The Clean Energy Future Blog

By Coalition for Green Capital

“It’s not that private banks have never heard of solar or electric vehicles,” said Jeffrey Schub, executive director of the Coalition for Green Capital. “It’s just that the speed of that private investment is far too slow.”

By Steven Mufson

From a dorm room at Stanford University, two business school students designed a system of solar panels for the roof of a boarding school in Nairobi. It worked. The school saved money and replaced the diesel generator it had relied on when the power went off.

But students Christopher Hopper and Samuel Adeyemo realized they needed to speed up design, shade analysis and permitting. They needed software. They needed computers. And they needed to lean on technology to make the business a success. The year was 2012, and they were in the right place.

“We put our headphones on, and we’d code all day,” Hopper said.

In 2013, the pair launched Aurora Solar, a software firm that speeds up design, permitting and installation for rooftop solar arrays. Today, a climate business that began in the dorms at Palo Alto has designed panels for more than 4 million solar projects, its revenue has soared tenfold to about $50 million, and it boasts 100 employees and expects to double that.

The secret to their success? Climate financiers.

For years, big renewable energy projects have found it relatively easy to raise money. Many investors have been attracted to the glitz of Tesla, the steel turbines in windmills or the fields of photovoltaic panels.

But now, as the cost of renewable energy plummets and awareness of the magnitude of climate change grows, market forces are luring investors into all sorts of “green” finance, nearly doubling the size of green bonds and green equity funds. These investors are looking up and down supply chains and searching not only for established companies, but also for innovative ones at early stages of development.

Energize Ventures, a climate change oriented venture capital firm, had been tracking Aurora Solar’s progress and pumped in two rounds of funding to fuel its rapid expansion — the first for $20 million and, in November, another for $50 million. The money came from Energize Ventures, whose investors include mainstream companies such as General Electric, Caterpillar and a big Canadian pension fund with a renewable energy mandate.

“Every single asset manager is looking to get away from carbon projects,” said John Tough, managing partner of Energize Ventures. His firm, by contrast, has invested in software that detects anomalies or breaks in the system so utilities don’t have to comb through 2 million drone photographs of turbines or solar panels to identify a problem. And with more than 500 drone pilots working for each of three large American utilities, Energize Ventures also has invested in software for drones, Tough said.

The surge in climate financing comes at a key moment, with President Biden promising to commit $2 trillion of climate-related spending over the next four years. As difficult as it will be to secure those staggering sums, Biden’s plan still will provide only a small part of the investment needed to slow climate change.

The International Energy Agency estimates that global investment in low-carbon energy will have to increase 2½ times by 2030 from its current level of about $620 billion a year to meet targets in the Paris climate agreement.

Private capital is essential to meet those targets, and the money has started to flow.

Despite the economic woes brought on by the pandemic, financial firms issued a record $357.5 billion of green and sustainable bonds in the first nine months of 2020, up 96 percent from the same period in 2019, according to Refinitiv, a consulting firm. The proceeds from the sale of the bonds are earmarked for projects related to climate change.

“Because capital markets pull future risk forward, we will see changes in capital allocation more quickly than we see changes to the climate itself,” BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink predicted Tuesday in his annual open letter. Fink said that while he expected the covid-19 crisis to “divert attention from climate,” in fact, “just the opposite took place, and the reallocation of capital accelerated even faster than I anticipated.”

From January through November 2020, investors in mutual funds and exchange traded funds invested $8 billion globally in sustainable assets, a 96 percent increase over the sum for all of 2019, Fink said. “We know that climate risk is investment risk. But we also believe the climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity.”

Big banks are scrambling to get in on it. HSBC maintains the top spot in underwriting green bonds, at 6.3 percent in the first nine months of 2020.

Goldman Sachs a year ago said it would devote $750 billion to clean-energy financing over the next decade, having already invested or financed $115 billion since 2006. And Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive and U.S. treasury secretary, will become executive chairman of a new multibillion-dollar investment fund at the investment firm TPG devoted exclusively to combating climate change.

