At a deal level, tax equity never looked easy. At an institutional economy-nudging level, its harder still. This installment sets out some structural blocks and ways over them.
It's not just limited or general. Parties in a tax credit transaction weigh decisions about exposure, timing, and benefit. This story clarifies the stations along the journey.
In 2021, tax equity investments drove one in five dollars of renewable energy investment. This article series aims to explain what exactly tax equity is, its history, and its current impact on the energy transition.
The future of tax equity may well run through a channel called "direct pay." which could simplify and expand a lot of what makes the tool valuable. As always, some unknowns come into the picture.
TIghtening gaps, thickening windows, and recovering waste heat might sound like the stuff of a bygone sitcom. It's the stuff of climate resilience, and its economics loom large in how investors treat commercial building portfolios or their own homes. Our writer spells out the choices.
In San Francisco, youth are protesting the climate crisis as pledges emerge in Glasgow. (Photo outside BlackRock's San Francisco office by Peg Hunter, via Flickr Creative Commons.)
A bumper crop of climate pledges and plans land in your inbox, but how many make it to your term sheet? This investigation follows a few global finance pledges, setting them against capital needs and focusing on partnerships and local efforts as units of action.
Amy Harder, an expert journalist, steers the storytelling for Breakthrough Energy's new publication.
Amy Harder, a veteran journalist, now runs a new site out of Breakthrough Energy called Cipher. She looks at the transition's hard questions, hard slogs, and compelling stories in a casual Zoom with undergraduates.
The economics in converting buildings to electricity look logical - over the long run, for pension fund investors. For a building owner with cash flow to manage, it's trickier. This explainer runs through the costs and trajectory for turning building systems to potentially clean sources.
(Photo by overWHAMmed, from Flickr Creative Commons). This transmission line in Pelzer, SC, testifies to the market potential for investment in new high-voltage lines.
The main line is the main event. Transmission of clean electricity, combined with storage, means that every state and nearly every community can effectively live on fossil-free power. Financing and permitting involve economic, political, and engineering knots. This explainer takes in the breakthrough ideas and baseline for speedier deployment.
Financing and Deploying Clean Energy: Program Insights
(Courtesy of Jo Zimny Photos via Flickr Creative Commons.) Ithaca took its buildings off fossil fuel. It aims to take its job base in the same direction.
At the local level, a Green New Deal can crowd in private capital. In this update of a Financing and Deploying Clean Energy policy memo, the sustainability director for Ithaca, NY explains the holistic economic and energy-justice strategy driving the city's project to decarbonize all its buildings.
(Photo by Don and Suzan Weller, via Flickr Creative Commons.) As the sun sets over Waterford, CT, an expert proposes a price floor in wholesale electricity markets.
As New England states progress towards decarbonization goals, the electricity spot market will see offers from solar and wind generators that incur no marginal cost. That can harm reliability and put some operators hastily out of business. To retain existing resources and the stability they bring, we need to set...
(Photo by Patrick Kovarik for Getty Images in Fashionista, September 25, 2020.) Chanel once staged a fashion show with wind turbines. The author argues that assertive tax policy can make renewable wardrobes a fashion-forward investment.
The US, as the largest consumer and highest emitter of carbon per capita, bears a critical share of the responsibility to facilitate a transition to sustainable practices. This article lays out the rationale and a pathway for the US to incentivize the apparel industry’s decarbonization. I propose a preferential tariff...
Battery storage systems and virtual power plants offer an opportunity for individual ratepayers to improve energy reliability and contribute to Maine’s clean energy goals. Maine has several options for protecting and incentivizing ratepayers, especially low-income ratepayers, to own battery storage systems and join virtual power plant programs.
With the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications showing this range of climate concern, should Colorado operate under one electricity provider?
Participants in CBEY's Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate program learn technology, finance, policy and climate science. Policy savvy locks in when they write real memos to real players. In this example, a professional in Colorado's community-solar industry encourages a state Senator to work on fostering competition in the state's...
The Center has worked virtually this fall with dozens of professionals earning certificates in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Learners in the program study the history, physics, innovation pathways and technological possibility sparking the carbon-free economy. One learning strategy involves crafting policy memos and op/ed pieces on issues where public...
CBEY introduced a certificate program in 2019 that teaches professionals the policy, science, finance tools and innovation paths that define the path to a carbon-free future. As the second year of the certificate revs up next month, certificate holders reflect on how the program taught them what to ask, what...
The EU needs to open financing channels to more providers to support the intent of the Green Deal.(Photo from Qvinnovindar.)
Why should "prosumers" - individuals who make electricity for others to purchase- encounter brakes on their output in European Union policy? In this memo, which the author wrote first in the Financing and Deploying Clean Energy program, the case emerges for releasing female prosumers' entrepreneurial energy. A linked interview with...
(Photo from Energy News.) Wanja Wallemyr contributes millions of kilowatt-hours to a grid that doesn't properly value it.
What would a prosumer-friendly policy achieve? The Financing and Deploying Clean Energy participant who proposed that direction talked to an entrepreneur whose co-op feeds wind energy into Sweden's electricity system. Wanja Wallemyr's experience outlines what a grid full of prosumers can mean for power and empowerment.
Nothing succeeds like exceeding. In this policy memo, which she wrote as part of coursework for the certificate in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy, attorney Joan Beckner makes a nonpartisan argument for delivering all of Texas' energy from clean sources by 2050. The memo Beckner wrote for her class includes...
