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Webinar Summary: How Cities Can Leverage the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund

Description

Last month the US Environmental Protection Agency announced the eight selectees under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), a program that will provide $20 billion to support a national clean financing network. Mayors and local governments must serve as critical connectors between finance providers, local businesses, community organizations, affordable housing providers, residents, and clean energy developers to ensure that everyone, especially those in historically disinvested communities, experience the benefits of this funding. The webinar invited GGRF NCIF selectees to provide updates on the program and answer questions about how you can best prepare your community to take advantage of this program.

Presenters

Resources

Q&A Responses

The GGRF selectees are still in the award negotiation phase and actively setting up their programs. As such, they may not have answers to all questions at this stage. We have identified and removed specific questions that fall beyond the current scope of the awardees’ knowledge, particularly those requiring detailed regulatory or strategic insights. For example, questions about strategies for standardizing installation costs, the Buy America requirements, or the possibilities for stacking or braiding GGRF funding with other grants are beyond the selectees’ or EPA’s current capacity to answer. We will aim to keep communications ongoing as information becomes available from the EPA and GGRF Selectees.

Funding for Local Governments Directly

  1. Of the GGRF sources available, do we anticipate funding will be going directly to local governments? If so, what are the pathways the funding will take?
    • Climate United: This is part of the strategy but how it is done depends on the Municipal Finance Strategy for example some of you have bond banks. We are hoping to come up with a couple different models for how that money works in partnership with your needs. We are especially interested in working around supporting schools and school districts working in building decarbonization. But we are also looking at other community facilities and other segments. We are still in the process of contract negotiations with the EPA on these different pieces. Happy to share a link on our website if you have projects you want to share and connect with us.
    • Coalition for Green Capital: We will be doing both direct and indirect investing. We will be doing a lot of direct investing at the commercial scale so we are looking for larger, fast capital deployment opportunities. That could look like a large network of charging stations. Ideally, we want to be in the power generation space so if there are community solar opportunities as well as buildings. Lastly, thinking about more commercial scale opportunities is where we want to have our national footprint. We will allow our local folks to craft their market based strategies so again the synergies between the cities, counties, and local green branks/community lenders are key to make sure money is pushed down to their level in the right way.
    • Power Forward: We also anticipate being able to fund community facilities. The exact structure and deals with municipalities are yet to be determined based on conversations with EPA.
  2. How can small/rural communities access and take advantage of these programs?
    • Power Forward: We know how critically important this is for rural communities in the need for capacity building. LISC has a Rural LISC program that operates in over 2200 rural counties across the country. We anticipate leveraging that network with our existing community-based organizations to be able to funnel information down into communities. If you are interested in finding out if your community is already a partner, you can visit our website. If there is a project that comes in from any county – rural or urban – we will consider it for financing. There is a lot of market building support that needs to happen. That is why we are focusing on that as a broader strategy to pair with our financial assistance and will be paying particular attention to ensuring that rural and Tribal needs are met.
    • Coalition for Green Capital: We have a national strategy that focuses on rural communities as well. There is a focus on identifying opportunities in rural communities for market building, pre-development assistance and financial assistance. Outside of the typical framework of projects, there are also going to be opportunities that relate to sustainable agriculture and forestry. They won’t be the typical project but they deserve attention and we’re open to considering those projects that fall outside of the norm but are still climate-related.
    • Climate United: We too are looking at agriculture even though that isn’t one of the priority project areas. Some of you all may have rural CDFI lenders in your neighborhood that are working really thoughtfully in support of rural communities. There is also the CCIA which is also providing financing to the CDFIs. Judging on the interest from this webinar, we will likely be organizing a similar webinar with CCIA selectees. One of the CCIA selectees is specifically focused on rural communities.

Eligible Projects

  1. How is financial assistance defined? Is it anything from grants to loans?
    • Financial assistance means financial products including debt, equity investments, hybrid debt, or credit enhancements. Subgrants are not financial assistance.
  2. Are there funding opportunities for planning, project development or design work, or other pre-development assistance?
    • Climate United: We will have a pre-development grant program that is designed to work in conjunction with our financing. We are hoping that the program will launch in late Summer. Please follow our newsletter for updates. We are hoping about 40% of the projects we select will go to rural communities and all of it will support low income and disadvantaged communities where pre-development is especially difficult. That goes to support things like project feasibility, market assessment and study, and other early parts of the development process all the way through more advanced stages. Most of our resources will go towards financial assistance.
    • Coalition for Green Capital: We also will have a pre-development market building grant program that our wonderful impact team will be building. Our timeline is also late summer. Knowing that there is not enough money to do the work that is needed, we are looking for opportunities with philanthropic grantmaking. Ideally we can put together a program with some of our NCIF funding and attract more grant capital to help us do more in this area.
    • Power Forward: We also anticipate doing pre-development grant making and also providing in-depth technical assistance across the country to pair with that pre-development funding to really be able to move projects along.

Timelines

  1. How do we get notified as soon as these portals are open?
    • Coalition for Green Capital: We will have a project portal online ready for the public on July 1st. If you have projects you want to submit directly through the portal, feel free to do that. If you have a green bank that’s already in your community, you may want to reach out to them. If you need help identifying who they are, please feel free to reach out to us and we will connect you. The local green banks are feeding us information right now so if you have something you think is special and deserves to be considered, I would encourage you to identify some of the community lenders in your community who are submitting their own pipeline to add your projects into the pipelines.
    • Power Forward: The best way to be notified of updates is to go to our website and register for the ListServ. You will get notified as these portals and various intake forms start to launch.
    • C40, Climate Mayors, and USDN: will keep our members posted as these portals open.

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