These groups face a hefty mandate: to use that federal funding to spur $150 billion or more of private-sector investment in climate and clean-energy projects
I love how our shitty system can only give money out to private companies to build Green infrastructure, instead of just, you know... using the money to build the infrastructure in the underserved markets ourselves.
Climate United also hopes that this first-of-a-kind financing of the pre-construction expenses of mid-size solar installations — a category of costs that includes permitting and interconnection fees and which developers now pay for themselves — will help other private-sector lenders “reduce the delta between actual risk and perceived risk in the market,” she said.
I understand that this is supposed to spur private entities to invest their own money into these projects, but they don't actually cite anywhere in the article that this works. It also mandates a US-centric supply chain, which (while good) also means that the actual cost to the government/ public is being hidden by subsidies already being paid to those companies.
The closest the article gets to saying this works is:
This kind of climate lending has a track record to build on. Over the past 12 years, green banks — government-backed and nonprofit entities now operating in 17 states, which provided the model for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund — have enabled nearly $22 billion in public-private investment.
but that doesn't specify the breakdown of public vs private. The goal for this fund is $20B public, to spur $150B private, but color me skeptical that will actually happen.