Happy IRAnniversary to all who celebrated last week! We loved seeing your salutes to progress and we’re cheering right alongside you.
Clean Energy Finance. Two years into the IRA, states are taking advantage of the law’s grant funding. However, more can be done to help states maximize the benefits of the IRA’s transformative (and much larger) clean energy finance tools. Thus, we’re excited to share a new memo: Clean Energy Finance for State Governments. We’ve worked across the field to pull together the top recommendations on how states can best utilize and facilitate the use of elective pay clean energy tax credits, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), and State Energy Finance Institution (SEFI) financing through DOE's Loan Programs Office. We’d love your feedback and your observations of what’s working (or not) in the field with these tools.
Winning Isn’t Everything? Knowing that the vast majority of applications to the EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program were not selected, we have developed a framework for states and cities to identify alternative funding sources for common climate action measures. Call us and we can talk more about how to make your unfunded measures happen.
Success Stories!
You don’t have to build your clean energy success story from scratch (at least not every time). We want to collect more IRA success stories, so please share them. In the meantime, here are some ideas we think are worth replicating:
State-supported elective pay TA. How can states support the cities, towns, schools, churches and nonprofits in their borders with accessing new clean energy tax credits? You could try what Washington and Pennsylvania are doing – the state is procuring experts who’ll be on call to help, making it easy to get tax, legal and project finance questions answered.
Gather round. What better way to spark conversation and make it stick than in-person gatherings? The State of Michigan partnered with officials from the U.S. Departments of Energy and Treasury to host roundtables in six Michigan communities to spread the word about elective pay to eligible local governments and nonprofits. Please let us know if you’re interested in hosting similar events in your state. We are working with the organizer behind them to help spread this best practice with more states.
Bridge loans. Check out Michigan’s green bank, Michigan Saves, offering an elective pay bridge loan, easing the pain of waiting for that cash payment to come in when you build a clean energy project.
Partner Resources. The heart of the State Support Center is making connections among the many technical assistance and implementation-focused groups working in this shared space of advancing state-driven clean energy opportunities. Here are a few of our favorite new resources from our network:
The Clean Energy Tax Navigator from Lawyers for Good Government is an interactive tool that can help state and local governments and nonprofits find out if their clean energy and EV investments are eligible for elective pay tax credits. This free, public one-stop shop provides information at all stages from project ideation through tax form filing.
You can’t drive a Special Purpose Vehicle, but the Center for Public Enterprise can show you how to use one to bundle small clean energy projects into a package that may be eligible for low-interest financing through DOE-LPO and other financing sources.
RMI is hosting another excellent IRA Bootcamp for Economic Development Organizations, September 23-24 in Salt Lake City, UT. Share and register.
The IRA has, with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, catalyzed significant progress in its first two years, and we are looking forward to working together – with you – to continue helping states and local communities maximize their clean energy and economic investment opportunities. Please keep in touch to share your resources and learnings, and let us know how we can support you and your work.
Thanks!
State Support Center