Financing for clean, resilient power solutions

This paper is part of a series of reports and concept papers that Clean Energy Group (CEG) will publish in the next two years on the issue of Resilient Power. Resilient Power is the ability of a community to provide clean, reliable energy in the face of power outages, an increasingly regular event due to severe weather.

The aim of the Resilient Power Project is to help states and municipalities with program and policy information, analysis, finance tools, technical assistance, and best practices to speed the deployment of clean, resilient power systems in their communities. An important focus of the project is to help vulnerable and low-income communities deal with power outages due to severe weather events, as they have suffered disproportionately in damaging storms like Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina.

The paper describes a broad range of financing mechanisms that are either just beginning to be used or that have a strong potential for providing low-cost, long-term financing for solar with energy storage (solar + storage). The goal is to identify financing tools that can be used to implement projects and that will attract private capital on highly favorable terms, thereby reducing the cost of solar and resilient power installations.

This paper continues the fifteen-year effort of CEG to make resilient power a major part of disaster planning and energy policy, work that is now showing results in new state and local programs to fund resilient power across the country. But much more needs to be done.