiment. “I think of [public housing] as a successful program that has provided low-cost, moderate-quality shelter to millions of people for almost a century across the United States,” Paul E. Williams, the executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, told Vox. “It has been hampered and limited in its ability to do more by policy mistakes over the past 80 years.”

So if America wants to be a public housing success story, it can. It just has to stop sabotaging its own efforts to get there.

Vox Media, December 8, 2024

One Bay Area mayor lives with his mom to avoid high rent. What does that say about the housing crisis?

Paul Williams — a housing economics expert and founder of the Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank focused on public investment — believes that the simplest fix is increasing city council members’ pay.

“If you want professional leaders,” he said, “you have to pay professional salaries.”

San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 2025

New funding model may help cities build affordable housing when federal financing runs dry

Paul Williams, the executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, said officials in Montgomery County opted for a third way — and in doing so, developed a new funding model that has rapidly gained traction in cities around the country.

An arm of the county’s housing authority effectively bought into the project. Using a revolving loan fund originally allotted $50 million by the county government, as well as the ability to leverage other low-interest financing and tax relief, the agency filled the gap and then some, taking a majority ownership stake.

“Montgomery County had just capitalized their revolving loan fund and said ‘hey, I have this tool to actually solve exactly this problem,’” Williams said.

WHRO Public Media, November 13, 2024

Trump’s Other Big Threat to Renewables

Since Trump came to be seen as the likely winner in the months before election day, yields on U.S. government debt — that is, the returns bondholders and issuers have to offer to entice investors — began to shoot up. Interpreting moves in the bond market is always tricky, but many market commentators interpreted the recent run-up as at least in part a reaction to Trump, whether they thought he was going to juice economic growth or stoke inflation, or some combination of the two.

“If Trump is proposing a broadly inflationary high-tariff, low-tax agenda, anyone expecting inflation is looking for a higher return,” explained Advait Arun, a climate and infrastructure finance analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise.

Heatmap, November 12,2024

One possible housing crisis solution? A new kind of public housing for all income levels

Interest is growing in locally financed public housing.

“There’s been a lot of uptake and interest for this model from jurisdictions of all shapes and sizes around the country,” says Paul Williams, who heads the Center for Public Enterprise. He founded the group to push for more public development generally, including mixed-income housing financed at the local level. These projects are profitable, he says, and don’t use up other, scarce federal funding.

“It’s [like] an entire conventional, affordable housing project without a dollar of any of those conventional sources,” he says.

National Public Radio, October 7, 2024

U.S. Senate panel probes federal government’s role in affordable housing crisis

Shekarchi and housing experts urged the senators to take a multipronged government approach to tackling the lack of affordable housing, such as reforming zoning, expanding land for building and streamlining permits.

“I really believe this is an all-hands-on-deck crisis,” Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said.

Murray said that in her state, there is a shortage of 172,000 homes. She asked one of the witnesses, Paul Williams, the executive director at the Center for Public Enterprise, how the federal government could help state and local governments tackle the issue. The Center for Public Enterprise is a think tank that aids public agencies in implementing programs in the energy and housing sector.

Williams said the federal government should encourage municipalities to look at local permitting and zoning processes to see if those delay new apartment construction projects or prevent them from happening.

Missouri Independent, September 24, 2024

What the Jumbo Fed Cut Means for Renewables

Reductions in cost of capital also make more renewables project viable to finance. According to a model developed by the Center for Public Enterprise, a typical renewable energy project with a weighted average cost of capital of 7.75% will have a debt service coverage ratio (a project’s cash flow compared to its loan payments) of 1.16. Investors consider projects to be roughly viable at 1.25.

So at the cost of capital assumed by Lazard, many projects will not get funded because investors don’t see them as viable. If the weighted average cost of capital were to fall one percentage point to 6.75%, a project’s debt service coverage ratio would rise to 1.28, just above the viability threshold. If it fell by another percentage point, the debt ratio would hit a likely compelling 1.43.

“As rates fall, projects become increasingly financially viable,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and Heatmap contributor, told me matter-of-factly.

Heatmap, September 19, 2024

How Local Governments Could Make Use of Kamala Harris’ Housing Plan

“There are a lot of jurisdictions that are eager to support innovative construction techniques and financing tools but feel they don’t have the resources to commit to it,” says Paul E. Williams, executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise. “If there were federal support for them doing so they would more quickly jump on board and get these sorts of programs up and running.”

