How can experienced renewable energy project investors find new opportunities? What makes an investment attractive? What are Green Banks, and how can they help identify new deals?
Confluence, in partnership with the Energy Foundation, organized a renewable energy investing roundtable discussion entitled Renewable Energy: A dialogue addressing investment opportunities at the UN Climate Week. The meeting was generously hosted at The Surdna Foundation.
The focus of the convening was the innovative Green Banks model, which is a nationwide network of financial intermediaries that identify, assess, and invest in renewable energy projects. Green Banks seek to leverage concessionary capital to invest in renewable energy projects that provide low-income communities with environmentally sustainable energy access across the country. The vision is to scale these projects to a level where they can attract commercial investors. To help Green Banks become better equipped to engage catalytic investors, the conversation centered around better understanding how investors currently invest their concessionary capital in renewable energy projects, the challenges they face, and their investment-return expectations.
Key Takeaways
Several interesting insights emerged from the discussion around pain points and opportunities.
- Deciphering Complex Tax Equities: The complexity of tax equity was a recurring theme, with many investors expressing frustration in analyzing deals which included these forms of returns. Several investors cited this as a major deterrent and expressed a need for support in navigating the myriad complex policies around tax equities.
- Opportunities to Collaborate: Many investors also expressed a need for great collaboration, possibly through a platform to share due diligence analysis so that smaller foundations and family offices, who have limited bandwidth to conduct deeper analysis on their own, could engage with such opportunities.
- Access to a Trusted Partner: The investors also felt that a trusted local partner who could handle ground-level issues, relationships with stakeholders and suppliers, and door-to-door community engagement efforts, is critical. Green Banks are, by their nature, very well equipped to handle this element of project execution.
- Diverse Impact Metrics: There were varied views around impact. The metrics ranged from benefits to the community to women ownership of businesses to the amount of money saved in energy expenses; all these insights emphasized the need to proactively capture diverse data points in order to highlight relevant impact for different investors.
The convening proved to be very insightful in understanding how to leverage greater amounts of concessionary capital for important renewable energy projects. To learn more about Green Banks, contact info@confluencephilanthropy.org.