Many people are urging Biden to ask Congress for money to start green banks that could unlock even more private capital. (Supporters often call these institutions “accelerators” to make them more appealing to lawmakers.)

“It’s not that private banks have never heard of solar or electric vehicles,” said Jeffrey Schub, executive director of the Coalition for Green Capital. “It’s just that the speed of that private investment is far too slow.”

Another force in the financial world: the pension funds and money managers who want to woo individual customers who are alert to the threat of climate change. On Jan. 24, two of New York City’s big pension funds said they would divest themselves of $4 billion of fossil fuel stocks.

“No issue ranks higher than climate change on our clients’ lists of priorities,” said Fink, whose firm has more than $7 trillion under management. “They ask us about it nearly every day.”

He said that “not long ago, building a climate-aware portfolio was a painstaking process, available only to the largest investors. But the creation of sustainable index investments has enabled a massive acceleration of capital towards companies better prepared to address climate risk.”

“What’s even more encouraging is that the drivers [of the surge in climate finance] are the real economy,” not just investors, said Daniel Klier, the global head of sustainable finance at HSBC.

That means not only small start-ups like Aurora Solar, but also large companies like the cement and concrete maker LafargeHolcim, which in November floated an 850 million euro bond (just over $1 trillion) linked to cutting about half of its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. If LafargeHolcim fails, the bondholders get higher interest payments in 2031. The concrete industry is one of the most greenhouse gas intensive in the world.

And Etihad Airways, a flagship airline of the United Arab Emirates, last October sold a $600 million five-year Islamic bond — which does not offer conventional interest in keeping with Islamic law — to help decarbonize its fleet and purchase carbon offsets. The loan carries penalties if the airline fails to meet its targets.

Big institutional investors also are jumping in.

In March, Prudential Financial became the first insurer to raise money with a green bond offering. It launched a $500 million bond issue devoted to investments that provide environmental benefits, including reduced greenhouse gas emissions and improved resource efficiency.

The realm of climate finance does have its own controversies. PepsiCo, for example, issued a $1 billion green bond, much of which went to buying recycled plastic. Many investors said that PepsiCo would have had to buy that recycled plastic anyway and that Pepsi was engaged in greenwashing. The bond offering was excluded from some green bond indexes.

The company, in a green bond annual report, countered that “by displacing virgin plastic with recycled plastic, PepsiCo can help to reduce plastic waste while lowering our dependency on non-renewable fossil resources and boosting the carbon and resource efficiency of our packaging.” It said it was lowering greenhouse gas emissions and saving energy.

Many investors also have steered away from financing green buildings at airports, asserting that they only lure passengers to planes that spew greenhouse gases.

Some of the biggest green financing still goes toward helping to construct traditional renewable energy, which is desperately needed. Renewables, including hydropower, provide just 17 percent of the energy used by the U.S. electricity grid and nuclear an additional 20 percent. The nation needs more if it is to eliminate the grid’s reliance on oil, coal and natural gas, which provide 62 percent of its energy.

In April, as coronavirus cases started spreading across the country, a company called Invenergy put the finishing touches on its 100th sustainable energy project, a field of solar panels just outside the town of Camilla in southwest Georgia. Local per capita income is less than half the national average, so the investment and the new tax revenue were welcome there. Under a 30-year contract, Invenergy will sell all of the energy to the state utility, Georgia Power.

A handful of the big oil and natural gas companies, such as BP and Total, whose capital investment budgets dwarf those of most companies, are increasing their investments in solar and wind. Enel, a major Italian pipeline company, has an American green power arm that has invested in 67 renewable projects in 18 states with 5.7 gigawatts of installed energy capacity. Enel Green Power has been combining those with small, dispersed battery storage in case of emergency, said Giovanni Bertolino, the head of e-mobility at Enel X North America. One of its largest battery storage installations serves the Marcus Garvey Apartments in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Some investors are so eager to back climate-related projects that they will invest in public companies that resemble empty shells; they do not have any businesses to start with but are looking for ventures to buy. The investments are the equivalent of blank checks written to experienced energy executives who will try to find and jump-start promising energy firms.

