The first national green bank opened in the US on Aug. 22 with the help of a $5 billion federal grant established to scale up clean energy investments nationwide.
The award for the nonprofit Coalition for Green Capital (CGC) was among $27 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants the US Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this month. Congress established the grant program under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the largest federal climate investment in US history.
"Today triggers the process by which the EPA provides us funding to build our staff, make investments, and create a network of green investors in every state," the coalition's CEO, Reed Hundt, said in a statement. "We already have 23 employees signed, we will double that number by the end of the year, and we have more than $10 billion of projects in our pipeline."
The CGC operates as the American Green Bank Consortium, which is a membership organization for green banks and community lenders seeking to scale public-private partnerships. More than 40 green banks operate in states already, but this is the first time a single organization will be able to invest billions of dollars through the network of green banks.
In 2023, CGC's members invested $5.2 billion matched by $5.4 billion in private capital, a record level of investment. Projects supported by such funding included energy-efficient affordable housing in Florida, a community solar project in Baltimore, a septic replacement program in Michigan, and grid resilience funding for rural electric cooperatives in Illinois, according to the consortium's annual report.
Establishing a green bank has been a pet project of some Democratic congressional leaders for over a decade.
"We never stopped fighting to launch a national climate bank because we knew the plan we designed will catalyze large private investments in clean energy that will help address the climate crisis, generate good paying jobs, cut energy costs for consumers, and directly support disadvantaged communities that are too often left behind — a true win-win-win-win," Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D) said in a statement after the EPA announced the funding Aug. 16.
Across the aisle, three Republican lawmakers in an Aug. 15 letter sent to the EPA expressed concern that some Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants could benefit recipients with "certain connections to the People's Republic of China."
The lawmakers asked the agency to provide copies by Aug. 29 of award agreements, "including all of the attachments, appendices, and any amendments, that the EPA executes with each funding recipient" under the program.