One example is the mixed-income development program in Montgomery County, Md. For decades the Housing Opportunities Commission in Montgomery County has been building housing projects with both market-rate and reduced-rate units, aiming to house people with a range of incomes. Recently the group established a $100 million housing production fund that allows it to directly finance, and own, mixed-income apartment complexes…

The New Republic, September 4, 2024

A Sigh of Interest Rate Relief for Renewables

Developers take out construction loans to build their projects and then pay those back with a term loan that covers the life of the project, explained Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise (and also a Heatmap contributor). “If you’re a developer who’s going through the construction process right now, your construction loan is probably floating-rate, so the amount of of interest you’re paying on your construction loan will fall,” Arun said. After you’re done building, you get another loan to pay off the construction loan, and that loan can be smaller if your construction loan gets cheaper thanks to lower rates.

These longer-term loans are paid back from the project’s revenues over the life span of the project, which means that the developer or investor will not have to earn as much from selling the electricity to cover the cost of their debt.

Heatmap, August 23, 2024

Don’t Believe Recent Headlines. The IRA Worked.

The Center for Public Enterprise, or CPE, is part of a small ecosystem of groups looking to provide technical assistance for state-level public entities to take advantage of IRA funds. “There’s all this money flowing into CDFIs, state green banks, and community developers. Now all of them who are interested in building renewable energy capacity outside the private sector are coming to the realization that they face the same barriers as the private sector,” says Advait Arun, CPE’s senior associate for energy finance. “A lot of local lenders have never really touched energy, which involves its own kinds of risks and financial modeling and technical issues. Procurement is another issue. Centralizing all that knowledge and capacity is going to be really necessary.”

The New Republic, August 16, 2024

Drive for Energy Permitting Reform Fuels Tensions between Climate, Environmental Justice Advocates.

Chirag Lala, director of energy at the nonprofit Center for Public Enterprise, said he views the permitting reform issue as one of efficiency — making sure that community-level input flows upward in a way that lends itself to the best decision-making possible.

“The problem isn’t stakeholder engagement,” Lala said. “And I do think there are some groups engaged in the permitting reform debate who either explicitly or border on suggesting that stakeholder engagement is the problem. It’s very much not.”

Utility Dive, June 6, 2024

White House Plan to Limit Rent Increases Nationwide Reignites Debate.

Many in housing development research hope that this latest debate will lead to bipartisan conversations in Congress next year about ways to encourage, subsidize or directly finance more housing. “The piece of the puzzle that has yet to be addressed is financing constraints,” Mr. Williams of the Center for Public Enterprise said. A report by the center detailed how “a national housing construction fund” could help solve the housing crisis for renters overall and for prospective first-time home buyers, who have been hurt by the scarce sales inventory.

New York Times, July 19, 2024

Public Power Push Spreads to the Hudson Valley.

The proposal would allow the HVPA to buy out Central Hudson, through eminent domain if necessary, if it can demonstrate that the takeover would save customers money on their monthly bills. (An initial estimate by the Center for Public Enterprise think tank put the cost of a buyout at anywhere from $560 million to $1.2 billion or more, to be financed through tax-exempt bonds.) The new authority would be charged with keeping bills at six percent or less of customers’ monthly incomes.

New York Focus, May 16, 2024

What if Public Housing Were for Everyone?

Paul Williams, who leads the Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank supportive of social housing, said growing interest in the public developer model has even led to new conversations with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Public agencies are clearly hungry for tools that allow them to produce a lot more housing, and in the past year and a half we’ve gone from working with Montgomery County and Rhode Island to establishing a working group with a few dozen state and municipal housing agencies who come to our regular meetings,” he told Vox. “That’s gotten HUD’s attention, and we’re now talking with them about ways the federal government can support this kind of innovation.”

Vox, February 10, 2024

A New Bill Could Bring ‘Social Housing’ to New York.

“The failures of the old programs left a bad taste in people’s mouth,” said Paul Williams, the executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit that advises governments on creating housing programs. “As these agencies have come up with creative tools that don’t face those issues, they’ve created this opportunity to spread a new kind of program.”

New York Times, February 6, 2024

The IRA Is Still Being Formed 

Through the IRA, Congress committed substantial money to fostering federal-local clean energy partnerships: The Center for Public Enterprise, in a recent report, found that direct pay (the provision in the IRA that allows nonprofit utilities to receive federal grants) could make otherwise unattractive or break-even projects very enticing.

Democracy Journal, September 28, 2023