David Crane, a former chief executive of the utility NRG, is leading Climate Real Impact Solutions (CRIS), which has raised about $400 million. Unlike most private-equity firms, which tend to invest in anywhere from 10 to 30 firms, each public company run by people like Crane will choose just one promising enterprise.

“It’s a mechanism that allows rising companies access to attractive capital earlier,” Crane said in October.

But it’s a riskier business. Crane said he was assessing companies on the basis of earnings projections for 2027. Some companies cannot even deliver their products at a meaningful scale until 2023, and some do not have any revenue yet, he said.

On Jan. 22, CRIS made its first move, buying a share of a high-speed electric charging company, EVgo. At any EVgo location, motorists should be able to recharge up to 80 percent of their batteries in just half an hour, enough for shoppers or people pausing at highway rest stops. CRIS provided $230 million, and after adding other financing, EVgo received $575 million in cash to expand from its current 1,600 chargers at 800 locations.

EVgo also has had talks with big automobile companies, which want a bigger electric recharging infrastructure before agreeing to Biden’s urgings to produce and sell more electric vehicles.

“What we’re seeing is that the market has the appetite to accelerate the clean-energy revolution,” said Cathy Zoi, the chief executive of EVgo. A Clinton White House and Obama Energy Department official who has spent years in the private sector, Zoi said, “The imperative is to go faster.”

By Coalition for Green Capital

By John Downey

Plans for a nonprofit green bank in North Carolina are accelerating as Democrats take control of the White House and Congress, improving chances for federal investment in clean energy programs that could help fund it.

Jennifer Weiss, chairman of the recently incorporated North Carolina Clean Energy Fund, and her three fellow directors will meet next week for the first time since the U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia on Jan. 5 flipped that chamber to the Democratic Party.

The directors have applied for 501(c)(3) status as a not-for-profit for the organization as they work on funding for what is hoped to be $100 million to $150 million in capitalization to underwrite or help establish small clean energy and energy efficiency programs that ordinarily fail to attract support of traditional financial organizations.

They are also looking for initial funding to pay for a director and staff for the nascent energy fund. Weiss says they are looking to possible foundation funding for a year to get the green bank off the ground.

“Once it is operating — making loans and collecting payments — we expect it to be self-sustaining,” she says.

Jennifer Weiss, a senior policy associate at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy, is board chairman for the North Carolina Green Energy Fund.Enlarge

Jennifer Weiss, a senior policy associate at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy, is board chairman for the North Carolina Green Energy Fund.

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The group is beginning to build a pipeline of potential projects it could support in the state, Weiss says. That could direct financing of clean energy initiatives in some cases. In others, the fund could provide loan loss reserves for banks and other traditional lenders to encourage them to offer financing for residential solar, high-efficiency heating and cooling equipment, insulation or other home energy upgrades. That is a tactic used in a number of the 15 green banks already operating around the nation.

By March, she says, the fund hopes to have clearer plans for the size and scope. It hopes to be operating within a year.

Weiss, a senior policy associate at Duke University’s Nichols Institute for the Environment, co-authored a report by the institute and the Washington-based Coalition for Green Capital in October, calling for the clean energy fund. Shortly after, Weiss and one of her coauthors — the program director for the coalition, Hannah Beinecke — filed incorporation papers for the fund.

But all involved acknowledged that the size — and possibly the success — of the proposed fund relied to a large extent on the outcome of the 2020 elections. Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden was calling for a $20 billion National Climate Bank to seed state green banks and promote private investment in them as part of his multitrillion-dollar infrastructure and growth plan.

