Big and Small Ideas: How to Lower Solar Financing Costs
DOE hosted the "Big & Small Ideas: How to Lower Solar Financing Costs" breakout session during the SunShot Grand Challenge Summit and Technology Forum. This session explored a range of solutions for making scalable, low-cost financing more available to the growing solar energy market. The intent was to generate new ideas, build connections, and accelerate innovation to effectively lower the cost of capital for large and small solar installations.
Finance ideas were solicited in advance so the solar program could select a wide range of concepts from a number of different perspectives. More than 15 ideas were presented, including:
- Quality ratings for PV to lower the risk for investment capital
- Master limited partnerships for renewable energy (a federal act is currently in committee)
- Insurance products to increase the number of participants in the tax equity market.
Below are the presentations given at the workshop. The following documents are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs.
- Session Overview
- Secondary Market for Solar Equipment
- Unlocking Tax Equity Investment
- GridParity Finance: Open Access to Financing + Solar Hosting
- Master Limited Partnerships and Renewables: A Perfect Pair
- Solar Lease Program with Insurance Products
- Tax Law Change to Help Churches and Non-Profits Go Solar
- A Public/Private Partnership Financing Model to Promote Large-scale Installation of Solar Power in Urban America
- kWh Analytics: Quality Ratings for PV
- Demonstrating Project Quality
- Quantification of Project Risk, Capital Formation, and Bankability
- Low Capital Photovoltaic Panel Electrical Output-Booster System
- Expanding Investment Tax Credit for Solar to Offset Active Income
- Residential Solar "YieldCo"
View a word cloud to see a visual representation of the topics discussed during this breakout session. Read the "American Idol Eat Your Heart Out" blog post written about this event on the Rocky Mountain Institute's website.