Read our report on project finance here. Upstream of project developers are their financiers. The investment banks, pension funds, and asset managers looking to earn a return on their investments may legitimately be interested in the social and environmental benefits that infrastructure provides—but they are for certain more interested in the returns on their loans […]

Revolving Loan Funds (RLFs) allow governments to speed up and reduce the costs of socially important investments by providing critical pieces of finance that private capital markets are unable to supply at an acceptable rate, while receiving sufficient enough returns to be self-sustaining. RLFs have a crucial role to play in accelerating the energy transition and catalyzing the potential of the Inflation Reduction Acts (IRAs) provisions to enable a greater public role in the energy sector. 

Augmenting the “SEFI Carveout”: How Special Purpose Vehicles Can Facilitate Large Project Pipelines

A Model RFI for Engagement and Collaboration with the Loan Programs Office

Under its original Title 17 authority, the LPO was limited to providing credit to borrowers working with experimental technology. But a new carveout in the IIJA and the IRA extends that credit authority to nearly any kind of energy project, so long as it’s being co-financed by what’s called a State Energy Financing Institution (SEFI).

The CPE Elective Pay Model is a tool developed in-house to help understand the financial considerations public utilities and other public agencies might face when making an elective pay investment in clean energy assets. Included here is report detailing the model, its assumptions, and results, a simulator tool (below) comparing tradeoff scenarios for the primary clean energy tax credits (Investment Tax Credit and Production Tax Credit), and the financial model itself.

This database, authored by Alexa Kane, Andrea Guscott, and Natalie Valachovic, identifies major public power campaigns across the country. Many of these campaigns seek to municipalize their local utility or replace their state utility, often but not always through cooperative structures. They generally prioritize delivering cheaper and cleaner energy, ending electricity shutoffs, and improving grid reliability.

There’s a point in the development and deployment of infrastructure where developers need to replace investors seeking asset value appreciation with investors willing to provide the kind of longer-term debt financing that can underwrite project deployment.

CPE's Energy and Finance Team will be in New York City for Climate Week between September 22-27. Here is our schedule.

Recording and slides This webinar was held on August 14. Watch the webinar here. Check the slideshow here. Event information Join experts from the US Loan Programs Office (LPO), state green banks, the Center for Public Enterprise (CPE), the State Support Center, and RMI for a webinar discussing the State Energy Financing Institution (SEFI) program. […]

How Tax Credit “Chaining” Expands the Reach of the IRA Through Greater Public Participation in Project Development Download this brief as a PDF here. The Department of Treasury is soliciting comments on final rules regarding tax credit chaining. Tax credit chaining allows public and nonprofit entities to purchase tax credits and monetize them through the […]

Entities seeded by the GGRF will have to change their strategy when governing the markets that they created: they will have to work to become public options that compete with and shape the behavior of other market participants. This is important not only because private investors may underbuild, but because they may deliver bad outcomes. Just because a market works does not mean it is not predatory or prone to faltering—look no further than rooftop solar.

The EPA’s announcement of the first round of GGRF recipients marks the “end of the beginning.” For the past decade, the advocates of green banking have pushed for federal financial involvement in green lending. The GGRF is the first small step in this direction. GGRF recipients—coalitions of nonprofits, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), and state-chartered green banks—are being charged with building a broad new financial ecosystem that will support decarbonization, especially in underserved communities. As we highlighted in the first blog post of this series, the GGRF’s goal is to effectively “crowd in” private capital to new markets supporting decarbonization.

If you’ve ever secured a mortgage, signed up for an insurance plan, or—anyone could be reading this—taken your company public on the New York Stock Exchange, then you’ve needed something called underwriting. Taking on debt to finance a home is risky, to say nothing of raising funding for a company. You know this, and so […]

In late December, the Treasury and IRS opened up a registration portal for firms and other entities to access the elective payment provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This portal allows elective pay-eligible entities to pre-register before they file the tax returns which will allow them to claim credits. It does not guarantee that […]