Jeffrey Schub, executive director of the CGC, says the outlook for the climate bank — also called a “clean energy and sustainability accelerator” — appears bright as President Biden takes the reins of government. With the victories in Georgia, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer becomes the majority leader in a 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the tie-breaking vote.

Schub says it is not clear that all 50 Democrats in the Senate will support the climate bank and the broader infrastructure spending that Biden will propose. But he noted with satisfaction that, this week, West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin, probably the most conservative red-state Democrat, talked of an infrastructure bill that could be in the range of $2 trillion to $4 trillion.

That is in addition to the $1.9 trillion emergency economic package that Biden is promoting. And it could indicate strong support for the broader infrastructure effort.

More important, Schub says, is the likelihood that some Republicans will back the climate bank measure, making it bipartisan and perhaps giving Schumer some breathing room in his own caucus.

The coalition is in the process of meeting with a number of number of Republican senators who have supported clean energy initiatives in the past. Schub says North Carolina’s Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis are high on the coalition’s list.

Both have been consistent supporters of solar and other renewable energy efforts in North Carolina. Schub noted a December speech by Tillis in which the senator praised “leaders who refuse to believe climate-smart policies that support clean energy workers had to be a partisan issue.” Further, Tillis said, “to rebuild our post-pandemic economy, we can grow clean energy jobs, promote American innovation, and continue to lead on driving down our carbon emissions.”

Schub says it may be difficult to assemble the 60-vote majority needed for most matters to advance over an attempted filibuster. But he says the climate bank provisions in the infrastructure plan involve the kind of revenue and spending programs that can be decided under budget reconciliation rules. That would mean that a 51-vote majority would be sufficient to pass it, whether it came from a solid Democratic caucus plus Harris or strong Democratic support with help from willing Republicans.

He says North Carolina moved in advance of the Democratic victories, and so it is a leader among states that do not yet have green banks. Other states have more recently begun to move in the same direction — including Maine, which could help win support, for instance, from Sen. Susan Collins. South Carolina’s state energy office also has now recommended a green bank, making another two potential targets.

“The more states involved, the more opportunities we have to try to persuade senators to get on board,” Schub says.

In North Carolina, Weiss says, the energy fund would support Gov. Roy Cooper’s carbon reduction goals now being fleshed out as policy by the Department of Environmental Quality.

The energy fund board of directors had its first organizational meeting Dec. 16. Along with Weiss, directors are: Ajulo Othow, founder and CEO of EnerWealth Solutions; Melissa Malkin-Weber, sustainability director for the Self-Help Credit Union; and Tyler Norris, director of development for Cypress Creek Renewables.

“We are still in our infant stage,” she says of the fund. “But within the next six months, we will have a good idea on our first projects and what the money involved will be.”

By Coalition for Green Capital

WASHINGTON — Joseph R. Biden Jr. assumed the presidency on Wednesday, bringing an expansive team of climate change experts to staff a White House that is preparing to focus on global warming in a way no other administration has done before.

Mr. Biden enters office with the largest team ever assembled inside the White House to tackle global warming and has installed policy experts at the State Department as well as the National Security Council, the president’s top advisory body for all foreign policy decisions. The Treasury Department, the Transportation Department and the office of Vice President Kamala Harris all will have dedicated climate policy staff, with more hires expected in the coming days throughout the government.

He has vowed to move quickly. In addition to rejoining the Paris Agreement on Wednesday, the new president intends to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline permit in his first hours in office. In the following days, people with knowledge of the team’s plans said, Mr. Biden will issue a series of executive orders that start the process of rolling back some of the Trump administration’s most debated environmental decisions — such as restricting the science that can be used to create new air and water protections — and lay the groundwork for ambitious new policies.

