Advanced Financing Mechanisms to Achieve Sunshot

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The project is designed to expand the availability and lower the cost of capital to deploy solar installations in the United States. The project will standardize, inform, and provide data to investors, developers, lenders, regulators, rating agencies, and other stakeholders in the renewable energy community to enable wide-scale adoption of solar energy through low-cost, consistent, and ubiquitous financing opportunities. This effort will engage solar, legal, financial and advisory industries to standardize solar lease and PPA documents; educate various stakeholders on system and credit performance; develop best practices for system installation, operation and maintenance, and independent engineering in order to facilitate investor confidence systems; and comprehend rating agency and investor risk perspective by engaging rating agencies to provide "shadow ratings" on mock portfolios of residential and commercial assets. To help create these products, NREL organized the Solar Access to Public Capital Working Group, an assembly of over 150 leading organizations in the fields of solar deployment, finance, counsel, and analysis. Under this agreement, NREL also conducts thorough analysis of opportunities and barriers to capital market investment and bank lending for expanded solar deployment, and develops the datasets necessary to quantify the relevant risks enabling institutional investment in the asset class. Finally, NREL engages the banking industry to standardize solar loan documents, educate banks and their regulators on system and loan performance, and expand comprehension of best practices and activities in commercial PACE programs in order to materially expand lending activity for solar deployment.