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…
Last month, Paul Williams joined the leadership team that created the mixed-income public development program at the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County to speak at HUD’s Quarterly Update, hosted at HUD’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., organized by their Policy Development & Research division.
There has been over a decade of advocacy by the Coalition for Green Capital and others for green banks, alongside proposals for even more comprehensive infrastructure and public development banking options. As a watershed moment in public policy, this blog explores some of the theories behind why the GGRF, and the green bank model, is…
This post is republished from the April 2024 installment of our Capacity Factor newsletter. Subscribe here. The Department of Energy (DOE) released another commercial liftoff report, this time focused on enhanced geothermal energy. While all of their reports are excellent, this one features a wonderful discussion of how the changing grid shapes the price of geothermal…
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…
The Center for Public Enterprise (CPE) submitted comments on domestic content rules as they relate to the elective pay provisions under § 6417 of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). You can read those comments in full here.
This is the final post of our three-part series on underwriting. In the two previous posts, I covered how underwriting works and how it interacts with the financial system, particularly in key tax equity and municipal bond markets. This last post picks up where the last left off: given the disappointing implications our fragile underwriting…
This post is republished from the March installment of our Capacity Factor newsletter. Subscribe here. Mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM recently published 2025-26 estimates of “effective load carrying capability” (ELCC) that show gas plants carrying more load (a measure of electricity demand), on average, than any of the four battery storage options during peak energy demand events. This…
This is the second of three posts in our underwriting series. The previous post—read here—explains how project finance underwriting at commercial banks works. This post dives into how underwriting interacts with the broader financial system to set the conditions for investment into crucial decarbonization priorities, with a focus on tax equity and municipal bond underwriting.…
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…