An executive order aimed at re-establishing scientific integrity in federal decision-making is high on the list, after four years of an administration that mocked or belittled the established science of climate change, elevated discredited climate denial studies and sidelined scientists who work on the issue. He also is expected to begin the process of forcing agencies to calculate the costs that carbon dioxide emissions impose upon society. By raising the costs of climate change, the Biden administration hopes to change cost-benefit analyses in a way that makes strong regulatory action more economically appealing and less susceptible to negative court rulings, two people familiar with the plans said.

Even fossil fuel advocates said they have been surprised by the intensity of the Biden team’s focus on climate change.

“I underestimated the level of seriousness that these guys had about this,” said Thomas J. Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research, an organization that supports the expanded use of gas, oil and coal.

“They are devoting a lot of personnel to the issue set, and I think that just emphasizes the level of influence that the greens have on the Democratic Party,” Mr. Pyle said.

As with other policy areas, when it comes to climate policy the incoming president has relied heavily on old hands from the Obama administration.

He selected Gina McCarthy, who led the Environmental Protection Agency in the Obama administration, start up a new White House office on climate policy. Ali Zaidi, a former top energy official in the Obama administration’s White House Office of Management and Budget, will be Ms. McCarthy’s deputy.

Last week Mr. Biden appointed David Hayes, who served as the deputy interior secretary in both the Obama and Clinton administrations, to be a special assistant to the president for climate policy. Former Secretary of State John Kerry will serve as Mr. Biden’s international climate envoy.

In the coming days, two people with knowledge of new hires said, Mr. Biden is expected to announce several additions to Mr. Kerry’s team. They will include Jonathan Pershing, who served as the State Department special envoy for climate change under President Obama; Sue Biniaz, a former top climate lawyer for the State Department across multiple administrations who played a key role in drafting the Paris Agreement; and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury Department for energy and environment under Mr. Obama. Rick Duke, who served as a special assistant to Mr. Obama on climate change also is in talks to join Mr. Kerry’s team, the two people confirmed.

But Mr. Biden also has reached into the worlds of clean energy development, the youth climate movement and environmental justice activism for key deputy-level positions.

Cecilia Martinez, a prominent advocate for addressing racial inequality in environmental policies, will serve as senior director for environmental justice at the Council on Environmental Quality. Tarak Shah, a former Energy Department official under Mr. Obama is also expected to be chief of staff to Jennifer Granholm, the nominee to be Energy Secretary.

The mix of expertise was applauded by moderate Democrats as well as the liberal wing of the climate movement, which has been critical of some of the incoming president’s policy positions and personnel choices.

“The picks are genuinely encouraging,” said Evan Weber, political director of the Sunrise Movement, a group that pressed for the Green New Deal, an expansive suite of climate and economic policies that Mr. Biden has not embraced in full.

“These are serious advocates who understand the policy details, who have connections to the climate movement and the environmental justice movement,” Mr. Weber said.

Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser in the Clinton White House, said the picks showed the White House was becoming the “domestic nerve center” for climate change in the Biden administration.

Mr. Bledsoe said Mr. Hayes in particular, with whom he worked in the Interior Department in the 1990s, “has an encyclopedic knowledge of the connection between public lands and climate,” and called him “the perfect complement” to Ms. McCarthy, whose expertise is in mitigating emissions through clean air and water laws.

Working with Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Hayes in the White House Office of Climate Policy will be Sonia Aggarwal, who co-founded the San Francisco-based energy and environmental policy firm Energy Innovation. There, Ms. Aggarwal helped develop a model called the Energy Policy Simulator to help policymakers drill down on specific clean energy policies and measure in real time the costs and emissions impacts of various plans. She will serve as senior adviser for climate policy and innovation.

One of Ms. Aggarwal’s areas of expertise is the development of a clean energy standard — that is, the percentage of non-fossil fuel sources that utilities must reach in their power generation and sales. By setting a standard without a source-by-source prescription, the policy is supposed to allow businesses and utilities to determine the most efficient way of meeting the targets. With the Senate now controlled by Democrats, even with a razor thin margin, the possibility of passing such a mandate could be within reach.

