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Reports
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Enhanced Geothermal Consortium for the Mountain West
Read the full report here. Next-generation geothermal technologies are at the frontier of energy development in the United States. Drawing on drilling techniques developed during the shale boom, enhanced geothermal drilling can open newer geologic formations with lower permeability to injected liquids. Heated liquid is then piped up to power turbines, generating a source of…
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American Nuclear Moonshot
Access the report here. Despite growing policymaker and industry interest in nuclear power, the U.S. has failed to deploy more than one new nuclear power project in the past three decades. Why? The failure to deploy this “clean firm” source of power is the result of financing challenges, which are themselves the result of the…
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Amortizing Public Capital: How to Advance Large Fixed Capital Projects
Access our new Elective Pay Model 3.0 here. Access the updated Elective Pay Model 3.0 Report here. The Center for Public Enterprise (CPE) is pleased to announce Version 3.0 of its Elective Pay model. It allows users to model publicly owned hydropower, nuclear, and geothermal projects (in addition to the solar, wind, and storage projects…
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Project finance
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…
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Public developers
Read our report on public developers here. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) have greatly expanded the reach of the public financing of renewable energy through tax credits and public lending programs. The goal of these policies is to help reduce the cost of capital for energy projects by utilizing the…
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Revolving Loan Funds
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…
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Smoothing the Housing Investment Cycle
There are many barriers to housing construction that need to be addressed on the path to a resilient and affordable housing market, from zoning to construction codes to subsidy programs. But the core economic trap, which leaves housing stuck in the depths of the business cycles, needs something else. A national construction financing fund could…
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CPE Elective Pay Model (2.0)
Access our new Elective Pay Model here. Access the updated Elective Pay Model Report here. In September 2023, Center for Public Enterprise (CPE) published the first iteration of our Elective Pay Model. The model is a free tool that allows users to analyze project-level financial considerations for state, municipal, or nonprofit projects claiming elective pay…
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Virtual Power Plants: Financing a Distributed Energy System
Creating a new DER deployment strategy requires policy makers rethink their financing by using VPPs to turn DERs into public resources. This report shows how green banks—mission-driven public lenders—can help enable such a shift using tools already present in the Inflation Reduction Act.
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Special Purpose Vehicles
Augmenting the “SEFI Carveout”: How Special Purpose Vehicles Can Facilitate Large Project Pipelines