Bayes: Clean energy financing bifurcated between bank debt and private credit
Katie Bayes · Frontier Forum: Why clean energy capital boomed in a volatile year [partner content] · Apr 6, 2026 · at 11:15
Crux executive Katie Bayes discusses how developer access to capital has diverged across the clean energy sector.
0:00 / 0:27exact quote · 27.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So we see a bit of a bifurcation between the traditional kind of project finance bank capital source, which remains very Cost competitive for a lot of developers. And then some of our newer, smaller developers who are accessing other forms of capital, including private credit, family offices and variety of different lenders who are able to provide capital, but perhaps at a slightly higher cost.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Katie Bayes
Bayes: Renewables hedge geopolitical disruption while fossil fuels hedge grid reliability
“Fossil fuels or conventional fuels are a hedge on reliability, ultimately, that they provide reliability benefits to a system that has become more reliant on, ah, intermittent sources of electricity, but clean energy systems or renewables are a hedge on geopol…”
Bayes: Projects with $500M+ tax credit tranches grew from two to dozens
“So, for instance, when we did our first report, we found, I think, maybe two, there were perhaps two projects that had tax credit Tronches are entitled to generate a tax credit in excess of five hundred million dollars. That number is into the dozens now.”
Bayes: Tax credit purchases reduce corporate effective tax rates by roughly 3%
“I mean, they're purchasing tax credits at a discount, and in general, what we find is that that translates to a reduction in their effective tax rate of roughly three percent, which is, I mean, if you have a hundred million dollars in tax liability that you're…”
Bayes: Bridge lending has broadened beyond traditional tax equity requirements
“We also saw significant growth in the bridge lending market, and bridge, bridge loans have been around for a long time, but they've generally always been available once a developer has secured a tax equity partner. Now what we see is that The variety of bridge…”
Bayes: 2025 Clean Energy Investment Was Front-Loaded for Safe Harbor
“I mean, we absolutely saw that investment Almost across the board was front-loaded into the first half of twenty-twenty-five, and so that's a reflection of the desire in many ways by developers to achieve certain safe harbor milestones so that they essentially…”