Maggie Thomas, who served in climate adviser roles in the presidential campaigns of Governor Jay Inslee of Washington and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, will serve as Ms. McCarthy’s chief of staff.

Jahi Wise, who was a policy director for the Coalition for Green Capital, a nonprofit group that works to drive investment in clean energy, will be a senior adviser for climate policy and finance.

The expansive White House team, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, has provoked consternation among Republicans. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, who will be the top Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, said he believed increased energy innovation and “not the appointment of countless unchecked czars” would be best for both the economy and the environment.

James P. Pfiffner, an emeritus professor of public policy at George Mason University and an expert on the presidency, noted that presidents have increasingly centralized control in the White House by creating special positions around policies of high importance, with mixed results.

A new White House climate office staffed with at least five people is a lot, he said, and a White House “czar” like Ms. McCarthy would have her challenges.

“White House staffers do not have the authority to make decisions on spending or personnel,” he said. “Certainly, they can be powerful, but only to the extent that their policy area is of primary importance to the president.”

By Coalition for Green Capital

WASHINGTON – Coalition for Green Capital today celebrated the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as President and Vice President and welcomed their focus on winning the battle against climate change and achieving full employment by fall 2022.

As Senator, Harris cosponsored the National Climate Bank Act, and President Biden in July endorsed “innovative financing mechanisms that leverage private sector dollars to maximize investment in the clean energy revolution.” CGC supports the Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator, a bill passed twice by the House of Representatives in 2020.

“At a moment when we face tremendous challenges as a country, we’re proud to congratulate President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris” said Reed Hundt, founder and CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital. “Throughout the campaign, President Biden and Vice-President Harris made clear that they are committed to tackling climate change, creating good jobs and building a country that prioritizes equity and justice.”

“A clean energy accelerator is the kind of tool that has strong support from the Biden White House and from members of congress on both sides of the aisle,” said Jeffrey Schub, executive director of the Coalition for Green Capital. “We’re excited to continue our work to unleash the power of a nationwide green bank to create jobs and combat climate change.”

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About the Coalition for Green Capital
Coalition for Green Capital is a  501c3 nonprofit determined to halt climate change and further the transition from carbon to clean power as the platform for the American and global economies by advocating for, creating and implementing green bank finance institutions.

By Coalition for Green Capital

Currently serves as policy director at CGC as it works to establish a Clean Energy Accelerator 

Will work with Gina McCarthy 

WASHINGTON—The Coalition for Green Capital’s Jahi Wise will head to the Biden White House to serve as a senior adviser for climate policy and finance in the administration’s Office of Domestic Climate Policy. He currently serves as CGC’s policy director and has been an integral part of the effort to create a national Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator, based on the proven green bank model. Learn more about the Accelerator.   

“There is no time to waste in the country’s fight against climate change and restoring the economy. Jahi’s policy savvy will help the Biden Administration accelerate its efforts to create jobs of the future that tackle climate change,” CGC CEO Reed Hundt said. “Jahi will make sure that communities that have been left behind and hardest hit by climate change are thought of first as the Biden Administration looks to build back a better and cleaner country.”

“Jahi has been critical to the significant progress we made in 2020 toward establishing a national Clean Energy Accelerator to create clean energy jobs. He has made sure that it will benefit individuals and communities hardest hit by climate change,” CGC Executive Director Jeff Schub said.  “We will miss Jahi at CGC but know that the impact he will have at the White House will benefit the country and left behind communities immensely.” 

Previously, Wise was General Counsel and Head of New Markets Strategy for BlocPower, an energy technology company that finances deep electrification projects in small to mid-sized buildings and an attorney. Prior to BlocPower, Wise was an associate in the Energy and Infrastructure Projects practice at Skadden Arps and a community organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation in Washington, D.C. 

