Green Banks: A Complete Clean Energy Finance Guide

This resource—which is one of many instrument summaries offered by the Clean Energy Finance Solutions Center—provides in-depth information about green banks, including best practices, case studies, design and implementation information, experts and training opportunities.

Green banks are innovative public-private or quasi-public institutions supporting the provision of long-term and low-cost financing for clean energy projects. They are often designed to use seed capital from the public sector to leverage significant amounts of private investment for clean energy projects and to eventually operate under a self-sustaining business model. Green banks are often intended to support technologies or products for which traditional market lending is not yet in place. Thus, green banks can be positioned as a fairly middle-ground policy support for technologies that are not totally reliant on incentives or grant dollars and do offer some payback, but that still need some assistance securing financing.