Inslee reintroduces clean energy bank bill

Press Release

Yesterday evening, U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) reintroduced a bill to create a Clean Energy Deployment Administration to finance the development and deployment of cutting-edge renewable energy technologies.

The bi-partisan "21st Century Energy Technology Deployment Act" was also led by Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and is co-sponsored Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), Deborah Halverson (D-Ill.), Ron Klein (D-Fla.), Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), and Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). The companion bill in the Senate, S. 949, is sponsored by Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and cosponsors include Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Richard Lugar (D-Ind.), Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.). The legislation was previously introduced in the 110th Congress and is one of the New Democratic Coalition Energy Task Force platform priorities. The bill number is H.R. 2212.

"To meet our long-term goal of a low-cost, low-carbon economy and seize a national economic opportunity to create clean tech jobs in the US, we need the government to step in and help where the market often fails," said Inslee, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "We should build our economy here at home with these industries rather than depending on imported solar panels from Germany and advanced batteries from China and Korea."

H.R. 2212 will create an autonomous Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) with a broad range of financial support mechanisms at its disposal to address the various types of bottlenecks that currently hold back the clean energy sector from achieving its full potential.

The Administration will seek to address market barriers for new technologies that need capital to reach the commercial scale, accelerating the market-availability, commercialization, cost-competitiveness, and deployment of low, and net-zero carbon technologies that meet national goals of a carbon-reduction program. CEDA will provide direct and indirect financial support for breakthrough technologies that bear technology risk that makes them ineligible for traditional project finance.

CEDA will have the flexibility to support projects through indirect means such as senior debt support to seed competitively-chosen third party fund managers investing in "valley of death" first commercial projects. Other indirect support mechanisms would include the ability to provide support for an aggregation of projects to address market failures that hold back, for example, a broader deployment of energy efficiency measures in the marketplace.

Source