Wise received his JD from Yale Law School and his MBA from Yale School of Management, where he focused his studies on community economic development and clean energy finance. Jahi received his BA in Political Science and Economics from Morehouse College. He is a member of the District of Columbia bar and the Maryland bar.

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By Coalition for Green Capital

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan. 14, 2021
press@coalitionforgreencapital.com

2 Independent Reports Point to the Economic Recovery, Job Creation & Deep Decarbonization Potential of Clean Energy Accelerator

 

WASHINGTON—Two independent reports released today by the Analysis Group and The Brattle Group found that a national Clean Energy Accelerator would have an outsized impact helping the United States recover from the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and also speed up the country’s deep decarbonization and Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) efforts.

The report by experts at the Analysis Group focuses on the near-term economic and ESG benefits created by the Accelerator’s investments in deploying clean energy technologies and sustainable infrastructure. The report by experts at The Brattle Group looks at the long-term decarbonization impact of the Accelerator.

“The Accelerator fits the economic-stimulus profile of being targeted, timely, temporary, and transformative, while also being opportunistic, simple, and strategically focused on the prize,” Analysis Group authors Susan Tierney and Paul Hibbard wrote.

“The Accelerator is expected to be a powerful mechanism for gaining several kinds of complementary benefits, in economic recovery, decarbonization, social justice, and market enhancement,” Brattle Group authors Frank Graves, Bob Mudge, Roger Lueken and Tess Counts wrote. “We have much in the way of highly effective clean energy technologies today, but we need to deploy them more quickly to obtain the near-term and long-term benefits of accelerated decarbonization.”

Both reports evaluate specific projects and barriers to private investment in clean energy technologies and sustainable infrastructure that will be addressed by the Accelerator. The Brattle Group’s paper identifies specific barriers to private investment that halt the rapid and widespread adoption of clean energy technologies and sustainable infrastructure, as well as tools the Accelerator will use to overcome those barriers. 

Key points from the report:

• The Accelerator would have a timely impact and would get money rapidly into the economy by supporting private investment in commercially ready clean energy technologies and sustainable infrastructure.
• With interest rates currently so low, the federal government can afford to support an aggressive infusion of economic recovery resources into clean energy technologies and sustainable infrastructure.
• The Accelerator would provide near-term employment and economic stimulus, as well as an equitable transition to a low-carbon economy.
• The Accelerator is uniquely able to “invest federal dollars to stimulate the economy while also addressing racial injustice, public health, and the climate crisis.”
• The urgency of decarbonizing requires the deployment of commercially ready or near commercially ready technologies and sustainable infrastructure not solely support for R&D on innovative clean energy technologies.
• Many clean energy technologies and sustainable infrastructure that are commercially ready for deployment that have a positive expected net present value but are not always being actively deployed and/or are well below the pace and level of adoption that is needed for material decarbonization and ESG efforts.

The reports lay out examples of how the Accelerator would achieve economic recovery, job creation and decarbonization and ESG goals, including: retrofitting and modernizing homes and communities where low and moderate income households live; funding “smart surface” infrastructure deployments to reduce urban heat islands, lower energy bills, mitigate heat-related public health impacts, and reduce emissions of GHGs and other pollutants that create adverse public health impacts; and financing the electrification of municipal bus fleets. 

Read the Analysis Group report and summary; read the Brattle Group report and summary. 

At the federal level, the U.S. twice passed funding for a Clean Energy Accelerator that would help achieve the decarbonization and ESG goals discussed above while also helping to create and fund state and local green banks like the one outlined in today’s reports. President-elect Joe Biden included the Accelerator in his climate plan and Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris backed the Senate effort.

Green banks currently exist in over 14 cities and states across the country and have supported nearly $4 billion in investment in clean energy projects in their states and local communities, and much of this investment has been targeted toward low- and moderate-income households and communities. View a list of projects that have been supported by already existing state and local green banks.

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